With the doors to my wardrobe thrown open, Dawnn Karen is rifling through my jumbled collection of dresses, skirts and blouses while encouraging me to ‘open up’ about my feelings for each item of clothing.
The 29-year-old is not a stylist nor a personal shopper, but something entirely new — and far more terrifying — in the fast-changing world of fashion. She has come to my flat as a fashion psychologist: a therapist garlanded with academic qualifications who charges her wardrobe-weary clients £300 per session to sort out not just their clothes, but their lives.
Fashion psychology, she claims, is a ‘new academic discipline which focuses on the study and treatment of colour, beauty, style, image, shape and their effect on human behaviour while addressing cultural sensitivities and norms’.
Clearly this is not going to be a girly chit-chat over my piles of mismatched socks.
Fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen (pictured right), 29, gave her verdict on the emotional history Barbara McMahon (pictured left), 55, has with the clothes in her wardrobe
Today, she is going to put me on the fashion couch and help me understand what my clothes say about me. At first, I guess this will be that I am a 55-year-old hoarder who prefers comfort over style in don’t-look-at-me black or grey? But I’m wrong and her CV suggests it will be something much more profound. She promises to explain how past or current difficulties in my personal life have influenced my sartorial choices.
By the end of our session, she says I will have a better handle not only on my personal taste in clothes, but also on my fashion hang-ups and how I should address these in the future.
‘We’re trying to get to the root of why you wear what you wear and how that impacts you in your everyday life,’ she says. ‘It’s about styling from the inside out.’
She holds up a shocking pink Kate Spade sheath with a Victoria Beckham-style back zip that a friend helped me buy as a wedding outfit a few years ago. ‘How did you feel when you wore this?’ asks Dawnn.
‘I never felt comfortable in it,’ I confess, not willing to admit that I also wore it with matchy-matchy pink shoes. Cringe. ‘As soon as I could, I changed into something that felt more like me.’
She nods. ‘Hmm. And yet you still have it,’ she says.
We pick out a second dress, another expensive mistake in a different shade of pink, that has a smock top and a wide skirt. I have no one to blame but myself for this one. It was a panic buy for another wedding — and, again, I never really liked it.
I produce another formal outfit that hasn’t seen the light of day for years. Good grief, it’s another pink dress — but it does have lovely pearl trimmings.
‘You go for a lot of pink,’ she observes.
It’s something I’ve never noticed before — my dependency on pink. And it’s not even a colour I particularly like, I tell Dawnn.
We move on to other parts of my wardrobe. It’s everyday slouchy stuff because I work from home. After a mountain of tops and trousers in blacks, blues and greys are piled on the bed, Dawnn suggests that I am suffering from two conditions: Repetitious Wardrobe Complex (RWC) and Polychromatic Anguish Syndrome (PAS).
Dawnn (pictured at Barbara’s home) claims Barbara has lots of pink her wardrobe because she has Repetitious Wardrobe Complex – she chooses to buy the same colour because she was once complimented by someone else while wearing it
Referring to the pink explosion in my wardrobe, Dawnn tells me: ‘This is a classic case of Repetitious Wardrobe Complex. Someone whose opinion you value once told you that you look good in pink and you went along with that.
‘You’ve neutralised your mood, which means not paying attention to how you feel, because you’ve told me you don’t like pink that much. You haven’t been cognisant of the fact that it’s not making you happy.’
Hmm. I think she’s right. I do remember a fashionable friend telling me I looked good in pink and it stuck. Looking back, it was a flattering rose pink, but over the years I bought a load of outfits in more lurid tones.
My dependency on neutral colours for daywear is a classic sign of Polychromatic Anguish Syndrome, she diagnoses. ‘I think you go into clothing shops and get overwhelmed,’ Dawnn says. ‘There are so many colours and shades and it causes you anxiety, so you take the safe route and go for neutrals. It’s a form of comfort dressing, like a child carrying around a teddy bear.’
Is this a serious problem, I ask? Should I be admitted immediately to fashion rehab?
‘No. A lot of women are on autopilot and they’re not aware of how clothes affect how they feel,’ she assures me. It is clear Dawnn does not suffer from RWC or PAS. Today, she is beautifully outfitted in a fitted cream Zara dress, accessorised with a tan Hermes handbag and vertiginous stilettos.
I don’t even like pink. So why have I got so much of it?
A former model, she has a degree in counselling psychology and is a professor in the social sciences department at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
A pioneer in this new field, she flies around the world as a consultant for fashion brands. Her life is ‘part Freud, part fashion’. She is the personification of an elegant executive — yet she got here by traumatic circumstances.
Seven years ago, she was studying for her degree when she was sexually assaulted. ‘When something awful like that happens, a lot of women wouldn’t bother about their appearance. They’d wear black clothes, not wash their hair or put on make-up, but I was the opposite,’ she recalls.
‘It was the worst time of my life, but I was a student and I had to go to lectures, so the first day I picked out the most elaborate dress I owned and the tallest heels that I had, got myself all made-up and went off to class.’
Dawnn claims clothes have the power to affect wellbeing and are often used to cover up our emotions. Harvard’s William James, has previously linked clothing to mood
She did this for several weeks. ‘I went really over the top. I was wearing long gowns and huge hats. It was a bit like wearing armour — the clothes protected me.’ She has termed this Mood Enhancement dressing — using clothes to comfort and cheer yourself up and not letting external events overwhelm you.
Dawnn was fascinated, she says, by the way our clothes have the power to affect our well-being. ‘We’re supposed to cover up our feelings, layer our emotions, and often we send out subliminal messages with our clothing,’ she says.
While studying, she discovered that she was not the first person to see the connection. William James, who helped establish Harvard’s psychology department and who was one of the leading thinkers of the 19th century, was the first to see the link between our moods and what we wear. London College of Fashion now offers academic programmes in the psychology of fashion.
Dawnn has shrewdly trademarked the term ‘fashion psychologist’ and is spearheading the popularity of this new discipline of looking at the invisible motives behind how we dress.
Among her clients, she has helped a widow understand why she continued to wear black two years after her husband died. ‘She didn’t know she was doing it,’ says Dawnn. ‘Unconsciously, it was her way of upholding his memory, but it was holding her back.
Dawnn claims outfits in Barbara’s wardrobe such as a black Goth-like dress remind her of the person she was rather than who she is now
‘I helped her work through it by making her aware of what she was doing and by encouraging her slowly to bring back some colour into her wardrobe with accessories. She’s remarried now.’
Another client was stuck in the Eighties, wearing garish dresses and jackets with shoulder pads and maintaining big, teased-up hair, locked in with hair spray. ‘The Eighties was when she was at her peak and she was having trouble letting go of that,’ says Dawnn.
‘I told her it’s normal to hark back to happier days and she began to understand why she still dressed that way. Together we decided it would be better to incorporate the odd Eighties twist into her wardrobe rather than staying completely stuck in a rut.’
Despite being a natural sceptic, I’m keen to zero in on what exactly this fashion psychologist can do for me, now that she has peeked inside the dark depths of my fashion psyche.
Specifically, what can a 29-year-old ‘dress doctor’ possibly teach a midlife woman about her frocks, her life and hanging on to old favourites?
By the end of my counselling session — to my surprise — I am presented with a diagnosis that explains a lot about my ambivalence about fashion.
But, before that, Dawnn suggests we examine more clothes.
I produce a Goth-like black dress from a French designer that has transparent panels in the skirt. This was a daring outfit for me in my 20s. I loved it and have never been able to let it go.
‘It reminds you of the person you were, not the person you are now,’ says Dawnn. ‘It holds some kind of psychological value to you about the past — that you wore it during a time of your life that you still remember fondly.’
I’m on a roll now, all embarrassment gone, and I show her a silver dress I bought two decades ago in Rome and some daring Gucci outfits purchased in London in the early Nineties.
I bought them because they were beautiful, but again, I never got around to wearing them more than once or twice because I never felt they were ‘me.’ They were impulsive buys, racier and more attention-grabbing than I have ever really been comfortable with. Why do I even have this stuff?
Barbara (pictured left) claims analyzing her wardrobe helped her to realize that she has never trusted her own instincts when it comes to style
Dawnn looks thoughtful and asks me if I remember my first fashion buying experience. Aged 12 or 13 and living in my home city of Glasgow, I was invited to sing in church at a relative’s wedding and my mother — who had no interest in fashion — agreed that I needed a new dress.
Clueless mother and daughter went to C&A and chose an eye-catching bri-nylon flower-patterned shirt dress that I thought was the height of sophistication.
On the day of the event I bumped into some cool girls from school and, as they walked away, I heard them laughing at my outfit. I still wince at the memory, I tell Dawnn.
‘Do you think you’ve placed too much importance on that one incident and let it shape your relationship to clothes?’ Dawnn asks.
I can see that I have never trusted my own instincts when it comes to style, and I don’t like to stand out from the crowd. I bought Gucci, for example, because it was a sought-after designer in the Nineties and I saw the outfits in Vogue. I probably thought a bit of that fashionable stardust would rub off on me, but always felt faintly ridiculous in them.
What advice does Dawnn have, now I have bared my deepest fashion secrets? ‘I’m not a personal shopper who’s trying to get you to get rid of stuff and replace it with trendy new things,’ she assures me.
Dawnn advises Barbara to show more of her own voice in the clothes she wears rather than focusing on pleasing other people
‘I’m not going to berate you for holding on to clothes that you don’t wear. I think you value what those clothes represent. They remind you of friendship. They remind you of happy family occasions like weddings. It’s up to you what you do with them.’
As part of our talk therapy, I tried on the bright pink sheath and couldn’t wait to take it off.
‘I can see from your body language that you’re not into pink, so I’d guess you’re a people-pleaser,’ she continues. ‘I’d like to hear more of your voice in the clothes you wear than other people’s. I think you have to be more independent — and not so lazy.’
‘I don’t think you need to go cold turkey — you could seek out the opinion of friends 40 per cent of the time and the other 60 per cent could be yours. For a special occasion, it’s perfectly OK to ask your husband or a friend what they think of an outfit, but you should let your own individual style come out.’
What if I make fashion blunders? ‘Then they’re your mistakes and you’ll learn from them instead of sitting on the fence all the time,’ she says.
I have been expecting Dawnn to end the session with advice on what to throw out and what to keep. ‘You could think about letting some of these outfits go,’ she says, referring to my memory lane of a wardrobe. ‘They’re not in alignment with who you are now. They’re not a great fit for you — no pun intended.’
Barbara chose to donate some of her clothes to a charity shop following her session with Dawnn and kept the ones that are linked to happy memories
In the next few days I mull over Dawnn’s advice. Now that I understand why I hoard some outfits, I resolve to donate some of them to a charity shop and keep the happy memories.
I try to follow her advice that women should acknowledge what mood they are in before deciding what to wear. And, as Dawnn suggests, I resolve to listen more to my inner Anna Wintour. I will be braver on my next shopping spree. I might even introduce a bit of colour. It won’t be pink.
Are you suffering Repetitious Wardrobe Complex?
POLYCHROMATIC ANGUISH SYNDROME
You ’re not confident with colours, so you stick to black, navy or beige. Online shopping is great here, says Dawnn. In the comfort of your home, scroll through items casually, which may lessen anxiety. Then you can walk into a store with a goal in mind — preventing you from feeling overwhelmed.
REPETITIOUS WARDROBE COMPLEX
You tend to wear the same outfit all the time. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this — it’s one less thing to think about. But if you feel stuck in a rut, start slow and build up. Stay with tried-and-tested outfits and try out a daring accessory or a new colour. Don’t try to change everything at once.
MOOD ILLUSTRATION
You dress to perpetuate your mood. Maybe you throw on a worn-out sweater and a pair of tatty jeans. It might be that it is just one of those days when you don’t feel like making an effort, but it could be that you are unintentionally saying that you’re not OK. It’s below awareness — you’re notconscious of what you’re doing.
MOOD ENHANCEMENT
You dress to optimise your mood. When happy, you go for patterns, bright colours or fabulous accessories to reinforce that feeling of contentment. If you are low, it can help to wear something cheerful — like putting on armour. You are choosing your own mood rather than allowing the world to dictate it.