Are You Fashion Forward?

By Pearl Bullivant on December 30, 2011 in Other

At the beginning of each New Year, Pearl is always asked the same question: What are your trend predictions for the Eastern Suburbs?

And, without doubt, my predictions (which are always accurate) usually revolve around vacuous trends that will be slavishly followed by what my friend Neale calls ‘oxygen thieves’.

So darlings, I’d love to predict that 2012 will herald the end of the mining boom, that Kyle Sandilands will build his own church on CloBaby Road and that Woollahra Council will outlaw bottled water and Range Rovers, but instead, my prediction for 2012 is ‘Fashion Forward’ – the idea that something isn’t worth pursuing unless it is ‘presumably hip, slick and cool’*.

The Fashion Forward trend has been around for a while but it has been milling around the edges of hipster society, thrown pretentiously into conversations when one has had enough of discussing luxury holidays and the essential renovations to one’s face and house. Fashion Forward is the new ‘uber’; it’s the new Zen moments; it’s the new ‘can’t live without’ and ‘must have’.

Just as “Coach IS Coach” (said with a wink and a nudge at the poor unfortunate Coach devotee standing in the private school playground in her Coach sunglasses), “Fashion Forward IS Fashion Forward”, and if you aren’t Fashion Forward in the Eastern Suburbs there’s definitely no hope for you. You should be selling up and moving to Earlwood, a suburb that is so enigmatic to lifestyle journalists that it’s on its way to becoming Fashion Forward through mere obscurity.

Being Fashion Forward allows one to be totally shallow and vacuous, to revolve one’s fabulous life around the pursuit of ‘cool and hip’ while disregarding serious issues like the environment, the Greek debt crisis and Afghanistan.

Whether it is clothing, exercise, renovations, pets, nappies, plastic surgeons, food, sunglasses, furniture or 4WDs, there’s a Fashion Forward moment out there, and if it’s not Fashion Forward it’s totally invalid. Care factor – nil!

Fashion Forward means that one’s life has no credentials or purpose unless one is attired in cutting-edge, high-end labels and one’s bathroom is fitted out in luxury PC items. And God help any Eastern Suburbs woman who isn’t Fashion Forward, especially if she is a private school mum wearing Coach Sunglasses (what the hell is Coach?).

Who cares about gas fracking in St Peters when Newtown is just down the road offering a Fashion Forward heaven for the bourgeois boho who rarely strays from Oxford Street? Fashion Forward allows you to sit in Parc Cafe with a long suffering husband and toddler (and nanny abandoned to a nearby tree with the Fashion Forward dog) in tow, browsing through a lifestyle magazine squealing loudly: “Look at this lovely cardigan, it is sooo fashion forward, darling, and we are off to buy it”.

And one definitely can’t exercise unless they are wearing “Fashion Forward garments that celebrate living and encourage women to get active and do so in style”.

Being Fashion Forward allows you to be so shallow that you “find the Blue Mountains… immensely disappointing… and the scenery… remarkably ordinary” until you discover that Blackheath is “drowning in hipsters wearing black stovepipe jeans and Buddy Holly style glasses”.

Finally, one can’t be Fashion Forward without having Fashion Forward children (usually named Ajax) whose social lives demand that they look their best at all times in the latest runway trends – one never knows when the Wentworth Courier ‘paparazzi’ are going to snap you and your pink princesses attired in Sambag leather pants for their ‘East End Girls’ section!

Happy New Year, Un-fashion forward Pearl xxx

*Urban Dictionary