Dopamine dressing is here post-pandemic, in vivid reds, greens, purples and yellows – colours of optimism. How to wear these saturated hues? Go all in
- This season’s fashion collections are full of colour – vivid, bold, saturated colour that makes us feel upbeat and optimistic as we emerge from the pandemic
- Part of this may be down to popular ideas around colour therapy and ‘dopamine dressing’ – when our brain releases feel-good chemicals because of what we wear
For Valentino’s autumn/winter 2021 haute couture show, staged in July in a Venice shipyard, creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli asked guests to wear only white. The reason became immediately clear – an entire audience counterpointing models walking the runway in puffballs of raspberry, sunny yellow minidresses, and gowns shot through with lime.
His palette was, as curator Roger Leong from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney in Australia noted, “a symphony of colour, tone and hue that we haven’t seen since Yves Saint Laurent’s couture collections of the 1980s.
“The collection not only harked back to Saint Laurent but Piccioli’s purple taffeta gowns reminded me of Perkin’s mauve, which took the fashion world by storm in the 1860s after the chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally created one of the first synthetic dyes, in the pursuit of a cure for malaria.”
