For a year, Pip Edwards was deep in denial.
She wasn’t sleeping. She was sweating her way through board meetings at her namesake athletic brand P.E Nation, walking into rooms that she used to own only to lose her train of thought halfway through.
So, the fashion designer and creative director overhauled her diet and exercise regime. She incorporated acupuncture into her routine and explored whatever natural remedies she could. All to feel “normal”.
“Normal? What even is normal?” Edwards questions now, nearly a decade on.
Edwards was in her late 30s when she entered perimenopause, her symptoms swift and severe. Had she spoken to her mum, she would have known history might repeat itself — she’d been through it a few years after Edwards was born.
Yet stigma surrounded the natural and inevitable transition phase, particularly in the fashion industry where Edwards was front-facing and compelled to appear perfectly put-together.
The longer it went on, though, the more Edwards couldn’t shake the unease of passing the silence down to another generation. A single mum, Edwards was fine one minute and not the next, with no more idea how to explain to her son Justice than her own mother had.
So, she started saying it out loud. On podcasts, in interviews and most recently to a room of women in Melbourne, where she opened up to a chorus of “me too”.
It’s why she said yes when Briella Browne, co-founder of women’s health brand Biolae, told her she was the perfect person to front products for perimenopause and menopause. It was the kind of product and messaging she could have used when she unravelled during meetings. Putting her money where her mouth is, Edwards is now a shareholder and strategic adviser in the company.
Sitting down with Edwards at Crown Perth’s Crystal Club is part therapy session, part catch-up with a friend you haven’t seen in awhile. Fresh off shooting Claremont Quarter’s spring summer campaign on Rottnest Island during a welcomed slice of sunny weather, she is two coffees deep and talking fast. She generously divulges about the hard years and the good ones with the same level of ease and detail.
What’s clear is that 2026 has been a year of transition. She left Ksubi earlier in the year, the streetwear brand she first joined in the early 2000s in a PR and admin role, before returning two decades later as creative director. This came after stepping back from P.E Nation in 2024, the label she co-founded in 2016 and built with Claire Tregoning.
Alignment and sovereignty are the words she keeps coming back to. For decades she grew businesses that became a part of her DNA. She was the face of P.E Nation, her fit body fronted campaigns and flooded the feeds of women who then bought the latest drop because she was attached to it.
It was hard to tell where the brand started, and where her own identity stopped.
Which is why it’s been a process of untangling and rediscovering where to place her self-worth outside of work or external validation. Not easy given the amount of women she passes on her regular walks from Bondi to Bronte wearing sports bras and leggings with her initials on them.
She still works hard on her new business Pip Edwards & Co which focuses on investment, advisory and partnerships. She wants to.
Only now, she’s given herself permission to stop, which is not something she did when her worth was measured in productivity. She’s allowed a holiday — she took one to Italy in July (though whether she completely switched off is another story) — and is open to a day off should the mood strike.
And part of what she’s uncovered is hiding in plain sight in her new Instagram bio, where a single title has been replaced by 10.
Founder. Investor. Advisor. Partner. Creative Director. Fashion. Lifestyle. Beauty. Wellness. MOTHER.
“I’m in a receiving era where I know I’ve done my time,” she explains. “I don’t have to prove my worth, and I need to accept that.
“So that’s why this era is a bit softer . . . I’m proud of the mother that I am and was, am proud of the achievements in my career, and that I actually became who I really was underneath all of those things that were conditioned.
“And then, I met the love of my life. That’s what happens when you have space, and taking that space to adjust allows for all that to come in.”
That love is Nicholas Nogarotto, a director at Freshwater Strategy, and a man she says is unlike anyone she’s come across in her lifetime, with quiet intelligence and an unwavering commitment to his own daughters. He’s an excellent cook, too.
The other thing that’s changed for Edwards is motherhood — the role that earned capitals, and the one she’s held the longest.
Justice, now 20, moved to the US in 2025 to study psychology and play basketball. You’d be hard-pressed to find a prouder mother.
“I’m proud of how brave he is to have the conviction and the belief in himself to not only leave home but leave the country,” she says, her face lighting up. “I think I chased my dreams for a lot of different reasons. He’s really got this purist attitude to it, like ‘I’m going to do this’, whereas mine was more attached to him and survival.”
They never had a conventional mother and son relationship, something friends and family found curious at times. He is calm whereas she, by her own description, is going a hundred miles an hour in a thousand directions. She thinks he was born to temper her. He tells her when she is being an idiot, and she takes it — he’s probably right. He called the other day to talk through a date he’d just been on.
“He sees things the way they are,” she says. “I think sometimes when you play happy roles all the time in a household, that rose-tinted view can be an illusion. There’s no illusion (for him) about life and how hard and how amazing it can be.”
She’s been honest with him about everything. With herself, not always so much.
Edwards had fallen pregnant easily with Justice in her mid-20s and had assumed, without ever really examining it, that the option for more kids would still stay open. Despite not knowing if she would ever go down that road again, the news that her egg count dropped almost overnight thanks to perimenopause, hit her hard.
“There was some heavy grieving there because I’d let my career and my turbo life take over without really doing the due diligence on myself properly,” Edwards says.
Now, she follows a longevity protocol — getting regular checks and DEXA scans, though hasn’t gone as far as the test that allegedly tells you how much time you might have left.
Your body is your wealth, she says now. It’s the thing she tells women to look after first, because there’s nothing without it.
She turned 46 in April, as confident now posing in swimwear on Rotto as she was in activewear in the P.E Nation days.
Fashion has and will always be there — she was cutting up clothes and thriving in textile and design in her first years of high school. She still keeps an archive, and couldn’t possibly guess how many swimsuits she has packed into drawers.
She’s also Australian fashion’s loudest supporter, quick to reel off labels like Camilla and Marc and Zimmermann that she wore and adores during the Claremont shoot, many of them designed by women she’s known for decades.
Naturally, a “turbo” Edwards has a new venture in the works, though “more lifestyle than fashion” is all she can share.
Until then, she is in no hurry — or her version of it. A sentiment that would have made no sense to Edwards at 39, but is now the whole point.