As* Friends* addicts, we spent the noughties paying more attention to Rachel’s pregnancy than our sister in laws. From the big paternity reveal to that ill-fated date with Joey, we couldn’t take our eyes off of that baby bump. The big question was what would the Gellar/Green baby be called? Would they go for Ruth, Phoebe, Rain? Or would she be called James?
Gender neutral names have been the biggest baby name talking point since Kimye chose to name their daughter North West two years ago. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds recently welcomed their own James into the world, Jessica Simpson named her first daughter Maxwell, and who can forget Chris and Gwyneth’s Apple?
But it’s not just celebs that are throwing tradition out the window when it comes to naming their new borns, at the end of last year, more and more of the top 100 baby names were gender neutral. With parents favouring names like Blake and Avery over more traditional gender binary names like Clare or Thomas. Is it just our love of all things famous? Or is our position on gender about to change?
Since Caitlyn Jenner burst, glamorously, onto that July Vanity Fair cover, gender has been all we can talk about. Big brands are now following suit. Apple’s recently revealed the Apple Watch came in one main design, without forcing us to choose between chunk fashion time pieces and actually being able to lift our arms to see the face.
For 2015, gender neutral is the way to go.
By Jess Howard