Joy by degrees: Dopamine dressing

Can what we wear really bring us happiness?

Apologies for the lack of voiceover this weekend, mates. I’ve been knocked sideways by a poorly-timed bout of Covid and nobody needs to hear that. I will be back in your ears next week, with a new podcast episode about…you guessed it. Joy!

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Photo by Sadam Anwar on Unsplash

I had never heard the term dopamine dressing until a couple of months ago, when

Emma Gannon

of The Hyphen posted a cute photo of herself in a cute jumper and wrote, “Dopamine dressing helps me write on difficult deadline days!”

Colour me intrigued. (Also, colour me at least two years behind anything trend-related.)

But, as someone with light-to-no interest in fashion outside how to minimise what I buy and look after what I have, could something like this apply to me?

When I searched for more info on dopamine dressing, I mostly found lots of photos of very young, very glamorous, very colourfully-dressed people. Not too many images of 40-something writers who spend 80% (okay, 95%) of their time wearing the same few combinations of denim shorts/jeans, tshirts/button-up shirts, jumpers and sneakers/birkenstocks.

But then I read a little more and found that, unlike its sparkly, luxurious online persona, dopamine dressing goes a little deeper and really, is about, “choosing clothing to match our desired mood”.

Of course, it’s 2024, which means there’s a whole lot of companies trying to make a buck off a movement that is, at its heart, quite simple and lovely. But if we strip away the consumerist side of dopamine dressing, there’s still something fun and maybe even joyful at its heart.

You don’t need to wear bright, quirky, colourful clothes if that’s not you. And you don’t need to buy anything at all to take part. Instead,