Born Whole

I’ve never thought of myself as particularly fashion conscious, and I don’t know much about style.

Given a choice, I’ll always go for jeans and t-shirt because that’s what I feel most comfortable in.

In the darker depths of my soul, however, lurks a biker chick, and I sometimes dream about setting her free. But my inner good girl gets in the way.“You’re too old for leather and chunky boots,” she admonishes. “Besides, you don’t have enough style awareness to pull it off.”

In an effort to educate myself, I recently went to see a professional stylist, hoping that she’d be able to sort me out and teach me a few style tricks.

The first thing she said, after conducting a surprisingly psychological analysis of my personality, was that I should get rid of all my black clothes.

“But then there won’t be anything left in my wardrobe!” I protested.

“You need colour in your life,” she insisted, and she’s right. I do need some colour in my life. Colour makes me happy, and on the rare occasion that I wear something bright and cheerful, I tend to feel a lot more energised and positive.

Could it be that for someone like me who’s inclined to suffer periodic bouts of depression, adding colour to my wardrobe might actually help me feel less blue (no pun intended)?

It turns out that there’s a whole field of colour psychology, according to which different colours correspond to different emotions.

What is more, the colour you wear can affect how other people react to you, so if it’s important to you to make a good first impression, pay attention to the clothes and colours you wear.

Although I’m not that bothered by other people’s perceptions of me, I have to admit that playing around with colours is fun, and one of the things I learned from the stylist is it that pink suits me.

Pink!

After all the time I’ve spent trying to dissuade my young daughters from buying into the whole ‘pretty in pink’ stereotype, I’m now told that pink is the right colour for me, a forty-something feminist.

Then again, who says pink can’t be a feminist colour? The Swedish feminist party, for example, has adopted pink as its colour partly in a move to reclaim it from the world of princesses and fairies.

After a day of learning about colour and style, I was aching to get home, not to clear out my wardrobe necessarily, but to do some colouring!

Yes, all that time spent looking at different colours had got me in the mood to borrow my daughters’ extensive collection of colouring pens and do a spot of colouring myself.

On the train that afternoon, I found myself looking at what people were wearing, and sure enough, it was the red coats, pink hats, bright green jackets that stood out from the crowd and looking at them I couldn’t help but smile. A bit of colour makes a difference.

As for the black clothes in my wardrobe, I’m still keeping them for the day I finally come out as a biker chick.