Megan French

Megan French brings a stylist’s eye to her fashion and features coverage, blending trend reporting with practical styling advice and a recurring interest in how people express identity through clothes, travel and culture. She writes across fashion, lifestyle and travel for The West Australian, drawing on formal fashion training and regular on-the-ground styling work to anchor her stories in real wardrobes and real lives.

Fashion trends with a wearable focus

French tracks seasonal trends with an emphasis on how they translate into everyday outfits rather than runway-only looks. In her coverage of winter fashion, she highlights details such as shoulders, suede and softer, more “feminine” silhouettes for men, framing them as accessible ideas that can be adapted across high street and higher-end wardrobes. Her fashion pieces often focus on specific items or themes — from shoe pairings for different occasions to key textures and cuts for a season — and she breaks these down into clear, usable guidance. She writes with the vocabulary of someone who has studied fashion, but keeps the tone approachable and grounded in the way readers actually dress.

Alongside written work, French’s styling background runs through her assignments. She is credited as a stylist as well as a features writer, and appears in magazine and social content that demonstrates outfit builds, shoe pairings and occasion-based looks. That dual role means her fashion journalism is closely tied to visual storytelling, where the written piece and the styled imagery work together. For stories on trends or brand-led partnerships, she tends to highlight fit, fabric and styling tricks rather than only brand messaging or product names.

Books, culture and lifestyle features

French’s features work ranges beyond fashion into books and broader lifestyle coverage, with a consistent focus on female-centred narratives and creative careers. She reviews and profiles new releases such as historical novels about women in wartime resistance or campus-era stories about secret literary societies, paying particular attention to themes of female friendship, knowledge, and resistance to social constraints. Her interviews with authors and creators foreground their creative process and the emotional or historical stakes of their work rather than pure plot recap.

She also writes longer lifestyle pieces that sit at the intersection of fashion, culture and personality. In these, she often uses a single subject — a designer, illustrator or local creative — as a lens on a broader scene. For example, when profiling a fashion illustrator with a cult following, she frames the interview around how that person reads a city through style, shops and visual details rather than treating it as a simple travel Q&A. Her tone in these features is descriptive and image-rich, leaning on sensory detail, environment and personal anecdotes from her subjects.

Travel through a fashion and literary lens

Travel writing is a regular part of French’s remit, but she approaches it with the same cultural lens she brings to fashion. She co-authors guides to destinations specifically for book lovers, setting out itineraries that treat bookstores and literary landmarks as primary reasons to travel rather than side stops. In a feature on a “bookstore bucket list”, she curates a small group of standout bookshops around the world and briefly sketches what makes each one distinct, from their history to their atmosphere. These pieces are structured as concise, list-based guides, making them easy to mine for specific stops while still giving a sense of romance around reading and place.

In travel features built around a single creative, she often lets that person’s tastes steer the narrative — for instance, following a fashion illustrator’s recommendations to reveal a version of London defined by style-conscious hotels, cafes and retail experiences rather than generic tourist sites. Across this travel work, she tends to highlight the kinds of cultural spaces — independent bookshops, fashion-forward neighborhoods, historic retailers — that would appeal to readers who care about aesthetics and storytelling as much as sightseeing.

Role, background and remit at The West Australian

French works as a fashion and features writer for The West Australian, covering fashion, lifestyle and travel across the masthead’s weekend magazine and digital platforms. She studied fashion before joining the newsroom as an intern in 2021 at the Sunday magazine, later moving into a reporting and styling role. Since then, her byline has become a fixture on style-led service pieces, interviews with authors and creatives, and culture-tinged travel features that combine her fashion training with narrative reporting.