Kellie

Co-founder, Fig & Bloom

Kellie is the co-founder of Fig & Bloom and designs the range, bringing a background in fashion to how the studio works with colour and form.

A forecast with my neck out — what I think is genuinely coming, and the few things I would happily see the back of.

Flowers move like fashion: in cycles, on a delay, and usually because something in the wider mood shifted first. I came from an industry that lives or dies by reading that shift early, so once a year I will put my neck out and call it. Not the safe colour-of-the-year nonsense — what I actually think is coming, and what I am quietly done with.

What I am calling: restraint. After years of bigger, fuller, more, I think taste is swinging back toward the considered and the slightly imperfect — single-variety arrangements, a brown flower on purpose, the confidence to colour-block instead of cram. People are tiring of the supermarket abundance look the same way they tired of fast fashion. Fewer, better, held longer.

A restrained single-variety arrangement — Calling it: fewer stems, held longer

A textured seasonal arrangement in muted tones — Texture over volume

What I am also calling: the return of properly Australian palettes — dusty natives, the bruised and the brown, colours that look like this continent rather than a Dutch auction. And seasonality as a flex, not an apology. Telling someone the stock is extraordinary this week is far more persuasive than promising them the same twelve roses in every month of the year.

Following the colour of the year is not taste. Knowing what to do with it is.

What I am calling time on: novelty for its own sake, dyed flowers, anything described as a statement when it just means loud. And the reflex to answer every occasion with a bigger bunch. None of that is a point of view; it is the absence of one. A trend you adopt without conviction is just someone else's homework.

A bright, busy arrangement shown as a contrast — Done with: loud for the sake of loud

I will be wrong about some of this, which is the point of having a neck and sticking it out. But the through-line never changes, whatever the year is doing: composed, not assembled. Trends are weather. Taste is climate.