She began modelling at twelve years old on the streets of Perth, Western Australia, and thirty years later, her latest book appeared on a billboard in Times Square.
That progression, from a teenager navigating international runways to a bestselling author whose work draws on more than 400 interviews covering film, royalty, sport, and business, captures something essential about Steph Adams: she has never treated any chapter of her career as a destination. Each one has been a credential, built upon and folded into what came next. Adams has now received a 2026 Global Recognition Award for her contributions across Leadership, Service, Innovation, and Artistic Accomplishment. This distinction reflects the full scope of a career shaped by consistent creative purpose.
From The Runway To The Editorial Page
Adams’ entry into professional life came early. She began modelling at twelve in Perth and spent the following decade working internationally before making a deliberate turn toward education, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree and transitioning into art direction. The shift was not incidental. It gave her a working vocabulary in visual design that would later define the shape and quality of her published work. She went on to serve as art director at British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue Australia, and Condé Nast Traveller. These publications sit at the centre of global fashion media.
Among her early milestones was designing the layout for the first-ever print magazine at Net-a-Porter. This project placed her where luxury retail and editorial publishing met at a moment when that boundary was still being negotiated. That work required more than aesthetic sensibility; it demanded an understanding of how print functions as an object, how layout guides a reader, and how form can extend a brand’s identity. Those are the instincts Adams carried forward when she shifted from art director to author.
Her company, Steph Adams Creative, which she ran from 2008 to 2016, extended that practice into luxury and commercial branding, coffee table book publishing, and design across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. The period was formative. It gave her the structural knowledge to approach each subsequent book not simply as a manuscript but as a designed object, one in which the visual and the written work in concert. That sensibility has remained a consistent feature of her publishing output ever since.
Thirty Books, Four Million Readers, And A Platform Built On Access
Adams has published thirty books, twenty-three of which became bestsellers. The titles cover a wide range of cultural subjects, including Fashion, 100 Voices of Power, Global Voices in Fashion, The Etiquette of a Lady, Keep Your Heels High, Paris Fashion: The World of Paris Fashion Through the Eye of an Author, and Women Who Wear Dior. Each title is structured around a specific cultural thesis rather than a standard interview format. The approach is deliberate: rather than presenting celebrity profiles as standalone features, Adams uses each interview as evidence within a larger argument about fashion, power, or womanhood.
Her most recent book, Powerhouse: A Legacy, published in October 2025, was the result of seven years of interviews and nine years from concept to completion. It brings together voices from film, politics, sport, journalism, fashion, and philanthropy, among them Hollywood director Clint Eastwood, F1 figure Susie Wolff, Princess Jahnavi Kumari Mewar of India, Princess Tatiana of Greece, Charlotte Tilbury, Elle Macpherson, Rachel Zoe, Jo Malone, Aerin Lauder, HRH Prince Nereides Antonio Giamundo de Bourbon, and New York television anchor Rosanna Scotto. The resulting volume is less a collection of interviews than a record of resilience, drawn from the firsthand accounts of people who have navigated failure, reinvention, and sustained achievement across vastly different fields.
Adams’ Instagram platform, which has grown to over four million followers, operates as an extension of those same commitments. The billboard placement for Powerhouse: A Legacy in New York’s Times Square, a space that few independent authors ever occupy, reflects the degree to which her work has found an audience well beyond specialist publishing circles. These are not figures that arrived overnight; they represent more than fifteen years of consistent output and genuine community engagement.
A Career Defined By Empowerment And Cultural Breadth
What runs beneath all of Adams’ work, the art direction, the creative direction, the publishing, is a sustained commitment to making space for voices that are often underrepresented. Two prior awards recognised her specifically for showcasing more than 200 women from diverse backgrounds and for her dedication to inclusivity and representation. Those recognitions were not honorary; they pointed to something embedded in the structure of her books, each of which is built on access to people and communities that mainstream publishing rarely reaches with this degree of care.
The Global Recognition Awards evaluation process uses the Rasch model, a measurement approach that creates a linear scale across categories such as Leadership, Service, Innovation, and Artistic Accomplishment, enabling comparisons across applicants who may excel in different areas. Adams scored highest across all assessed dimensions. Alex Sterling, a spokesperson for Global Recognition Awards, placed that result in context: “Steph Adams’s career is built not on a single achievement, but on decades of disciplined creative work, genuine cultural contribution, and an enduring commitment to amplifying the voices of others.”
What Adams has built over more than two decades resists easy categorisation. It is part literary project, part cultural archive, part visual practice, and it is that refusal to be contained by a single discipline that has given her work its reach and its staying power. For an author who started her career before a camera lens rather than behind a desk, the full weight of that achievement is, by any measure, considerable, and the work, by all indications, is far from finished.
