Annette Sharp: Fashion designer Edwina Horseman felt abandoned before death

Sydney designer Edwina Horseman is said to have felt increasingly abandoned by her socialite and celebrity friends, who once embraced her success, Annette Sharp reveals.

To observers, it appeared fashion designer Edwina Horseman was living the dream.

She had three beautiful children, a $15 million home in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs, a rock-chick cool demeanour, a thriving fashion business and counted some of Sydney highest profile A-listers among her dearest friends.

But as friends go, Sydney’s A-listers are a notoriously fickle bunch and in the months and years prior to 36-year-old Horseman’s tragic death last week, the “cashmere queen”, as she was once affectionately dubbed by media, is said to have felt increasingly abandoned by the glamorous socialites and celebrities who once embraced the designer and her success, using it to bolster their own stocks through association.

“Before she died, she was abandoned by pretty much everyone who wasn’t family,” said one source who was close to the designer for over a decade.

Edwina Horseman died at the age of 36.

“That’s the tragic truth about her decline. When her life got really tough, most of her so-called society friends were nowhere to be seen. They’d moved on to the next overnight sensation.”

An eating disorder – the type that pervades in the fashion industry where the fall of a fabric drape on a human frame is more highly prized than the frame itself – had, over many years, sapped her energy and strength.

Eating disorders go hand-in-hand with feelings of self-loathing, despair and depression.

The mirror never tells the anorexic or bulimic inquisitor what it is they yearn to hear and there are many mirrors in the fashion industry – glass mirrors, human mirrors and media mirrors — taunting and reminding the vulnerable of their perceived imperfections.

At an age when Horseman should have been at the height of her powers as, by the measure of most, she appeared to be, it emerges she may in fact have felt at her most powerless.

Increasingly we are seeing this trend – and the devastating impact of eating disorders – on 30 and 40-something women, women who have spent decades chasing a dream of unattainable perfection manufactured by a swelling mass of guileless marketers selling everything from chocolate bars to sanitary products.

Jaimi Lee Kenny, eldest child of athletes Lisa Curry and Grant Kenny, was just 33 when she died last year battling depression and complications associated with an eating disorder and alcoholism.

Jaimi Lee Kenny died while battling complications associate with an eating disorder. Picture: Glenn Barnes

Celebrity stylist Jo Ferguson died from liver and kidney failure, aged 46.

The death of Horseman’s associate and rumoured friend, celebrity stylist Jo Ferguson, at 46, revealed how very lonely the life of a spent and ageing “It” girl can be.

Ferguson returned to the family fold in South Australia to die after Sydney showed her its coldest shoulder over many years. There, in April 2020, she died from liver and kidney failure.

In a series of heartbreaking and wretched deathbed posts she farewelled her newly hostile former crew, her face polished – lips plumped, eyelash extensions intact, brows stencilled and nails and hair pristine – camera ready except for her hospital gown.

A coroner will determine the cause of Horseman’s death, but friends on Friday said loneliness had contributed.

The breakdown of Horseman’s long-term relationship with her partner, uniform manufacturer Joseph Dahdah in 2020, left her searching for companionship.

It also seems to have prompted the designer to spend her final year diving headlong into new relationships with much older men – possibly a consequence of having lost her own cherished father when she was just 16.

Her death last week, as the high point of the Sydney fashion calendar Australian Fashion Week loomed, should serve as a timely reminder that the battle against eating disorders goes on, with plenty of casualties among the first generation to be targeted by national education campaigns.

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