How does a rabbi choose her shoes? Why does a psychoanalyst like slogan tees? And why does a doctor avoid wearing scrubs at work? Seven striking dressers share their surprising style stories
Andrew Geldart, 65, retired engineer, Cornwall
For 30 years as a civil engineer I wore conventional grey and navy, then I retired at 55, moved down to Bude in Cornwall with my wife, Lynn, and the sun came out. Bude is a positive place, where you can be yourself. Everyone is friendly; it’s paradise.
I first started down the yellow route 10 years ago when we moved to Bude with a camper van called Primrose. People gave me yellow accessories for it and the seed was sown – I thought I might wear yellow myself. Now it’s a mainstay of my wardrobe. I wear it practically every day. I have everything from yellow caps to yellow shoes. I prefer sunflower yellow rather than mustard tones: it’s bright and cheerful.
I don’t always go “full banana”! I dress according to the situation. I wouldn’t wear yellow to a Remembrance Day parade, but I would to a funeral of a friend, as I’m known for wearing it and I would be honouring them. If I want to go under the radar, I wear beige. I’m a church leader and help run the food bank: usually people know me there and adjust their behaviour accordingly, but when they don’t recognise me because I’m not in yellow, I can blend into the background and hear what the community really want.
There are practical benefits. My grandchildren can easily spot me in a crowd. In fact, they walk past me if I’m not wearing yellow, and ask: “Where’s Pops?” But the main reason I choose to stand out is to connect with people, to show that I am friendly and approachable, even if I’m not smiling.
Someone says, “I like your glasses”, nearly every day (I have a jazzy, stripy, bright yellow summer pair and a more muted, translucent yellow winter pair), and that opens the door to a conversation. There are so many isolated people looking down at their phones, and if I can encourage someone to talk, I’m happy. I want to spread a bit of love in the world and to show that it’s safe to say how you really are, to get past just “Good morning”. A coffee and a chat can be a little glimpse of sunshine.
I have toyed with changing to red or green, and that would be a new conversation – “What happened? Why aren’t you wearing yellow?” It’s a colour that works for me, but never say never: men’s fashion is quite limited when it comes to yellow, so I may be forced to change to another bright colour one day.
Sometimes the old conventional and staid engineer part of me thinks, “Can I get away with this? Is this too much?” But I saw a picture of the late David Hockney in his yellow glasses recently and thought, “Maybe I’m not ridiculous.” I want to give people the courage to step outside the box – let’s make life enjoyable.
Anouchka Grose, 56, psychoanalyst, London
I don’t want to dress too conservatively as I don’t want to look like an authority figure, or like someone who believes that “analytic neutrality” – the idea that the therapist is a blank slate – means some kind of John Lewis cosplay. “Neutrality” can’t mean aligning with a dominant norm – psychotherapists need to be critical thinkers. But what I wear also can’t be so unusual that the client is distracted. Overall, I’m aiming for a kind of quiet surrealism – a balance between comfortable, pleasurable and characterful.
So I have a vague uniform of a genderless jumper or jacket – a strict-looking black jacket with pointy shoulders, say – with a man’s shirt or T-shirt, big trousers (I’m currently loving a stripy pair from Maison Margiela I found on eBay) and ugly shoes, usually Uggs I buy secondhand. Most things are outsized, or loose.
Very often my T-shirts will have a slogan – my favourite is “Dress for the male gays”. It references Laura Mulvey’s theory that there could be a male gaze that things are constructed around, which was one of the first ways into psychoanalysis for me. But it’s also a funny wordplay referencing the post-Freudians, who thought of homosexuality as a kind of sickness to cure. I see that T-shirt as a sort of apology for the past homophobia of psychoanalysis. Plus it makes clients laugh, which is allowed. (Freud took jokes extremely seriously.)
Subverting the expectations of how a shrink ought to dress has been a real theme for me. A patient once asked me: “Are you allowed to wear those trousers to work?” They were balloonish red and white checked ones. And sometimes when I’ve given papers at analytic conferences, the other shrinks will be, like, “Yeah, but what do you wear for work?” (It is no different from what I am wearing at the conference.)
I’ve always loved clothes and the way they transmit meaning. I love the crazy semiotics of them – communicating social signals to other people who know those signals. That seems very psychoanalytic to me.