

I am very tired. (Hopefully, thanks to extensive retouching, you can’t tell.) I’m a 43-year-old father of two and, every morning, without fail, at least one of them will wake me up before my alarm goes off. Whenever I read an article that explains how important sleep is to my mental health – and, here on MR PORTER, we’ve published a few – I think: the person that wrote this doesn’t have young children. These days, it’s probably easier to point to where on my body it doesn’t ache. And while I’d like to think I’m not exactly grumpy, I can be irritable. Short-tempered, certainly. Prickly, perhaps.


I barely have the bandwidth to juggle my work and home lives, let alone think about the clothes I wear, which could explain why my wardrobe leans heavily into the essentials. Classic pieces, such as casual shirts, polos and chinos, mostly in shades of black, grey and dark blue. Maybe, if there are no kids or condiments nearby, I’ll stretch to a white T-shirt. I need stuff that works as a unit with little effort or consideration on my part. It can’t rely on one key item to tie it all together because that item is usually at the bottom of the laundry basket (my clothes are lowest priority). Character is something that is typically relegated to my sock drawer.

I am very tired. (Hopefully, thanks to extensive retouching, you can’t tell.) I’m a 43-year-old father of two and, every morning, without fail, at least one of them will wake me up before my alarm goes off. Whenever I read an article that explains how important sleep is to my mental health – and, here on MR PORTER, we’ve published a few – I think: the person that wrote this doesn’t have young children. These days, it’s probably easier to point to where on my body it doesn’t ache. And while I’d like to think I’m not exactly grumpy, I can be irritable. Short-tempered, certainly. Prickly, perhaps.

I barely have the bandwidth to juggle my work and home lives, let alone think about the clothes I wear, which could explain why my wardrobe leans heavily into the essentials. Classic pieces, such as casual shirts, polos and chinos, mostly in shades of black, grey and dark blue. Maybe, if there are no kids or condiments nearby, I’ll stretch to a white T-shirt. I need stuff that works as a unit with little effort or consideration on my part. It can’t rely on one key item to tie it all together because that item is usually at the bottom of the laundry basket (my clothes are lowest priority). Character is something that is typically relegated to my sock drawer.


On TikTok, they call it “dopamine dressing”. But what if you’re a grumpy fortysomething and the only thing you feel is back ache? One MR PORTER writer finds out if this bright trend will cheer him up

Fashion: Over The Rainbow – Can Colourful Clothes Really Make You Happy?

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