#9. Surfing in Sydney with Cynthia Rowley

(by Bob Morris, New York Times) Cynthia Rowley stood on Bondi Beach on Friday in one of her ready-to-wear wet suits, gray with a big red heart on it. She only had eyes for the ocean. “I’m stoked to get in the water,” she said. “I mean you can’t come to this city and not want to surf.”

Last year, when IMG, the company that runs over a dozen fashion weeks worldwide, asked the designer if she wanted to show with them in Australia, she immediately said yes. “Then they asked me if I was sure,” she explained backstage before her runway show on Thursday. “Why not show your clothes wherever you’re invited?” For her debut down under at Australia’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week (which is devoted entirely to resort wear and showed nearly 50 designers), Rowley hired a band of African drummers as well as four lifeguards (two from “Bondi Rescue,” a hit local T.V. show) to carry her bathing-suit-clad female models on surfboards of her own design as if they were California Cleopatras. “I can’t just have a simple runway show,” she laughed.

Due to jet lag and a dinner that went late, she got little sleep. But leave it to Rowley — an avid Montauk surfer, who has a store both there and in Honolulu — to throw in a morning of surfing the day after the show, just hours before heading to the airport. “You go into the water and you’re removed from everything but nature,” she said. “It de-stresses you and washes the workweek away.” In her wet suit, Rowley ran with a rented surfboard — a little short for her long-board taste — into waves she found “hollow” and a bit intimidating. But she stayed far out in the cerulean-blue water a long time, unworried about sharks — of either the oceanic or retail variety. She only caught one wave, but when she came back in she was beaming. “That was absolutely invigorating,” she said. “I could have stayed out there all day.” Never mind the choppy conditions in unfamiliar waters. “It was a little rough,” she said. “But nothing compared to working in fashion.”