Zara blazer, Sportscraft silk blouse, Civilize shorts (JJ Markets), Carrano ‘Vemelo’ suede heels, vintage leather bag, Peter Lang 3 bar cuff, earrings from India. Shot at the University of Sydney.

My sister has two beautiful little girls who are a mountain of joy to be around – they’re bubbly, vivacious and ridiculously clever. Yet, as my one little complaint, I’m constantly telling my sister that she needs to stop dressing them in pink. This colour makes up about eighty percent of their wardrobes and as someone who diplomatically worships variety, it bothered me a little. People already know they’re girls, I say, confident that their plump cheeks are all the pink they’ll ever need. She tells me that it’s not out of choice but rather, necessity. As I’ve discovered, the toddler fashion market is not as open-minded to colour as Erdem or Proenza Schouler and mainstream little girls’ clothes makers favour pink. Mia, 3, does too. Audrey, 1, on the other hand, will need to master the art of speaking in a comprehensible fashion before she can express her colour biases.

As young children, where we’re fortunate enough to be afforded the protection and attention, we seem to live life through rose-coloured glasses. Our parents get into ‘kid mode’ conversations, feigning deep interest in the The Wiggles, and life is about ice cream, toys and which little boy tried to kiss you at childcare (in Mia’s case, Giovanni). Life is played out as if there is no evil in the world and as a little girl, your world is as pretty as the clothes Barbie, the ultimate pink pin up, wears. Even Dora the Explorer, a hispanic Indiana Jones in the making, favours pink t-shirts with her orange pants (colour blocking before her time perhaps).

As a young adult, I’ve often avoided pink and the few pieces that I’ve allowed to creep its way into the collection are light and blush-toned. More recently, however, I’ve started to question my own ideas about colour, as evident in my previous red post, and how it shapes what I choose to wear and what I choose to buy. This blazer is an obvious exception, not only to my wardrobe choices but also to my natural predisposition to associate candy and fluorescent pinks with cheesy teeny boppiness and Playboy bunny objectification. I love  the way it looks and am assured that when worn thoughtfully, my fears of looking like an iced strawberry sponge cake will remain unrealised.

More importantly, I love how wonderfully the pink ties itself with notions and memories of being young, perpetually curious and innocent in the truest sense of the word. This colour is able to represent this for me, despite the fact that I spent the first 6 formative years of my life in a remote little village in Asia, oblivious to the existence of Barbie and Dora and thankfully, Playboy bunnies.

Pink is about happiness and the time in your life when you wanted so much to be a big person and knew not how precious life was as a little person.