In These Shoes collides the two lives of Glynis Traill-Nash — fashion writer by day, jazz singer by night — into a witty, pacey hour of cabaret. The award-winning show returns to Sydney at Fringe on The Rocks, 2–6 September, after seasons in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe.
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In These Shoes collides the two lives of Glynis Traill-Nash — fashion writer by day, jazz singer by night — into a witty, pacey hour of cabaret. The show returns to Sydney at Fringe on The Rocks, 2–6 September, after seasons in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe.
Glynis Traill-Nash has spent more than two decades on the fashion trail: most visibly as fashion editor at The Australian, and now across Harper's Bazaar, the AFR, The Nightly and The Australian Women's Weekly. What people who read her bylines don't always know is that she has been singing jazz this entire time, ever since a teenage obsession with Julie London took hold in Perth.
In These Shoes is the show that finally lets the two worlds meet. Directed at the absurdities of the industry she covers (Crocs, activewear, ageism, the tyranny of a Jimmy Choo) it's a fast, funny, hour-long cabaret with a songbook that runs from the fashion capitals to the vintage side to the shoe rack, costumes from Oscar-winning designer Tim Chappel, and Perth-based musical director Josh Haines on piano. It premiered at the Perth International Cabaret Festival in 2024, picked up a Weekly Award for Best in Cabaret at Adelaide Fringe 2025, and has since made it to Edinburgh and back. Now it comes home to a curated Fringe on The Rocks slot at Atherden Street, on the tail of a Brisbane run closing that city's fashion festival.
We spoke to Glynis before the Sydney opening about redundancy as a plot twist, and all the surprising ways in which the fashion writing fed the cabaret.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
"As per the press release, it brings together my journalistic life of fashion and my other life as a singer. I hadn't done a cabaret show in about twenty-five years when I did this one. I've always been singing jazz (that never stopped) but the bigger the day job got, especially the almost ten years at The Australian as fashion editor, the gigs took a backseat."
"For the last ten years or so I'd been saying, I really want to do another cabaret show. I just didn't know what it should be about. I was talking to a fashion-writer friend and he looked at me and said, well, you should probably do one about fashion."
"No. I didn't know if it would work at all. So it's been a relief and a joy."
"It's a lot of observations about fashion, the absurdities of fashion. Crocs. Activewear. Don't stop me. When we started doing vox pops at Adelaide Fringe last year and in Edinburgh, the two words that kept coming up were 'fun' and 'energy' — which I hadn't even thought of, but for that hour I don't shut up or stop singing, and it does have a momentum. It gets pretty pacey by the end. There are costume changes. I'm thrilled with how it's gone."
"A hundred percent. You have a bit of an ego moment (that took about six weeks to kick in) but honestly the only thing I really miss is the title. I'm still writing for pretty much every other publication that covers fashion. Harper's Bazaar regularly, a story in the AFR this week, The Nightly, Women's Weekly, all sorts. It's really varied."
"The funny thing is, within the industry, people will occasionally say to me, oh, so you're doing cabaret full-time now? And I go, no no no. Trust me. I'm still writing. If you need anything. It's a much better balance between the two now."
"I've always kept a hand in with the jazz. While I was at UWA I did a bit of pro-am and amateur musical theatre, as I had all through school. I fell in love with jazz (Julie London, specifically) when I was about fourteen, and became a bit of an obsessive. I started studying jazz at nineteen, with a singer in Perth called Helen Matthews, who was incredible."
"I've had four singing teachers who really helped formulate me in different ways. Helen helped me realise my range...it's very low, an unusual range. Then Raymond Long, who used to be Shirley Bassey's musical director in the sixties and retired to Perth to teach. He worked repertoire with me and positioned my voice in what he called 'the glossy bit in the middle.' Then I went to London for five years in the nineties, and Ian Shaw got me gigging, thrown in at the deep end. Having someone believe in you like that in a new country was incredible. And in Sydney I studied with Kerry Biddell for some years."
"Helen and Kerry were also very good at approaching it from a business perspective and a woman-in-music perspective: how you have to be in control of things, how you have to charge what you're worth, how you deal with the money. All the stuff that isn't top of mind. They were great from an empowerment perspective as well."
"I've reported on fashion for twenty-two years, so in the first few seasons I had context to call on. Alemais created a beautiful teal beaded gown...there are clips online. Mariam Seddiq made a pink dress that's still in the show. Then a stylist friend came to an early season and said, you know what would be really cool? If you had a dress printed with your stories. I went, bingo. Yes."
"Before Edinburgh I thought, no one knows me there (I last did Edinburgh in 1998) so how do we make it obvious? An introduction without having to spell it out. Tim lives around the corner from one of my gay husbands, Adam. Adam did the intro. Tim got it immediately. First thing he said: send me a bunch of PDFs of your stories."
"In my head I was imagining a Galliano print, lots of stories in a collage. But this is where the genius of a costume designer comes in, because what works in fashion doesn't necessarily work on stage. Tim said, to actually read it on stage the words have to be at scale. You don't need to read every word, you need to see that it's copy. So we'd focus on one story."
"And the thing that made me laugh more than anything was that the one story he chose was one I wrote about eighteen months ago for Women's Weekly, about age positivity in fashion. There's a great pull quote — "with visibility comes purpose" — I should know it! Then at the top of the dress there's a big style banner in sparkle pink, which was the banner from the top of my column at the Sun-Herald, my first newspaper job."
"I told him: for Edinburgh, we need something light, something that doesn't need ironing and steaming every day. He said, honey, this will be shake and go. Don't get me near a naked flame, but it's a fantastic piece: a translucent cape also printed with the words. When he first described it he called it 'word smoke.' Sheer, layered words, in movement. Super light, spandex body."
"He was a dream to work with."
"The Jimmy Choos were a lot of my costume budget, I won't lie. Very sparkly. Think 'Jimmy pretty.' But we run the gamut: trainers, some sparkly Nikes I was very happy about. And there are Crocs involved. I don't want to say too much."
"No spoilers, but there are Crocs. They're kind of a pain point for me throughout the show. There's a moment, it's the Miranda Priestly moment, where I explain how Crocs became fashionable. Hopefully it's fun."
"Gig money from the music side hasn't increased in, it feels like, twenty years. From a producing perspective, I could bore you with spreadsheet. It feels like everybody is making money in the arts except the artists. I'm a stickler for paying people properly. We're a two-man band, effectively, and I'm paying my musical director and his travel, as it should be. Absolutely as it should be."
"We had to charge a lot more in Brisbane than I was comfortable with. Our breakeven point on that show is 60%, which is not a feasible breakeven point. Even Sydney's is relatively high at this ticket price. There are so many expenses involved."
"You're flying two people to the other side of the world and putting them up for a month in student accommodation...the cheapest thing you can find short of sleeping in your car. To hire a keyboard for the show through the venue (and we were with one of the big four venues) was going to cost something like a thousand dollars. My boyfriend said, god, you could buy one for that."
"So I tracked down a piano shop in Edinburgh and rang them. I said, hi, I'm coming for Fringe, we need a keyboard, you've got these ones online for about £300. They said, yeah, we'll buy it back for a hundred at the end."
"He's an absolute gem. He's based in Perth. Because the first season was in Perth, and I'm from Perth originally and my partner is in Perth, I thought I'd get an MD there so we could work together whenever I was over."
"As a musician he's incredible, and a brilliant performer. He's the guy you want on stage. Friends who've seen the show in different places say, we just love watching Josh, he's always so engaged. He's watching everything you do. He's absolutely there, a hundred percent. It's not a gig where he's just playing some songs."
"And he brings that MD sensibility. In week four of Edinburgh he said, wouldn't it be cool if we got the tech guys to put an echo on that last note, to really hold the moment. And it was amazing — because it's the pinnacle of the show, at the end of 'Carousel', and it has to hold. My favourite thing at that song is if people don't clap; I don't want them to clap. It's an incredibly difficult song because of the speed and repetition, and the point it's making in the show works if it holds this uncomfortable moment. The echo effect just helps."
"His background is classical and musical theatre. He's also a Percy Grainger academic expert. Fingers in all sorts of pies. One of the songs took us forever to track down: 'Think Pink!' from Funny Face, the Audrey Hepburn film. There is no sheet music. We looked. It was written for the film, not by the people who wrote the rest of the score. He found a male-choir version that wasn't quite working when we broke it down, and a British singer's recording, and he transcribed it from that."
"I did a CD back in 2003, and it's the only one I've released, so that's certainly unfinished business right there. It's well overdue for the difficult second album. I've been thinking about it for about ten years. But my deadlines — if it's not hanging in front of me, as a journalist, it'll get done when it gets done. I need to make myself some firmer deadlines now."
"The desire to perform has never gone away. I had, in a way, forgotten how happy it makes me. There's nothing in this world that beats that post-show buzz. Nothing."
Written and performed by: Glynis Traill-Nash
Musical Director: Josh Haines
Costume Designer: Tim Chappel
Additional costumes: Mariam Seddiq, Alemais
Interviewed by Aubrey Naur.
Instagram: @glynistn · Fringe listing: sydneyfringe.com/events/in-these-shoes
#SydneyFringe #InTheseShoes #Cabaret #FringeOnTheRocks #GlynisTraillNash
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