I’m a freelance fashion stylist currently based in Cape Town, originally from the East Rand Springs, to be specific. The Shadowlands, if you will. (Gauteng to be geographically, because no one knows where Springs is lol)
I have big dreams of moving further into the world of wardrobe in film, which still feels slightly surreal considering I grew up with very small-town energy and absolutely no master plan to become a fashion stylist. Getting into styling was, honestly, a happy accident. Somewhere along the way, an interest in clothes turned into work, work turned into obsession, and now I’m here, trying to make a career out of something I was probably going to do anyway.
We welcome Debs to The FRM Newsletter to share what she’s been into recently!
Travel as the best education
I spent a fair portion of my early twenties living overseas travelling and working (my version of university), including time in Washington, D.C. and Berlin. Both have probably done irreversible things to my taste, my sense of identity, my relationship with cities and my inability to walk past a good vintage shop without going inside.
I genuinely believe travel is one of the greatest forms of education. It teaches you things no classroom really can: how other people live, what they value, how differently a city can make you see yourself, and how wonderfully strange the world becomes when you step outside what you know.
Travel was, in many ways, my university. It made me more curious, more observant and much less convinced that there is only one way to do anything. It taught me that your way of seeing the world is not necessarily the way others see the world, which is a very useful thing to learn, especially when you’re interested in fashion, where everyone seems to have an opinion about everything.
If I could give anyone one piece of advice, it would be: move as far away as you can at least once. Go somewhere that scares you a little.
Be scared. Be uncomfortable. Be a little bit lost. Then let that discomfort push you. You learn so much about yourself when everything familiar is taken away and, more importantly, you discover just how capable you are of finding your way again.
Living abroad inevitably seeped into the way I see fashion, art, people and, perhaps most importantly, what constitutes a good outfit. I’ve become increasingly interested in the way different cultures, histories and subcultures collide through clothing. I like fashion that feels lived in, slightly strange, deeply considered and never too perfect. I’m interested in the stories clothes carry — where they’ve come from, who has worn them, what they might say about a person, and why some outfits somehow feel more alive than others.
Lifestyle
I’m perpetually reading, researching and writing essays about things that probably did not require an essay. God, Substack has doomed us all.
At the moment, my bedside table is occupied by Madonna in a Fur Coat and Women without men. I like Persian rugs, Japanese denim that apparently belongs in the freezer, Tabi pumps with orthopaedic insoles, film photography, lift selfies and floor time because sometimes the body simply needs to be horizontal, and I have decided this is a legitimate philosophy.
My interests exist somewhere between fashion, cinema, art and mild cultural obsession.
Fashion
I have a particular soft spot for John Galliano’s work at Maison Margiela. The Spring/Summer 2024 Artisanal collection genuinely rewired something in my brain. There was something so theatrical and unsettling about the kind of fashion that makes you stop looking at a garment as simply a garment and start thinking about the character, history, performance and transformation.
It reminded me why I love fashion in the first place: because, at its best, it can completely alter the way you look at the world. It can make the ordinary strange, the strange beautiful and a piece of clothing feel like an entire universe.
I’m also endlessly fascinated by artists, thinkers and designers who create their own visual languages. I love the work of Shayna Arvan, Justine Mahoney, Manyaku Mashilo, Erin Chaplin, Jana Wasserman, Wanda Lephoto and Viviers Studio. I have a particular admiration for Vivienne Westwood, whose work has always felt like a glorious collision between fashion, rebellion, art, history and politics. I love that she never seemed particularly interested in behaving herself (much like me).
And then there’s August Barron, who occupies a slightly different but equally important corner of my brain because, apparently, my taste requires both intellectual stimulation and the occasional person who makes me think — well, that is certainly a choice.
Music
I’m also a slut for jazz. Yussef Dayes. Miles Davis. Hiroshi Suzuki.
Films
I believe in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Not necessarily in the literal sense, but spiritually.
Oh, to live inside a gothic romance — dramatic lighting, beautifully inconvenient clothing, questionable decisions and absolutely no one asking me to be practical.
I love cinema that stays with you. Art that makes you uncomfortable. Fashion that makes you curious. Books that make you underline an entire paragraph and then stare into the middle distance.
I love the possibility that fashion and art can exist so closely together that you stop being able to tell where one ends and the other begins. I’m interested in that space — the bit where clothing becomes a character, where an image becomes a feeling, where a film can make you want to dress differently and a painting can completely change the way you see a room.
Advice
I also believe friends are never an inconvenience.
I think true friendship can heal parts of you that you didn’t even realise needed healing. There is something deeply beautiful about being known by people who have watched you become several different versions of yourself and still choose to sit beside you.
Ultimately, I’m interested in the strange intersection between fashion and life — how the things we wear, watch, read, listen to and surround ourselves with become little pieces of evidence about who we are.
I like beautiful things, complicated people, good conversation, slightly obsessive research, old things with stories, new things that feel strange, and anything with enough intellectual potential to keep me thinking about it long after I probably should have moved on.
Basically, I’m trying to make a life out of being incurably curious.
