Rear Window
Elite Cranbrook dresses up in RM Williams
Mark Di StefanoReporterCranbrook is an exclusive school on Sydney’s eastern suburbs that’s given us so much.
Clyde, Kerry and James Packer are Old Cranbrookians. So are Rodney Adler and Jodee Rich. Former Test cricketer Ed Cowan and Liberal MP Julian Leeser were raised behind the walls. Then, of course, there’s Double Bay Jesus himself, Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The exclusive Sydney school has sent parents a “uniform reveal”.
As readers of this column will be aware, Cranbrook has been on a journey to allow girls into the school. There was, last year, a full-scale governance crisis about the pace of the co-ed transition push, which led to 10 of the 11 members of the school council clearing out. You know, normal school stuff.
That unpleasantness aside, the transition continues. Parents were last week sent a video update. “It’s a very exciting day today,” headmaster Nicholas Sampson said over inspirational muzak of a CBA TV spot. “We are turning our intent into action.”
What was the “significant milestone in this process”? It was a “co-education uniform reveal”!
You can just imagine iPads blowing up from Bellevue Hill to Vaucluse. Phones being passed around the Lord Dudley and Chiswick. Did you see The Cranbrook Uniform Reveal?
“We’ve been able to work across a uniform that allows for inclusion and diversity,” said Daisy Turnbull, the head of the school’s co-education process.
The camera pans across ties, skirts, blazers, vests, while the former prime minister’s daughter talks about “a darker charcoal for the pants and shorts and skirts”, and “introducing a white shirt for year 11 and 12 students … which I know students have been asking for a while”.
Oh, you thought “diversity and inclusion” in a uniform meant displaying a Cranbrook hijab, or a badged turban? Don’t be silly.
But the reveal of the reveal was the fact Cranbrook had hired Jonathan Ward, the former executive designer of boots at clothes maker RM Williams, to work on the uniform.
Was Tom Ford busy? What’s next? School bags from Mimco? Blue and red scarves from Will Vicars’ Oroton?
Parents who send their pampered progeny to the school pay astronomical sums for the privilege – more than $40,000 a year. It’s said in social circles about 30 per cent of Cranbrook students have their school fees paid by their grandparents.
But, of course, Cranbrook picked RM Williams, whose former designer will be dressing the next generation of Pitt St cowboys. And soon, cowgirls.
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