Raised in Australia and now based in LA, Lara is on a mission to represent women and diversity in and out of the water.

We chat with Lara about her beachy upbringing on the East Coast of Australia, getting into surfing, her days as marketing boss of Topshop in London, and the inspiration behind Women Making Waves...

On her surfing rituals...
I suit up because I’m on the Pacific and the water is cold most of the year. Always sun protection - obsessed from my years living in Australia so I lather zinc on my face and thick cream on exposed skin, lip cream too. I stretch on the beach before a surf. After it’s straight to the shower, conditioning treatment for my hair, lots of face oil, moisturizer, eye cream, all the creams!! I usually come home pretty wrecked and my skin and hair are in a state so there’s a little maintenance that goes on!

On her years as marketing boss of Tophop in London..
For me, working at Topshop in the early 2000’s during it’s hey day was really one of the best fashion jobs in the world. We had healthy budgets and worked with the fashion industry's most creative and dynamics minds from around the world. From brand collabs with Kate Moss and emerging British talent to editing our fashion week zine, it was just a very exciting time on the high street and it was really where I honed my attention to detail and the pursuit of excellence in everything I did. It was hard, hard work and a constant cycle of innovation and newness, which is incredibly exciting but also very draining.

On the moment she decided to create Women Making Waves...
I can’t remember the exact moment but it was around the time I was surfing at County Line one day and I realised that surfing had completely changed my life and altered my future in that I would never sit in someone else’s office again! Everything from then on was going to be on my terms. I dove into the surf culture and read every surf book, and watched every surf film and documentary - everything I was seeing was men ripping big waves, which was absolutely not my experience of surfing up and down the California coast. I had found an incredible community of female surfers and they were strong, fierce and feminine and absolutely shredding out there! So graceful and elegant and far more interesting to watch. Everything in the media was so misrepresented and skewed to the men, I was shocked! So I decided that with my creative marketing experience, I would publish a book to show what’s really going on out there and not only that, feature fully diverse women who are living a life of purpose and driven by social impact and who are just trailblazers in their field.

On building an all-women publishing team...
Part of my pitch to publishers was that it was very important to me to have an all-female team on this book and luckily they agreed. I worked with around 40 women around the world it the middle of a pandemic to make this book happen.

On the women featured in the book...
Writing this book in the middle of a global pandemic pushed my beyond my comfort zone in every possible way. Connecting with a cast of 40 women around the world, each facing their own inconceivable and often devastating circumstances, whilst contributing to a creative project with such passion and purpose was humbling, cathartic and unifying - and no truer representation of women supporting women.

What's next for Lara and Women Making Waves...
I think women are redefining the human experience so I want these stories to exist off the page and onto the screen and making a documentary seems like the natural next step.