Onitsuka Tiger top, $275.
Onitsuka Tiger top, $255.
THE FORMER MODEL AND ACTOR HAS SPENT YEARS NAVIGATING THE WORLDS OF FASHION AND ENTERTAINMENT. NOW, WITH MUSIC FINALLY TAKING CENTRE STAGE, SHE’S LEARNING TO TRUST HER INSTINCTS — AND HER EVOLVING SENSE OF STYLE WITH THE HELP OF ONITSUKA TIGER.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY HANNAH SCOTT-STEVENSON
STYLED BY BRIDIE GILBERT WORDS BY SARAH NOONAN
IS MAKING MUSIC HER MAIN ACT
Sarah
Ellen
arah Ellen Robertson (known to most as Sarah Ellen) is trying to explain how she wants people to feel when they hear her music. Words are inadequate so she gets up from her chair and starts shaking her head from side to side, hair flicking across her
as her hands curl into loose fists and bop gently beside her ribs. You could maybe call it a dance, and on a dark and sticky dancefloor it probably is, but to Robertson, it’s a physical translation of feeling — and a memory of something she did in the studio a few weeks earlier to explain her vision for a new song. “I want people to move like this when they hear it,” she had said, before letting her body take over. For Robertson, this is perhaps the most natural way to understand music.
What Robertson is trying to get at is intuition. “What is it in us that comes up with certain melodies and why do those melodies strike a chord within us?” she asks. She doesn't have an answer, and she isn't particularly interested in finding one. Instead, she seems enamoured by the mystery. “It’s just a gut feeling,” she concludes.
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LEFT Onitsuka Tiger top, $255, long sleeve top, $275, and pants, $630. RIGHT Onitsuka Tiger jacket, $540, top, $255, skirt, $565, and Mexico 66 Sereza shoes, $750. Stylists own socks.
Onitsuka Tiger jacket, $760.
“I GET INSPIRED BY MUSIC THAT IS EMOTIVE, THAT MAKES ME WANT TO MOVE MY BODY, THAT MAKES ME WANT TO CRY, THAT MAKES ME FEEL NOSTALGIC”
– SARAH ELLEN
TALENT: SARAH ELLEN
PHOTOGRAPHER: HANNAH SCOTT-STEVENSON AT ART BOX BLACK
STYLIST: BRIDIE GILBERT AT M.A.P
HAIR: MICHELE MCQUILLAN AT M.A.P
MAKEUP: SORAYA BOULARES
SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR: KIERA SYLVESTER
PRODUCTION: NICOLA HANRATTY
FASHION ASSISTANT: ANNABEL DICKSON
LEFT Onitsuka Tiger top, $255, skirt, $565, and Mexico 66 Sereza shoes, $750. Stylists own socks. RIGHT Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 Sereza shoes, $750.
Recently, that gut feeling has taken Robertson around the world. In Paris, a week before our chat, Pamela — the indie-pop duo she formed with her musical counterpart Josh Kempen — played the storied Bus Palladium as part of their European and UK tour, the same venue where Madonna and Charli xcx hosted a Fashion Week afterparty just days earlier. For Robertson, who grew up idolising Madonna, the proximity to pop royalty was a nice piece of cosmic timing. “I was just kissing the ground,” she says, laughing.
Only two years prior, Pamela was playing their debut gig at Newtown’s The Pleasure Club and in the time since, their songs have travelled beyond that intimate 200-capacity room, finding their way to new audiences through stints supporting bands including Dope Lemon, The Grogans and even a slot at Lost Paradise Festival this past summer. Until recently, though, nobody knew their music. “This tour was our first experience looking out into the crowd and people singing our songs back to us,” Robertson recalls. “It was a bit of a pinch me moment."
It’s the kind of thing that makes the past few years feel slightly surreal. She’s been writing songs since she was 15; now, at 28, the former model and actor is finding herself on stages that once felt impossibly distant.
When I ask Robertson where her relationship with music began, she turns the question back on me. “Do you have an older sibling?” she asks. Her brother is three years ahead of her, and growing up, she tells me, she had a habit of following his lead. “I would just copy everything that he was into.” He taught himself guitar at 12, so she soon picked one up, too. The pair grew up listening to Angus and Julia Stone, singing their songs together and dreaming of one day starting a band. “I think I was always intrigued about writing music,” she says. “And from then, I’ve never really stopped.”
Over the past decade, Robertson has moved through more creative worlds than most people could reasonably fit into one career. She first found an audience online in the early 2010s, building a following through Vine and YouTube before moving into television, landing a recurring role on Neighbours in 2016, and eventually into an international modelling career with IMG Models & Talent. All the while, she was writing songs on the side.
“I just didn't grow up thinking that my perspective was unique or interesting enough to share,” Robertson says of keeping her songs to herself. It’s an insecurity familiar to most creatives who have made something deeply personal and wondered whether anyone would care to see it. At present, she seems to have outgrown that particular hesitation, or at least learned to work around it. “I just want to make shit that I really like,” she says. “It has to be good enough for me. And if it's good enough for me, I don't really care what anyone else thinks.”
This desire to make something entirely her own feels particularly significant for someone who has spent much of her career performing for the lens of others. Music gives Robertson a different kind of visibility. “I feel like you can only portray what is superficial in front of the camera,” she says. “And how I look is the least interesting thing about me.” On stage, she tells me, “It feels authentic.”
Across Pamela’s debut EP, It’s Nice To See You Here, this authenticity becomes audible. The record moves through themes of attraction, intimacy, heartbreak and renewal without settling into a single sonic identity. One moment it pulls you towards the dancefloor; the next, it slows into something more intimate. Ask her which artists influenced her musical instincts and Robertson can’t offer a definitive answer. “I get inspired by music that is emotive, that makes me want to move my body, that makes me want to cry, that makes me feel nostalgic,” she says. “I guess I get inspired by the way that my body reacts to music.”
LEFT Onitsuka Tiger top, $365, pants, $255, and Mexico 66 Sereza shoes, $750. Stylists own socks. RIGHT Onitsuka Tiger top, $255.
It’s an impulse that isn't confined to the studio either. Robertson describes herself as having “a multitude of personalities” when it comes to her wardrobe. On stage, in leather booty shorts and with considerably fewer inhibitions, she becomes “the most unhinged version of myself”. Off stage, she’s more likely to reach for denim, such as a deep blue cropped jacket from Onitsuka Tiger’s DENIVITA collection which she wears for our shoot. “Denim is the equivalent of a reliable friend,” she tells me. “It’s always ready for an outing.”
Robertson has a particular weakness for loose denim, which makes the DENIVITA collection something of an easy sell. “It’s the perfect baggy jean,” she says. The collection extends that same relaxed sensibility into its cotton pieces, too, which feel just as suited to her off-duty wardrobe. And, being Japanese-made, she adds, “you know that it’s going to last forever.”
LEFT Onitsuka Tiger top, $255, long sleeve top, $275, pants, $630, and Mexico 66 Sereza shoes, $750. RIGHT Onitsuka Tiger shirt, $660, and pants, $440.
The Onitsuka Tiger connection, it turns out, has a history of its own. Like many, Robertson first encountered the brand through Kill Bill, the 2003 action thriller that introduced a generation to Uma Thurman’s yellow-clad Bride — and the unmistakable yellow Onitsuka Tiger sneakers. About a month before her partnership with the brand was conceived, Robertson found herself rewatching Kill Bill on a long-haul flight, this time looking for inspiration for a new music video. A week later, the collaboration landed on her desk. “I feel like there was some weird manifesting going on there,” she laughs.
The strange timing of the collaboration is not the only instance in which Robertson has found herself wondering whether some things are simply meant to happen. She tells me about the making of ‘Skin Contact’, the fifth track on Pamela’s EP, when she and Kempen independently landed on the same title without knowing the other had written it down. “It was this weird synchronicity that is literally inexplicable,” she says.
By now, Robertson has accumulated enough strange coincidences to make a case for kismet. “I feel like you’ve got really good juju,” I tell her at one point, only half joking. She laughs. “Sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes I feel like it’s a whole car crash,” she responds. For all the talk of intuition and synchronicity, Robertson doesn't believe life is supposed to make perfect sense. She welcomes the misfires, too. “You need the ups and downs,” she says, “Was it Jane Birkin who said ‘But who wants an easy life? It’s boring.’”