Romy Frydman is the voice and vision behind sophisticated online style diary, Style Me Romy. The Sydney-based stylist and super blogger curated close to 300 sleek summer looks for this year’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival trend and red carpet shows, held just this past week at Sydney Town Hall. Hand-picking pieces from the Spring/Summer 13/14 collections of the festival’s 40 featured designers might have seemed like somewhat of a colossal undertaking – but this is a waltz for Frydman, who has been art directing and styling for over 15 years.
“I chose approximately five looks from each designer,” she says of her role at the fashion festival. “Some of the key designers there were Romance was Born, Toni Maticevski and Haryono Setiadi. The standouts for me would be Emma Mulholland and Christopher Esber.”
The process of editing down collections involves visiting studios for viewings and pouring over look books to unearth standout showpieces that have a certain ‘wow-factor’. The important task for Frydman was to develop themes for the nightly shows. Finding a visible common thread between all of the disparate collections is important she insists, “otherwise it could all look a bit schizophrenic”.
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SIGN UPIn the end, Frydman siphoned out four major themes, sending models down the runway swathed in kaleidoscope colours and prints, sculptured and modern shapes, neutral and black and white – and finally in pastel tones, which she notes “seems to be a big trend”. Her favourite piece from the collections was a blue dress by of-the-moment young designer, Esber. “I want to own that desperately!” she laughs.
Frydman studied design at RMIT in Melbourne and once had a label (which she called Romy Tops), but says that while she has always loved fashion, dressing up and glossy magazines, she “never really wanted to design”. Frydman has worked at publications like Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue Australia and had her feet firmly set in the fashion world when she started her blog, Style Me Romy in December 2009.
“I already had a great database of people watching what I was doing,” she remembers. “When I started to blog, I kind of felt like I was on my own, but everyone was really encouraging.” Thousands of stylists, models and fashion industry types have since started blogging, sharing their fashion prowess in what is now a virtual universe of style stimulus. But over the past four years Style Me Romy has retained its sophisticated aesthetic, reflecting the clean and clever style of Frydman herself.
While she typically likes to pull inspiration from international shows in Paris and New York, Frydman enjoys going to “exhibitions or films, to be inspired through different mediums, rather than just magazines”.
The stylist is also a keen photographer, having just shot an entire magazine as a part of her Style Me Romy output. Of all of the hats she wears – editorial stylist, blogger and now photographer – she says: “I think I get bored if I have to be one thing – there’s not one thing that I like more than anything. I think that’s why I do so many things.”
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