Inside The Creative World of Stephanie Wilbourn
Written by Diona Ballard
Photos by Maddie McMurry
For Stephanie Wilbourn, creativity was never quite something she chose, but something that felt spiritually destined. As a member of the legendary Wilbourn Sister family, a name synonymous with fashion and beauty across Jackson and beyond, Stephanie has spent more than five decades turning fabric, vision, and faith into real art.
Stephanie’s earliest memories are stitched with thread. Her grandmother converted her garage into a sewing and alteration business, and as a little girl, Stephanie would fan her grandmother while she sewed, which was a tradition meant to pass the trade down through generations. By age five, she was already making doll clothes on her own
Her aunts traveled the world, appearing in fashion shows at notable venues such as the Essence Festival and the Proud Lady Beauty Show. This exposed Stephanie to the fashion industry before she was even a teenager. In high school, she won art scholarships and attended Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts at MTSU.
She went on to Tuskegee University on a full basketball scholarship, originally intending to study architecture. But with the intense demands of athletics and lab hours, she was eventually pushed into something she already knew in her bones was kismet: fashion design. While at Tuskegee, she funded her education by doing hair on the side and sewing for the basketball team, as well as putting on her own fashion shows. Circumstances cut her time at Tuskegee short before her final semester, but rather than viewing it as a derailment, Stephanie saw it as redirection. She decided to move to Atlanta, where she worked alongside her aunts at their store in Greenbriar Mall, sewing for their exclusive design line inside Macy’s. Eventually, she returned home to Jackson, earned her cosmetology license, and built a lifelong career never fitting into one box. Stephanie blended her love for hair, fashion shows, photography, and more into a career that she loved.
Ask Stephanie how she balances so many creative pursuits at once, and she’ll tell you the question itself is based on a misunderstanding.
“When you’re a true creative...other people on the outside looking in get confused thinking that you'reall over the place. No, we’re not all over the place. You just don’t understand us,” she said.
For Stephanie, the variety is less about being scattered and more of an outpouring of gifts she believes were given to her by God to use freely, without apology.
“The creative side of me, that’smy therapy, that’s my balance,” she explained. “The things that I do, other people may look at it as work, but that’s my peace.
That mindset extends to how she runs her business, Sexes by Stephanie, where she creates custom designs for her clients. After years of working for others, she found her footing working for herself on her own terms and standards. “There’s an order about everything,” she said. “And a belief that there’s always a higher level people can strive toward if they’re allowed to be who they are.” She describes her work, particularly with the unisex "Sexes by Stephanie" title, as something rooted in helping people see themselves fully, beyond labels or expectations.
Stephanie was born and raised in Jackson, Tennessee. After Tuskegee and her stretch in Atlanta, she eventually settled in Memphis for a time before returning to Jackson. She admits that her relationship with her hometown is layered. While she’sbuilt a loyal client base and earned respect for her work locally, she’s candid that Jackson hasn’t always returned the kind of support she’s found elsewhere. Still, Jackson serves a purpose in her life. The cost of living and pace of the city give her room to breathe and provide a familiar comfort.
Stephanie’s custom hats are wildly detailed, one-of-a-kind pieces that double as wearable art. She takes pride in her creations, as her process is rooted in something deeply meaningful: identity and repurposing.
She’s long been a collector of a variety of materials: vintage hats, fabrics, and random items she’s naturally drawn to long before she knows what they’ll become. While I was interviewing her, Stephanie was mid-construction on a hat made from a pair of jeans by the designer Christian Audigier (of Ed Hardy fame), repurposing the denim embroidered pockets, waistband, belt loops, and even the zipper into the design. Another piece in progress used Fendi fabric that a client brought her back from Korea.
"I just collect things or save certain things that I'm drawn to naturally because I know at some point in time I'll be able to repurpose it, " she said.
Her home doubles as her studio and showroom — mannequins dressed in finished pieces fill the space, a living gallery for clients to walk through. “My house truly reflects my creativity,” she said. “It’s an energy for me. Everything is about energy.”
Each hat, Stephanie explains, is an alter ego, comparing it to the way fashion as a whole lets her step into different characters.
Stephanie also designs full custom gowns, such as prom dresses and wedding pieces, entirely from scratch, without patterns. A basicmermaid-style dress, she stated with pride, can take her as little as three hours once the fabric is cut. She credits decades of hands-on experience and an intuitive understanding of pattern-making for sharpening this skill. Her made-to-order approach means each piece is for one client only — no duplicates.
“My designs are one of a kind, meaning I’m only making that one,” she stated.
She intentionally leaves the zipper as the final step on stretch-fabric gowns so the fit can be perfected at the very end, giving clients that “snatched” silhouette without excess pressure or rushed timelines.
When it comes to the uniqueness of her designs, Stephanie admits that it’s intentional. She doesn’t care about fitting in. “With the hats, I look at a lot of hat designers or people on Pinterest, and I like to see if what I'm doing is different...I want to go against the grain,” she said. She feels most excited when clients come to her with unique custom ideas. “It allows me to be able to execute a way I wouldn’t normally...Most people are comfortable looking like somebody else — no, I’m coming to show up and show out.”
Overall, Stephanie says the most rewarding part about creating with her hands is that she gets to work freely. “Can’t nobody tell me what to create. There’s no right way, no wrong way, and I let my hands go to work, seriously,” she says.
A major career milestone for Stephanie was when she got the opportunity to showcase her custom ascots at the 2019 BET Awards Show— she designed them for singer-songwriter Raheem DeVaughn, who was seen wearing one of her ascots on another award show carpet previously. The opportunity came not long after her mother passed away from uterine cancer, during a season when Stephanie was organizing a cancer benefit in her honor.
Stephanie's creative output shows no signs of slowing. She recently published a digital adult coloring book on Etsy titled Stephanie Rena: The Fashion Factor, featuring her own designs, with herself illustrated as the central character across different eras of her life and style. A printed edition is in the works.
She's also a contributing author in an upcoming book called"Grands," a multi-author project exploring the relationships between Black women and the grandmothers who shaped them.
She teaches sewing classes for students at Liberty Tech High School and finds a genuine passion for pouring into the students. “You have so many creative kids nowadays, but they don’t have an outlet, money, or parents that really care to see this is something they want to do...I just think it’s another way to raise up future designers.
Stephanie’s advice for creatives that may be hesitant to share their handmade gifts with the world? Be authentic. “Stay true to yourself, find yourself first through your vision, and once you do that, it’s easy. Greatness looks a certain way, but the discipline part is what stops a lot of folks from being able to reach that next level.
As a self-proclaimed manifester, Stephanie identifies as someone who doesn’t only think about ideas, but truly brings them into being. It’s a distinction she believes separates dreamers from doers, and it’s a philosophy she’s lived by since she was a child sewing doll clothes in her grandmother’s garage.