She locked eyes with a Frenchman at a restaurant

“When you grow up in the country you’re used to people being quite genuine,” says Edwina, the creative director of Aje. “You suddenly get to these big cities, not that you lose your way, but you’re … perhaps not mixing with the right people for a while. I think people are a bit more worldly and like to prey on people who are a bit less so. They love it [your innocence] and want to take it.”

Cut to 2013, and Edwina was in a relationship – “albeit not a good one, and it was kind of on its way out” – when she went out with a friend for dinner to her favourite restaurant, Fratelli Paradiso, in Sydney. It was here that she first glimpsed Felix Forest, a French photographer from Lyon.

“It was a strange turn of events, one of those eye-locking moments,” she says. “I didn’t really think anything of it, other than, ‘Wow, that was strange’. It’s kind of one of those moments that don’t happen when you’re in a relationship.”

Two weeks later, she received a friend request on Facebook from Felix. “[It was] from this face I remembered so vividly, but didn’t know the name of the person. It turned out that evening [at Fratelli Paradiso], he was dining with a friend of a friend, who knew who I was. So he had been armed with my identity for two weeks.”

Within two months, her then-relationship was over. She and Felix began to write to each other on Facebook, out of the blue. “We just started to correspond strangely for the whole month, like, old-school long-winded love letters. Which was nice, before we’d actually physically met [again].”

She had been in Bali for work, and the night she returned, they went on their first date –at none other than Fratelli Paradiso.

“It was one of those eye-locking moments … I didn’t really think anything of it, other than, ‘wow, that was strange’.”

“Disturbingly, it was Valentine’s Day, but we just thought, we’ll just do it. And the rest is kind of history.”

A week later, they moved in together. Ten months later, they were engaged. Just more than two years later, they were married.

That was four years ago. In March, they had their first child, Freia.

How could Edwina have been so sure about Felix, so soon?

“I do think you just have a meeting of minds and souls, I really believe that,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a conscious decision about, ‘Does this man tick all these boxes?’. You have this instant connection – which I’d never felt so strongly before – a kind of connection that rattles you to the core and you can’t really move forward from it. After that, as you learn to get to know each other, you realise you have foundations that make something work effectively.”

“You have this instant connection – which I’d never felt so strongly before – a kind of connection that rattles you to the core.”

And, as it turns out, they were both in a similar emotional space when they met.

“I’d been working for a while [to] get myself back into a form of equilibrium … Both of us had come out of long relationships and obviously though some wounds take a while to heal, I think we were in great spaces personally.”

Like her, he’d had his own difficulties in the past that he’d overcome. “He was actually going to be a professional golfer,” she says. “He had an injury, which crippled his ideas of what he wanted to do in the future.” He was studying finance at university in France when he had an opportunity to travel to Australia. He moved at 19.

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“It’s strange, because here’s this Frenchman growing up in one of France’s largest cities, and I was from the country in Australia, and [yet our] values and morals were very, very, very similar. He’s fiercely loyal, very honest, extremely kind. He’s considerate and supportive. And then, on the other side, he’s very passionate and driven.”

They also, she says, both come from families that are close and supportive.

Felix’s qualities came in handy at the beginning of lockdown, when Edwina was not only giving birth to their daughter, but she and Aje co-founder, Adrian Norris, had to close the brand’s 20 stores because of the pandemic.

“Felix had to flee to get my mother from Queensland, before the borders shut,” says Edwina.

Since then, Edwina and Norris have opened two new stores – one in Parramatta, in Sydney’s west, and another in Bondi Junction’s Westfield, where their store shares real estate with brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Gucci. The latter marked a career milestone for Edwina, the fruition of a long-time goal.

But the stresses of COVID-19 on her family continue, particularly with impacts on travel.

Edwina says Felix has provided the kind of support she had never previously experienced in a relationship. She points to a moment during Freia’s birth.

“We had a doula and she said something really beautiful, when he was wondering what to do in the birth. [She said] he should be the oak tree and support me first and foremost, and then, I suppose, the child. And that’s kind of how he remains.”