By: Elowen Gray

Matthew Brian Robertson, 34, is an American lifestyle and travel figure with roots in New York and a life that moves across New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and Rhode Island. He works with Tumi, the luxury travel brand. One look at him now, you wouldn’t guess he was once an addict who spent his teenage years drifting through boredom, money, and the wrong kind of company.

“I was bored. That’s where it started,” Robertson says. “I had money, I had time, and nothing felt real enough.”

It didn’t look like a crisis at first. It looked like freedom. Cash in hand. No structure. No one asking too many questions. A small town with not much to do and people who quickly noticed he could afford more than most.

“It started with weed,” he says. “Then it turned into other things because people knew I had money to spend.”

Was it fun?

“Yes. At the beginning, yeah.”

But what followed wasn’t a sudden collapse. It stretched out. The spending became routine. The people around him stayed as long as he was paying. The noise covered the emptiness just enough to keep going.

“I would have to buy the drugs around my friends because it was the only way I could entertain them,” he says.

Were they real friends?

“No, but you don’t see it when you’re in it,” he adds. “You think you’ve got people around you. You don’t.”

And then there was home.

His mother, a family nurse practitioner, worked punishing hours. His father later developed dementia during Robertson’s preteen years. There was support around him growing up, yes, but also distance, absence, and a kind of emotional looseness that money could not patch over.

“My mother is my hero,” he says. “She helps people like no other.”

That admiration carries a sting because he knows exactly what he put her through.

He remembers taking money that had been earned the hard way, on 12-hour night shifts, and burning through it on cocaine. He remembers the entitlement of it. He remembers the blindness. More than that, he remembers her pain.

“I was putting her into debt and making her cry,” he says.

Today, their relationship looks nothing like it did back then.

“We’re closer than ever,” he says. “I consider her my best friend.”

Photo Courtesy: Matthew Brian

Matthew Brian Robertson doesn’t describe his life now as fixed. He doesn’t pretend it’s perfect. What he talks about instead is control. Ownership. Knowing what fills your day and why.

What does that actually look like?

Early mornings. Coffee. Messages handled before the day builds up. Time outside. Walking, sometimes more than once a day. Quiet without needing to fill it.

All of that and more has shaped the man Matthew Brian Robertson is now becoming in public. His taste leans polished but restrained, with a clear preference for brands that combine form, function, and identity, from Theory and Cartier to Saint Laurent and Tumi. He gravitates toward pieces that feel considered rather than loud.

What interests him now is not flash but fit: what works, what lasts, what feels like you.

Drugs, he argues, do not give you a life. They give you a substitute for one.

The real work starts when you decide the substitute is no longer enough.

And once that happens, he says, the upside is bigger than people think.

“You can build way more than you thought you could,” Robertson says. “Once your head is clear, your whole life opens up.”

For Matthew Brian Robertson, that life includes client-facing work, fashion, travel, good design, and the simple pleasure of being useful. He likes helping people find what they need, whether that is something practical for travel or something that makes them feel more like themselves. He’s no longer paying to keep people around.

If someone is already drifting into the trap, what does Matthew Brian Robertson want them to know?

Find something that is yours, he says. A routine. A skill. A passion. A job. A place to go every day that is not leading you deeper into the same hole. Build around that.

Once your head clears, everything changes. Better people. Better judgment. Better use of your time. Better sense of who you are.

Matthew Brian Robertson cannot get those lost years back. But he is no longer letting them define the rest of his life.

“My life isn’t perfect,” he says. “But it’s mine now.”