Steven Fleming has made a career change each decade.
In the 1990s he was an architect.
He became an architectural historian after obtaining a PhD in 2000.
For most of the 2010s he was a travelling conference presenter, with two international books.
Then 2019 saw him build a career around his love of photography, fashion, and water.
The cumulative effect of these roles, is a unique set of concerns, embedded in every piece offered.
Before starting Pride, Steven had written two books for architects and city planners, about bicycle transport. The first, Cycle Space, was so successful he left academia to co-found an NGO, called Cyclespace (now BYCS), in Amsterdam. By 2018 he had advised cities and given keynotes all over the world.
While he loved the experience, he faced the difficulty that many people would prefer to hear about cycling from a Dutch cycling expert, not one from such a non-cycling nation as Australia. To win more commissions, he was hiding the fact that he was an Australia resident, and was only living in Amsterdam part of the time.
It was while swimming in the Australian pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, that shame turned to (national) pride. That year, Australia's pavilion housed a free public pool, the kind Australians take for granted on the East coast.
If the world looked to the Netherlands for cycling (the way it looks to America for movies, Norway for skiing... etc.) it looked to Australia for swimming.
It wasn’t long before he was reading about Annette Kellerman - who inspired women all over the world to ditch pantaloons for what they wear now. When he looked at competitive swimming, he realised Australia wins seven times more Olympic medals, on a per capita basis, than the US.
While he still contributes the occasional chapter to texts on bicycle transport, that chapter of his life has now closed. He founded Pride in 2019, with the aim of celebrating Australia's contribution to the Modernist/Enlightenment project: its swim culture and superior swimwear. He has even trained to become a swimming instructor, and teaches children to swim on Saturday mornings.