Sarah-Jane Clarke spent nearly two decades shaping how Australian women dressed. With Heidi Middleton, she co-founded Sass & Bide in 1999, built it from a market stall into one of the country’s most recognised labels, and left in 2014 after successfully selling the business. A long pause followed: three years of travel with her husband and three sons, much of it away from fashion, and all of it spent paying attention to how she wanted to live.

Her namesake brand grew out of that pause, launching in 2018 with a small, considered collection built around travel and natural materials. Sarah-Jane has run it at her own pace ever since, releasing newness in capsules rather than relentless seasons. Beyond clothes, she has also become a frank public voice on getting older, changing her relationship with alcohol, and reinventing yourself.

The brand now reaches past the wardrobe to the home, the objects she finds on her travels, and the conversations she wants to have about this stretch of a woman’s life. Through it all runs her experience of arriving in her late forties and fifties and finding, to her surprise, that it was the most interesting time she’d had, along with a sense that other women deserve the same. Sarah-Jane Clarke is a Member of the Order of Australia.