Changing seasons, changing colours

How to avoid “death in small doses”

For most of my adult life, my wardrobe and my home has been dominated by the colour blue. I wore a navy school uniform and mostly stuck to cold, dull shades when I started working as a journalist. I thought that drab trouser suits would help me be taken seriously in the male-dominated worlds of politics and business I reported on.

I was also reacting against the trends of my hometown Newcastle, where fashion is designed to draw maximum attention to the body: skimpy skirts and bare legs and arms are the norm for women even in winter. I preferred thick woolly tights and a cosy cardigan.

As I got older, I experimented with brighter shades of turquoise and emerald, but I avoided warm, feminine colours like red and yellow, purple and pink. And I only wore silver jewellery, never gold. I told myself that chilly tones suited my blue eyes and blonde hair, even though my sister, who at some point had her “colours done”, was much happier to experiment with sunnier shades and patterns.

Even now, I am uncomfortable writing about colour: it feels frivolous to suggest that it is important, especially in these dark days of war and climate crisis.

Slave of habit

But for me, the issue took on symbolic importance when I left my job at Reuters after a 27-year career. I had become stuck in my ways in many areas of my life: I only like blue, I only drink rosé wine, I part my hair on the left, I always do yoga on Friday. I realised I had become a slave of habit, as described by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

He who becomes the slave of habit,

Who follows the same routes every day,

Who never changes pace,

Who does not risk and change the colour of his clothes,

Who does not speak to somebody they don’t know,

Dies slowly.

…Let us try to avoid death in small doses,

Reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater

Than the simple fact of breathing.

That poem inspired me to try to break some old habits.

The result of my latest art class

I had already embraced more colour in my life by taking up art classes with the wonderful Leah Kohlenberg during the pandemic, but I had yet to change my wardrobe. I was also emboldened by a newspaper article about ways to get through the winter – one of their top tips was wearing sunny yellow to keep your spirits up. That is essential in the long dark nights in Berlin, where black is still the most popular colour even as garish 80s shell suits make a comeback. I have banned myself from buying anything else blue or green. I have succeeded in confusing the Facebook algorithm – for years I would always click on dresses or shoes in turquoise. Now Facebook mostly offers me multi-coloured options.

Embracing pink and gold

As yellow autumn leaves blow past the window, it seems like a good time to choose a mustard background for my new website: a colour I associate with optimism, joy and creativity. I complemented it with purple, often used by the women’s movement and symbolic of loyalty and dignity. I have even allowed myself some accents of girly pink, perhaps a nod to the year of Barbie – not that I was allowed one as a girl.

A window in Benalauría, Andalucia

I was also inspired by the sunset yellow painted around many window and door frames in southern Spain, where I spent a month on a fellowship earlier this year and where I met architect and interior designer Mariana Jaramillo, who gave me a crash course in colour theory and website design. Mariana, a Colombian living in Italy, noted that colours have different meanings in different cultures. So yellow is associated with courage in Japan, spring in India and good fortune in Egypt. All values I’m happy for my website to reflect.

My journals get more colourful

Refusing to be invisible

My shift in colours also reflects a shift in life seasons after reaching 50. I am no longer prepared to hide who I am to fit into a man’s world. I want to show my creativity and femininity and still be respected and valued. So on my website, I mention that I offer mindful and playful methods in my consultancy, coaching and facilitation. My partner suggested that potential corporate clients might not see this as “serious”, also a concern when I was opting for the yellow, purple, and pink theme of the site. But I have reached the stage where I want to be open about my values and experience, even if they challenge the masculine status quo. Indeed, that is the point of my pitch to companies and individuals: I want to help them question their old habits too, to generate innovation and growth.

Author Bernadine Evaristo has also embraced bright pink, lemon and orange with age. She puts it like this:

“My style is a visual statement and representation of myself as a woman in the arts who is a creative thinker. It signifies that I cannot be stereotyped, controlled or silenced. Women of color are hyper-visible in some situations, on account of our darker skin making us stand out, and simultaneously invisible, when we don’t have a platform on which to speak out. I refuse to be invisible and I demand to be heard.”

“Hair, husband, hemline”

I have been thinking about the issue of how women present themselves in the public eye as part of an EU-funded project I am working on to try to shift gender stereotypes in the media portrayal of women in politics. I am helping three broadcasters design strategies to try to redress the balance in their newsrooms and coverage, including by shifting the focus away from the “hair, husband and hemline” of women politicians.

I want the media to focus more on what women politicians have to say, rather than what they are wearing while they say it. But I don’t want women politicians to have to wear dull trouser suits, supress their femininity and hide their caring responsibilities to succeed. Instead of stopping asking women like former British PM Teresa May about her love of expensive shoes, we should ask male politicians about their fashion choices too. Indeed that is what has happened with Rishi Sunak, who has been quizzed about his choice of 3,500 pound suits. We will know we have made real progress not when we stop asking women like Jacinda Ardern about who is looking after her daughter while she ran New Zealand, but when we start asking the same question of men in power.

A former colleague who works in PR told me recently he was advising a woman executive who is struggling to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field. He said he is not surprised the men think she lacks gravitas because she talks “too much”. This is exactly the problem: women who do not conform to sober masculine ideals, indeed women who look and act like women, will always come under fire if they also seek power and influence.

So, I will keep painting my nails, wearing bright colours and probably using too many exclamation marks in my emails, but I still demand to be taken seriously.

Taken by my son for a school project

What I am reading:

Shrines of Gaiety - Kate Atkinson - A fun page-turning thriller set in 1920s Soho.

A Heart so White - Javier Marais - A dark story about marriage, secrets and the sins of the father. This is the first book I have read by this Spanish author in translation and it definitely made me want to try more.

Hysterical - Pragya Agarwal - A book that is challenging my assumptions about how we experience and describe emotions. It questions the idea of innate differences between how men and women experience emotions: “People perceive angry women as being more emotional and less competent than angry men, while angry men are seen either to be passionate or having a bad day.”