My mother’s best advice: wear bold, bright colours

Maybe adolescence wasn’t the ideal time to receive my mother’s advice to wear an array of colours. What better way to express how you feel on any given day, and convey that mood to the world, she would say. It was important to the eye, to the soul.

It really isn’t the best advice to give any teenager, especially a sulky one who’s hoping to disappear in baggy, all-black sport-core. I’d cringe when she would try to push big, loud colours on me on shopping trips, talking in what I thought was mumbo jumbo about mood-lifting lilacs, energising reds and skin-warming oranges.

She did as she preached. She had a favourite parrot-green leather coat, a ridiculously frilly orange and black dressing gown and great big printed dresses that made her look like one of Hockney’s kaftan-clad women from his swimming pool paintings. There was also a pair of tropical-print trousers which I thought made her look like a walking fruit bowl. What would other people say? Cringe.

I see now that wasn’t the point, at all. Her advice isn’t about fashion or looking good for others, or making an impression, but dressing from the inside. It’s taken me a while to lean into the power of this. I’m not quite sure when I started implementing it myself but I remember waking up one morning in my early 20s, looking at my wardrobe and thinking: what colour do I feel like wearing today?

It’s a question that brings a surprising degree of daily self-awareness. It’s asking, “What mood am I in?” “Do I want to be seen or do I want to hide?”. The idea of starting the day in the right colour sends me back to myself.

Akbar and her mother in 2023. Photograph: Courtesy of Arifa Akbar

The “bright” bit of the advice is also about being confident with being seen. When my older sister died suddenly in 2016, I inherited bits from her wardrobe. It was clear from her clothes that she had embraced my mother’s advice to treat colour as a form of bold, flamboyant self-expression. I felt afraid of her clothes at first. There were traffic-light patent shoes, strings of pink and purple fake pearls, a gold and diamante cat-eared headband, electric-blue lace gloves. She was an artist and all this gear seemed like an extension of her artistic self. I loved the look and feel of them when I put them on but I also felt as if I was shouting: “Look, it’s me, me, meeee”.

But now I think that was just the point. My wardrobe has become more colourful over the years, and, it turns out my mother was right: it does bring me joy to wear pink shoes with a gold shimmer to them, and an A-line space-age silver dress which is so shiny it can probably be seen from the moon, or my sister’s large-collared, lemony faux-fur coat. Wearing shiny, metallic colours brings me immense happiness, as does any shade of glitter. Meanwhile, my mum’s old frilly orange dressing gown is now mine, and it’s only a matter of time before I repurpose it as a springtime coat.