There comes a time when being out of fashion comes back in

So, you laughed at the girl with the bushy monobrow at school. Bet you didn’t expect her trendsetting ways would take off and you’d desperately be trying to regrow your own over-plucked eyebrows.

Cara Delevingne KISS ME Picture: Instagram Celebrity Confidential

The good thing about always being out, is that there comes a time when you are in again.

I have found this to be true throughout a lifetime of being unfashionable, only to find months, or even years later that I was in fact, at the vanguard of a new trend.

Look, I’m sorry but there it is — I am a style maven. In fact, I am thinking of starting one of those fashion blogs anyone who has ever gotten dressed seems to have these days, and calling it “The Ignorant Trendsetter.’’

Should you need proof of my qualifications to do so, please know that my nickname at university while studying journalism was “Foxy Lady.’’

No, wait a minute, it was “Nana”, short for Nana Mouskouri, due to the thick, black glasses I sported throughout university under the mistaken impression they would make me look intellectual.

They did not, but they did make me look like I was about to break out into “The White Rose of Athens” at any moment.

I was teased mercilessly for those glasses during my student days — but fast-forward many years later and every man, woman and child is sporting those glasses, and also the Bohemian look, which I also began.

Granted, the “I look like I’ve just rolled out of bed and thrown together whatever clothes I could find on the floor” look I sported for many years was because I actually had just rolled out of bed and thrown together whatever clothes I could find on the floor, but the point is I was doing it before it became fashionable.

I cannot be certain, but I am almost sure I also started, or at least contributed, to the “not brushing the hair” movement, which is now known as having a “bed head”.

Now, in my day, it was known as the “couldn’t find my hairbrush underneath all those clothes’’ movement, but no matter.

We now come to my latest style triumph, my eyebrows.

After years of teasing about their general thickness, bushiness, unruliness — “Honestly, Frances, it’s like you’ve got two black slugs slowly making their way across your forehead” — I find that my unplucked, unwaxed, and ungroomed eyebrows are in.

Thanks Cara Delevingne for affirming what I knew years ago: bushy eyebrows are in. (Pic: Instagram)

Courtesy of models and “it” girls like Lily Collins, Suki Waterhouse and Cara Delevigne, who frankly have been copying my look for years, natural, bushy eyebrows are the look of the moment.

Girls who spent years trying to get rid of their brows are now frantically trying to grow them back again.

I have never had that problem, for two reasons — first of all, my mother never allowed me to pluck mine as a teen, explaining that they were, in words which have now gone down in family folklore, “like the wings of a dove.’’

Sadly, I chose to repeat this phrase when challenged by the much-plucked leader of our school bully gang when she demanded to know why I did not tweeze mine.

“Oh”, I told her earnestly — which just goes to show you how clueless I really was in the ways of the world, let alone the tweezer — “That’s because my mum says my eyebrows are like the wings of a dove.”

Suffice to say I did not enjoy an unbridled wave of popularity in Grade Eight.

The other reason my eyebrows have been allowed to grow wild and free is because of my incredibly low pain threshold.

I have no tolerance for physical pain, and while on occasion I have been forced to have my eyebrows waxed, because they were joining together in the middle — not unlike the magnificent meeting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge arches in 1932 — I have done so most reluctantly.

Other than that, they are untouched, untamed, and now, apparently, in fashion.

So, if you would like to be at the fashion forefront in future, just follow my lead, girls.

My next prediction?

One word.

Flannelette.

You’re welcome.

Originally published as There comes a time when being out of fashion comes back in