‘I do want to lock it down!’ Elle Ferguson on reality TV, her new fashion brand and her upcoming wedding
Nearly three years after dramatically exiting The Block, fashion influencer Elle Ferguson explains the fallout – and why “we weren’t even in our bodies”.
Stellar
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Style entrepreneur Elle Ferguson on facing grief, launching a new fashion line, wedding planning and … a return to reality TV?
1. She started 2025 with a single mantra. “I said I was just going to do things that bring me joy,” the fashion influencer and creator of beauty brand Eleffect tells Stellar. “Life is short, and I think there can be a lot of things that don’t bring joy that you hold onto for the wrong reasons.”
As for what that joy looks like, Ferguson and her fiancé, retired AFL player Joel Patfull, have moved their work, dog and games of Tetris from one room of their Bondi unit to another in order to paint the black floorboards white – something she’s wanted to do for a decade.
2. Designing their own pad on their own terms is a far cry from the flurry of headlines 39-year-old Ferguson and Patfull, 40, faced in 2022, when they famously walked off The Block just three days into filming.
Host Scott Cam even claimed that perhaps the series wasn’t on-brand for the couple.
Today, Ferguson maintains she and Patfull rushed from the Melbourne set to Adelaide, where his mum Trish was in hospital with a broken neck, so they could focus only on helping her walk again.
“We actually didn’t get to live out the experience we wanted to live out,” she admits to Stellar. “I think about that time and we weren’t even in our bodies. For us, that year was such a blur.”
3. As for a return to reality TV one day? “We’re having so much fun doing our house at the moment that we keep laughing, saying how funny it would have been to live out that dream of doing that show,” Ferguson reveals.
“Joel has flipped houses before, and I studied interior design … We love that, so don’t count it out.”
4. Every year on March 14, Ferguson and her younger sister, jewellery designer Lucie Ferguson, recognise the day they lost their mother Kim to terminal cancer in 2015, aged 57. Every other day, Ferguson forces herself to stay as positive as her mum was in life.
“I run six days a week and every day I get on the treadmill, I say to myself, ‘I’m so lucky to be able to do this,’” she says. “I know it sounds silly, but my mum was in palliative care for two years, and she was sick for over 10 years. I remember at the end her not being able to walk. So when I get on that treadmill, I say to myself, ‘This is my joy today,’ because I get to run and I get to walk.”
5. Strength isn’t just physical, adds Ferguson. “We all have bad days, but when you’ve lived through something like that, the bad day is never as bad as that day,” she explains.
“There’s no way to navigate grief; it’s something I’m learning.
“I now acknowledge the feelings that I feel: that actually nothing can replace the void in your life when your mum goes. I’m scared every day, because I’m like: how do I do this? What would Mum think?”
6. Her latest venture, a new fashion label called Felle, has been “a dream since I can remember – I just didn’t think it was attainable.”
It didn’t help that as she branched out from modelling to building brands, she faced sexist stereotypes at every turn, making her more determined to prove her doubters wrong.
“100 per cent, every single day. Sadly, women still have to do this.
“When I was 14 and I was modelling, my mum was like, ‘No, you need an education, because you don’t want to be judged on a pretty face’. That means so much to me now. In hindsight, it all makes sense.”
7. Getting Felle off the ground has been a speedier business than tying the knot, even though Ferguson and Patfull have been engaged for seven years. Yes, a wedding is on the cards this year.
But the very personal reason for the delay is that Ferguson still can’t imagine a ceremony without her mum present. “I’m trying to move through it because I’m so blessed to have this amazing man with me in life,” she says.
“I do want to lock it down. We’ll get there.”
Read the full interview with Elle Ferguson in Stellar, out on Sunday inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).
For more from Stellar and the podcast, Something To Talk About, click here.
Originally published as ‘I do want to lock it down!’ Elle Ferguson on reality TV, her new fashion brand and her upcoming wedding
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