C’mon, Dress Happy
Like a scene straight out of the 1957 musical comedy Funny Face, in which a Diana Vreelandish fashion editor exhorts women to “think pink!” as an antidote to everything down, dreary, dull, depressing, dismal and deadly, the fall 2021 digital runways were awash in rosy colour. Take your Pepto-Bismol in the form of a pink power suit from Thebe Magugu, a puff-sleeve dress in a bubblegum shade from Carolina Herrera or a cerise marabou-trimmed jacket from Gucci.
“Colour is life, joy, fun!” says Donatella Versace, who sent out a trio of A-line minis paired with tone-ontone monogrammed tights in fuchsia, lemon and coral. “I wanted the three looks to go out together to make a statement. We’re looking at the future with a new sense of positivity. As we slowly get our lives back, the world should celebrate.”
Can we indeed dress ourselves happy as we start to emerge from our pandemic chrysalis? A paper published last year in the journal Psychological Science, co-authored by a team of researchers at 36 academic institutions, revealed certain universal colour-emotion associations. In the study, 4,598 participants from 30 countries on six continents speaking 22 languages were asked to pair 20 emotions (such as joy, pleasure, relief, regret, sadness and anger) with 12 colours. The researchers then calculated the average probability of each colour-emotion association and identified the most prominent among the 240 possible pairings, which included joy with, yes, pink, as well as the other colours highlighted in the Versace collection, yellow and orange.
The study did not test whether participants actually felt more joyful when they wore the colours they associated with joy. But in a 2015 study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Ps ychology, researchers in Switzerland asked students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to watch video clips of actors portraying “panic fear” and “elated joy” and to choose the colour of shirt most appropriate for the emotion. They found that participants selected brighter, more saturated and warmer colours for joyful expressions than for fearful ones. Colours along the red-yellow spectrum were deemed more appropriate for joy and cyan-bluish hues for fear. The conclusion was that clothing colour may be used to convey emotional intentions—that we might choose brighter colours “when aiming to convey positive affect”.
Loewe stylist Benjamin Bruno apparently got the memo. Last winter, as Covid-19 cases in Europe surged, he started turning up at the studio wearing cheery, colourful t-shirts to boost his own mood. That inspired the label’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, to begin thinking about designing pieces that might offer people a similar kind of much-needed emotional uplift, like the buttercup yellow nappa leather coat and the oversize tangerine suit with contrasting stripes in the fall collection. Anderson also made a range of optimistically hued accessories, including booties with sunray details and a supersize pouch bag that looks ready to play the role of an emotional support animal. “This collection is a big departure for me. We’ve never done something this colourful before,” he explains. “I was thinking of this idea of ‘colour therapy’ in a literal sense: I wanted to delve into a really out-there colour palette and make it feel sensual, even salacious.”
Stella McCartney also took a trip over the rainbow with a collection that leveraged her expertise in sustainable materials such as forest-friendly viscose and PVC-free paillettes to create ruched bandage dresses, sequinned going-out tops and other glad rags. “It’s all about escapism and being able to blend fantasy and reality,” McCartney says. “These are conscious pieces that reflect a collective desire for joy, opulence and glamour. There’s so much more colour injected into this season with the sunshine yellow and rich purple that I hope will inspire everyone to dress up and go out to the clubs again.”
Other collections evoked the glamour of Old Hollywood. “I wanted to create a technicolour fantasy in deep hues and saturated colours—something dynamic and cinematic,” says Moschino Creative Director Jeremy Scott, who made a mini movie titled JungleRed after the It colour in George Cukor’s 1939 comedy-drama TheWomen. In Scott’s reboot of the film’s fashion show sequence (the only scene Cukor shot in colour), which features eveningwear with vivid brushstrokes and a satin mini dress embellished with a feathery pink flamingo, flame-haired model Karen Elson is a vision in head-to-toe marigold, complete with a wide-brimmed sun hat. She appears alongside an all-star cast that includes Hailey Bieber, Precious Lee and Shalom Harlow.
Meanwhile, A. Potts designer Aaron Potts channelled happy childhood memories of a very Singin’ in the Rain raincoat. “When I started doing the collection, the yellow was really going to just be a highlight,” says Potts of its standout hue, a colour he calls sunburst, seen on fluid shapes modelled by Alvin Ailey dancers. “And then I said to myself, ‘Okay, Aaron, you can choose to stay in this dark space or you can will yourself into some joy and some lightness and some happiness and some optimism.’” If we hope to spark joy this fall, then we may indeed want to, as Funny Face’s fashion editor puts it, “banish the black, burn the blue and bury the beige”.