Eleven Women Walked. This Is the First Story.
In 2023, Her Smile held its inaugural High Tea and Fashion Show at The Abbey in Canberra. One hundred tickets, completely sold out. Families and friends travelled from as far north as Maroochydore in Queensland and as far south as Adelaide to watch their women walk.
These were not models. They were mothers, grandmothers, and professionals, real Her Smile clients who had each done the quiet work of coming back to themselves.
Starting this week, I'm telling their stories. One woman, one week, in the order they walked. This is Stephanie Dickinson's story, the woman who walked first.
A Childhood Spent Avoiding Sports Day
As a child, Stephanie hated sport and got out of it whenever she could. She had no way of knowing yet that her body was already working against her.
At sixteen, her hip began to ache. She was sent to a specialist, who diagnosed her with hip dysplasia, a condition where the hip joint doesn't develop properly, setting her up for a lifetime of pain most people her age never had to think about.
Decades of Being Told What Her Body Couldn't Do
By thirty-seven, the pain was unbearable. Cortisone injections and anti-inflammatories had done nothing. She insisted on a hip replacement, and got one.
But dysplasia doesn't stay contained to one joint. In 2013, her knees started giving her trouble , a consequence of a hip that had never developed correctly. Two knee replacements followed, in 2014 and 2015, and then a second hip replacement in 2020.
Her weight climbed. Her mobility dropped. She struggled to walk without assistance.
Stephanie tried almost everything to help herself: chiropractors, physiotherapists, hypnotism, naturopaths, personal trainers, Pilates, yoga. Nothing stuck.
Finding Her Smile
In 2021, Stephanie heard about Adele Haussmann and Her Smile. In January 2022, she began one sixty-minute Zoom personal training session a week.
The change came faster than she expected. After just two sessions, her four-year-old granddaughter looked up at her and asked, "Nan! Why don't you walk bent over like this anymore?"
After sixteen weeks, Stephanie wasn't just walking unassisted and without a crutch — she was climbing rocky mountain steps. Over the following twelve months, she lost seventeen kilos and found a confidence in her own body that decades of pain had taken from her.
What Stephanie Wants Other Women to Know
Stephanie has met plenty of women her age who believe you simply can't lose weight once you're over fifty. She'd tell them it's not as easy as it was when she was younger, but it isn't overly hard either. Once the exercise and the eating became routine, they simply became part of life.
"I am so grateful that I got in touch with Adele," Stephanie says. "She has helped me get to where I am now."
Stephanie was styled by Simone Finch Designs, and walked that runway in front of one hundred people with her head held high. Her story is proof that your starting point is never your ending point.
Stephanie's story is one of eleven featured in The Women Who Walked, our celebration of the women who walked the 2023 Her Smile Runway.
