By Jenna Clarke
Pip Edwards is wearing black tights covered in red, yellow and nude stripes and a matching black muscle shirt which cuts low into her side, so you get a glimpse of washboard abs and an impressive set of obliques.
There's a certain amount of mystery surrounding the Sydney-based fashion identity: because she's always in activewear, you never know whether she's going to the gym or just been. Yet she perpetually smells like she's just rolled in a field of iris, which is thanks to her $550 Christian Dior Bios d'Argent perfume. And there's no sweat, or hint of flush on her face, which is kept flawless thanks to monthly $150 blueberry face peels at Bondi Junction's famed The Clinic
"I was selling the dream, man! Selling the dream," Pip Edwards says of her activewear label P.E Nation.Credit: Damian Bennett
Although today, Edwards, 37, is planning to exercise, hers is an ensemble equally appropriate to working out, eating brunch, visiting the supermarket and doing the school run. After all, activewear is now a near-universal uniform; that's especially true in Bondi, the Sydney beachside neighbourhood in which Edwards lives. Her exercise-wear collection P.E Nation - a label she founded last year with former Topshop and sass & bide designer Claire Tregoning - has parlayed this trend, and the associated Bondi lifestyle, into a multimillion-dollar business.
In the 1970s, Diane Von Furstenberg designed flattering jersey wrap dresses suitable for both work and play. Now, Edwards is merging performance and style, for the gym and everything else. In March 2016, P.E Nation's first collection sold out within hours on its website. Within a year, the original team of two grew to 12. Stockists include David Jones, Selfridges in London and online retailers like MyTheresa, a leading luxury website, where it nestles among labels such as Balenciaga and Valentino.
Pip Edwards in new season P.E Nation.Credit: Damian Bennett
"Bondi is where the heart and soul of the brand comes from," Edwards says. "[The label] is everything about what Bondi represents in terms of just being active, being a bit more fashionable and showing off that chilled-out Australian vibe."
It makes sense the local uprising of Lycra is happening in Bondi, home to hipsters, hospitality workers, millionaires, yogis and yummy mummies. The principality of pretty people appears to be in a perpetual state of training. Serious joggers outnumber tourists on the picturesque Bondi to Bronte coastal walk. Others can be found planking on the grassy knoll near the Icebergs pool overlooking the world-famous surf, or picking up a "buffin" – a muffin free of gluten, dairy and sugar, and made from organic buckwheat flour – and fresh juice after a heated vinyasa yoga class at one of the many studios now sprinkled along Hall Street.
"Ah Bondi," a friend of Edwards' chimes in as we later take a walk along the world-famous promenade, passing the Pavilion where a group of older Italian men are playing cards and young shirtless men are skateboarding. "Green juice in one hand, a bag of MDMA in the other."
Another associate of Edwards', a Bondi-based former model turned fitness publicist, meets me for $5 protein balls, the size of a golf balls, at a popular cafe called Skinny Dip. "I'm a big fan of day time drinking," she says. "I can't justify losing a day so I go to the gym, get some work done and usually start drinking at 1pm. I'm home by 8pm. But only wine, only vegan wine."
Pip Edwards and Dan Single at a party in Sydney's Chippendale back in 2006.Credit: Janie Barrett
I ask Edwards to show me her Bondi routine, and so on a humid summer morning she takes me to the Cali Press juice bar. There she recommends a $9.50 concoction made with organic coconut water, banana, baby spinach, chia, plant protein and almond butter. She customises it with XCT oil (distilled from pure coconut oil) and agave (made from the blue agave succulent of Mexico). Everyone seems to know her: we are interrupted by a man who owns a day care franchise and wants to adopt P.E Nation as the new staff uniform.
Eschewing neon-hued inspirational slogans and puns, Edwards and her team restrict themselves to a more restrained palette of reds, yellows, blues and black and her initials, P. E. Whereas other brands carry items of exaggerated underwear - abbreviated tights commonly known as the "booty short" - P.E instead sells loose-fitting, knee-grazing basketball shorts. Oversized silhouettes and slightly androgynous styles rule. Tight and bright, it seems, is done.
Pip Edwards and her son Justice.Credit: Ashleigh Bonner
Marion Hume, the former Vogue Australia editor, now AFR Magazine's international fashion editor, is one of fashion's most revered, and toughest, critics. An avid swimmer, she thinks Edwards is a "girl to watch" who has entered the game at just the right time, with just the right aesthetic.
In February 2015 at Coterie, the exclusive womenswear trade show in New York, Edwards secured stockist deals with some of the world's major retailers for P.E Nation's first collection more than a year before it even officially launched.
Pip Edwards poses for Good Weekend.Credit: Damian Bennett
My fitness used to be dancing in nightclubs.
"You don't have a non-existent brand at Coterie," Edwards says. "I was selling the dream, man!" She adds, "The world envies Australia's fit and healthy lifestyle. It's ready for a brand that encapsulates that, and which comes out of Sydney."
Hume points out that the last sporty brand to capitalise on that global reputation was Speedo, which is no longer Australian-owned. Could P.E Nation also grow into a global brand? "I think it could," says Hume, nodding.
Pip Edwards: The Queen of Bondi.Credit: Damian Bennett
There's not much time for play in Edwards' life these days. She trains harder than ever before, using rigorous daily fitness sessions to test her products' comfort and durability. On a stationary bike inside a gym that was, until recently, owned by Russell Crowe in Darlinghurst, Edwards pulls her famous hair into a loose half-up, half-down top knot. It's the kind of look her favourite comedians, the Bondi Hipsters, would mock. She then begins to explain how a spiritual healer, a psychic and a kinesiologist help keep her grounded as her professional star rises. Between sprints, she recites her kinesiology mantra: "I am fucking woman. I am sensational. I empower my femininity."
A decade ago, Edwards was dabbling in fashion projects, working as a fit model for Marcs, and living a seriously hedonistic lifestyle. She had moved from her parents' house in Rose Bay into her boyfriend's [denim brand Ksubi founder Dan Single, 36] South Bondi apartment, and was drinking bottomless flutes of Veuve Clicquot at Justin Hemmes' gin palaces, the ivy and Establishment, while also supporting Single as he embarked on a new gig, separate from Ksubi, as "DJ Dangerous Dan" in The Bang Gang DJs. Edwards herself started to DJ as a side-business with the girlfriends of the other Ksubi designers for "shoe money" but they found themselves booking too many gigs while also trying to maintain careers and families, so gave it up.
"I was always quite fit, but as good as I was fit, I was also good at partying. My fitness was dancing in nightclubs. I didn't eat from Friday to Monday. I don't even know how I maintained a life. I went hard in both and that was conducive to my partner [Single] and the business I was working in at that time in fashion," she says.
Despite no official training as a designer or stylist, and dating back to her days with Single, Edwards has long been the barometer of style in Sydney, oozing confidence, cool, and insouciance. Think of her as a home grown Victoria Beckham, or Mary-Kate Olsen. (In fact, Olsen, the former child star of Full House turned co-designer of The Row, once accosted Edwards inside New York's Beatrice Inn to learn more about her trademark Top Deck chocolate bar-coloured hair.)
Like Beckham and Olsen, Edwards has now successfully transitioned from fashionable social fixture to fully-fledged designer.
But although she's now one of Australia's leading activewear entrepreneurs, Edwards was unable to play sport at high school. "I had to protect my fingers for piano lessons," she says. Raised in northern Sydney, she discovered soft-sand running in 2010, which she still does once a week - in addition to boxing and heli-skiing in winter, surfing in summer, and walking, skateboarding and twice-weekly $100 personal-trainer sessions.
Across from Edwards at the Darlinghurst gym today is the publicist Roxy Jacenko. Her blonde hair freshly blow-dried, Jacenko lifts dumb-bells and requests the music – Drake's Gyalchester – be turned up. "I don't take naps. Me and the money are way too attached to go and do that", raps Drake. "I want it to be like a disco in here," says Jacenko, who is also a Bondi resident.
As well as Jacenko, there are two other women working out. All are wearing tights by P.E Nation. "They look good," says Edwards, surveying Jacenko's $179 polyamide and elastane leggings. "How do they feel?"
Jacenko instructs her trainer to take a photo of her working out, while Edwards' trainer presents her with a cake to mark P.E Nation's first birthday.
It's safe to say the brand, financially backed by renowned rag traders Wassim and Ziad Gazal, has exceeded her expectations: "Sales are almost 10 times more than we projected, and that's being modest," says Edwards, who wears her own designs every day.
Edwards is hungry, but hers is not the type of appetite that will be sated by this gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free cake which her trainer promises won't cause "any inflammation to the body".
"But it's still got calories in it, right?" Edwards asks, jokingly.
Jacenko is offered a slice. She declines, intently focused on posting her workout photo for her 162,000 Instagram fans. More than 2300 will "like" the post. Her monochrome tights, "gifted" to the publicist by Edwards, and featured in the picture, quickly sell out online - exemplifying the digital networks and close personal connections of fashion's tastemakers so crucial to P.E Nation's success.
These days, social media support is the equivalent of "closing the deal". When reality-TV stars Khloé Kardashian and Kylie Jenner publish their P.E Nation outfits (which they buy) to their combined 160 million followers on Instagram, the pieces sell out.
Edwards herself has more than 97,000 followers on the photo publishing platform, and her social media profile was crucial in her landing some of P.E Nation's major stockists.
Buyers from around the world discovered the brand on the photo-sharing app and placed orders immediately.
"We first saw P.E on Instagram as it was gathering traction and were attracted to how fresh and visual the brand felt," Selfridges womenswear buying manager Heather Gramston tells me. In January, a P.E Nation pop-up store was launched inside the famous London department store. MyTheresa has sold P.E Nation for almost three seasons - just over a year - after seeing how much the debut collection was "generating buzz on Instagram", a representative says. "We wanted to be a part of its story and growth."
Jacenko's motivation for exposing the brand to her Instagram followers is simple. "Pip's a friend," she explains with a shrug. "I want to see her succeed. If I can help her by wearing the garments, which I love, by all means I'll do it."
The two have been close for almost 20 years after meeting at the Field Day music festival. Jacenko was 18; Edwards 17. "You couldn't really miss Pip," Jacenko says. "She was the girl all the boys were chasing. She was one of those girls, when walking into a nightclub, I'd let her go one way and I'd go the other because she was stiff competition."
Edwards thrives on a little healthy competition. Even today, carrying a shoulder injury that's giving her "phantom labour pains", she wants to up the weights and add reps. Her relentless drive has defined her since high school, when she was a prefect and music captain at the North Shore's prestigious, and posh, Ravenswood School for Girls.
But fashion was an interesting pivot for the woman headhunted in 2001 by PricewaterhouseCoopers after growing up in what she calls "a very corporate household". Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked in the banking sector. She was plucked from Sydney University before she completed her commerce and law degree. But, by 2003, Edwards had packed up her desk in the risk-assessment department and, after throwing away her business cards that read "Pip Edwards, Penetration Specialist", moved into PR, then found design and styling. Fashion was an industry that was more accepting of her "mohawk hair, rat's tail and fluoro orange pant-suits", she says. "I didn't fit in among the suits."
In 2004, aged 24, Edwards joined the house of Ksubi, then known as Tsubi, the maverick label of Australian fashion. She remembers it as a "boys' club" famous for its expensive jeans, wild parties – oh, and a rodent-infested catwalk show. In 2001, founders Dan Single, George Gorrow and Gareth Moody, decided 169 rats should open their Australian Fashion Week showcase. One was killed after a curtain rod fell on it. The RSPCA was called. An internal PR division was established, and Edwards eventually moved into that department after starting out as Single's personal assistant.
"Dan and I were best friends for a very long time. He was very popular with the women but we were best friends," she says. "When I first went into my job at Ksubi I was his PA and my title was 'Legendary Sexytary'," she says, rolling her eyes. "But obviously sitting next to him everyday …" She trails off. "I fell madly in love with him, madly."
Later in the day, Edwards attends a cocktail party for Dior to mark International Women's Day at the fashion house's Sydney boutique on Castlereagh Street. She's dressed in a red and white P.E Nation bomber jacket that balloons over a black Ellery floor-skimming skirt. The DJ notices her from across the room, smiles and starts playing her favourite song, This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. Edwards laughs, blows the DJ a kiss and starts dancing, alone. She explains the significance of the song by pointing to one of seven tattoos on her body. The cursive phrase underneath her bicep reads: "This must be the place". "Because that's where you always want to be, in the nook," she says.
Edwards is now comfortably ensconced in fashion's nook. In the mid-2000s, she and Single were regulars at the renowned, now defunct, Oxford Street nightspot Ruby Rabbit, late-night venues around Kings Cross, and out and about in Bondi. In 2006, the couple had a baby: Justice Maximus. Growing up an only child, Edwards had never held a baby before Justice was born, and after a few months she moved in with her parents for support. She took two months off work before returning to Ksubi to design womenswear.
In 2008, Edwards and Single broke up. They share custody of their son, who is now 10.
Edwards quit Ksubi in 2009, and joined sass & bide as chief accessories designer. She credits founders Sarah-Jane Clarke and Heidi Middleton for helping her discover her "cycle of realness": "It lifted me out of the unknown," she says. "While Ksubi was great for instilling authenticity, they were such beautiful women who really nurtured my spirit into becoming confident about who I am," she says. During her four years there, Edwards also met Tregoning, her business partner.
Ksubi was sold in 2010 for $5 million after Single and Gorrow placed it into administration. The brand is now owned by General Pants, who hired Edwards as creative director in 2013. She left the company in 2015, with the blessing of chief executive Craig King, to work full time on P.E Nation.
Back when Single and Edwards separated, Single's blossoming romance with model and singer Cheyenne Tozzi thwarted any chance of a reconciliation. Edwards and Tozzi were best friends, and the love triangle rocked the close-knit fashion industry and titillated the tabloids.
A mature, mellowed and more maternal Edwards admits she has since worked on re-establishing a relationship with her former friend Tozzi. As Edwards recounts it, over drinks in Bondi in early 2015, Tozzi encouraged her to establish her own fitness inspired label.
P.E Nation was born 12-months later.
The same year, Edwards met realtor Ben Azar, whom she calls her "calming influence". Gone are the paparazzi days of her standing barefoot in convenience stores in the early hours, buying chips and bottled water at the end of a night out. These days Edwards prefers hanging out at the beach with Azar, Justice and their kelpie puppy, Max.
Edwards sends Justice to Cranbrook, the elite Anglican boys' school, to give him "structure and discipline because his outside life is a little …" She doesn't finish the sentence. But she still sees herself as a working mother, a view that drives her corporate vision. "We are just doing what the average woman wants and needs in a time-poor environment," she says. "We've shown mums that if you believe in it, you can do it. You can also have an active lifestyle and maintain that sanity."
Justice has been selected for the school's choir, and is due to perform an acoustic cover of Coldplay's hit song, Clocks, at a midweek assembly. Edwards is running late. She can't find a car park in the poky streets of Rose Bay. With minutes to spare and her BMW secure, she jumps over a school fence to arrive on time. A group of schoolboys looks on. She gives them a friendly wave and laughs before running across the campus.
As she settles into the auditorium, another mother turns around to take in her outfit - drop-crotch black pants, sneakers and a navy sweater by menswear designer Ximon Lee emblazoned with the slogan: "Take a bite" - before sidling up to her. "We missed you at the dawn service this morning," she says, a joking reference to a yoga class organised for parents.
Edwards' experiences as a mum, as well as Tregoning's, who is a mother of two, serve as the label's main source of creative inspiration.
"I can't put it down to strategy," Edwards maintains. "It's just how we dress, how we live, who we are. End of story."
But there's no denying that Edwards is capturing the zeitgeist, and a cultural shift to a more relaxed, sporty aesthetic. As she was making the transition from the corporate world to the rag trade in the early Oughties, supermodel Christy Turlington appeared on the October 2002 cover of US Vogue in a silver evening gown, pulling her body into Bow Pose, or Dhanurasana. The cover stimulated the fashion industry's interest in functional garments.
Turlington busied herself for a number of years espousing the virtues of her near daily practice and launched a Puma-backed active apparel line called Nuala. Twelve years later, Canada's Lululemon, famous for its $100 yoga pants, had become a $US10 billion company. It went public in 2007 with a share price of $US18. By 2012, its stocks hit $US76, signalling a 400 per cent increase.
It was then Stylerunner chief executive Julie Stevanja decided to launch the world's first, premium athleisure online-only store for women.
"Lululemon was growing 40 per cent year on year, that's enormous growth," Stevanja says. "What that told me was that I wasn't the only woman who wanted to buy premium, expensive activewear".
Stylerunner started with 11 brand offerings in 2012. Today Stevanja stocks more than 70, including P.E Nation, in her Sydney warehouse.
"There's a lot of good activewear brands but Pip is just pushing the boundaries," says Stevanja. "She stands for being bold, confident, and unapologetic. It really ties in with this movement with women at the moment."
While Edwards, and others like Lorna Jane and Running Bare, were waking up, smelling the cold-pressed juice and realising work out wear was a potential market in Australia, Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld was one of the earliest high-fashion adopters of the trend. He sent models down the runway in sneakers for the French fashion house's 2014 couture collection in Paris.
By March when the fall 2014 shows came around, Tom Ford was showing sequined football jerseys and Alexander Wang was designing $1000 tracksuits.
Over breakfast at Bondi's Drake Eatery after the choral performance, I repeat Lagerfeld's comment that "you can be in fashion without being a victim" to Edwards. She enthusiastically agrees, between bites of a $16 serving of smashed avocado with gluten-free bread and extra ricotta cheese. She is wearing all black: P.E Nation pants, a knitted backless Ellery sweater and a black pair of Chanel trainers that retail for about $1300.
"That's what's been so refreshing in the uptick in the fashion industry – that people can wear trainers to shows. They can wear trainers anywhere. I'm sure everyone's high-fiving because God knows there are a lot of bunions out there." She laughs, pausing to sip her skim mocha with extra chocolate before pointing the cup. "Extra chocolate is my way of saying, 'I don't have sugar.' Whatever it takes, right?"