I wrote recently about my rediscovered love of strong, warm colours, crimson and purple and a particular rowanberry shade of orange I’m always delighted to see. Since then, I’ve had several conversations with women my age about surprising revolutions in colour preferences. A lot of us, it seems, after years of wearing “neutral” and “cool” shades, discover a midlife passion for strong colour.
Of course, there’s a strong social aspect to such personal changes. There’s nothing objective about which colours are “neutral” or how they “go”, it’s all constructed by cultural association. None of my friends married in white because none of us wanted any truck with sexist ideas about virginity or purity, but in other cultures brides wear red or gold, and white is for funerals. Pink was not associated with European femininity until the 19th century. Santa Claus used to wear green.
I remember reading Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple when I was a teenager. The poem, in which a middle-aged speaker dreams of spending her pension on brandy and satin sandals, in old age becoming fat on sausages, was in an anthology of feminist poetry that was precious to me, but I found it frustrating. If the speaker wanted to wear purple, why didn’t she just wear purple? Why did women’s benign ideas about self-expression and pleasure have to be deferred to an imaginary old age? What would be so terrible about wearing a red hat and eating bread and pickle in your 40s?
And so I am a little sceptical about my own and my contemporaries’ turn towards brighter colours in our 50s, as if being “allowed” to wear pattern and colour is some kind of compensation or trade-off for our imminent invisibility and dismissal. I know, now, why younger women might not feel able to wear purple; even in the relatively tolerant environments of university arts departments and literary publishing where I have spent my working life, young and young-presenting women always had to fight to be taken seriously, to decide how far to ape the ways of middle-class, middle-aged white men to get ahead. (I intend no insult: the people I love most happen to be middle-class white men and they didn’t create this system either. Patriarchy hurts everyone, even the patriarchs, who are not ever allowed to cry or to wear purple.)
For years I wore mostly black and grey and tried to pitch my voice lower than its natural register, and to behave with authority. That, or something, worked. I was promoted, reached the top, and by then my hair was greying and I had a certain reputation and 20 years’ experience and the pink and orange began to creep back into my wardrobe, at first in socks and jewellery and then, as I emigrated and jumped off the career ladder, in bigger blocks and nearer the face.
[ Sarah Moss: ‘I’m a classic first child. A driven overachiever. Slightly neurotic’Opens in new window ]
Now I often wear raspberry pink and rowan orange in loose linen layers and look like someone who isn’t interested in dress codes, which is, obviously, a luxury not available to all.
And it is particularly men to whom that luxury is not available. A friend who was his sons’ primary carer used to make a point of wearing pink shirts, in an attempt to counterbalance the cultural excitement around pinkness and girls, to show his boys and their friends that masculinities can be as plural and playful as femininities, but 10 years later they all dress in the usual masculine palette of grey, black and sober shades of blue. I have one male friend who wears oranges and reds, but in most shops they’re not even available to men.
Here’s the thing: all of this is just stuff we invented. We could decide any day that office attire is rainbow-coloured, that judges should wear feathered hats instead of wigs, that Garda uniforms should be rose-pink or sky-blue or that heart-warming shade of rowanberry orange (or is it, in the light of the afternoon sun, red?). I’m sure the cars of my childhood came in Smartie colours, as well as pumping out leaded fumes at the height of a child’s nose. There’s no reason they should all have turned grey.
Old age doesn’t await all of us; let’s not leave it until we’re old to wear purple.
