Current mood: The unbridled joy of dressing for your inner child

Now deep into my thirties – i.e. definitely an adult, on paper – I am often struck by the novelty that I can eat whatever I want for dinner. I could have party food every evening, forever, were it not for my vanity. Growing up, I assumed that grown-ups naturally made grown-up decisions. Now I know that many of us have Adult Imposter Syndrome: we know how to ‘adult’ (a word I despise using as a verb but turn a blind eye, please), but that doesn’t mean we always want to.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently, given that pink – the colour of my childhood – is suddenly everywhere. Look at Nicola Coughlan, resplendent in poufy, bow-festooned Valentino at Sunday night’s BAFTA awards. Or Zoë Kravitz at the Oscars in blush Saint Laurent. Or Adwoa Aboah (in Tory Burch), Kiki Layne (in Prabal Gurung), and Tessa Thompson (in Carolina Herrera mille-feuille ruffles) all at the Met. Both my inner child and my adult self would have been very happy to wear any of these magnificent dresses.

Today, all my friend’s children are dressed in chic, Scandi-style neutrals; it’s that and not the iPads or Frozen which make their childhood look incomparably different from mine. There is a photo of me, aged three, where I am wearing a dusky pink satin dress, my cheeks so rosy I was compelled to ask my mum recently if I was wearing blusher. ‘No,’ she told me. ‘You were just so happy to be wearing that dress’.

Now, as adults on paper, shouldn’t we still be searching out clothes that make us happy? That seems to me the bare minimum we can demand from what we wear. Alas, somewhere along the line we get swayed by a sense of what is appropriate, and more perniciously, of what constitutes good taste.

There is something, however, so deliciously, unapologetically joyful about pink, which is why adults can be sniffy about it. Where’s the bite? The kick? But I think that’s exactly why we, why I, need it more than ever: it’s about hankering after a childish optimism. Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli has been single-minded in his dedication to bringing it back. His entire AW22 collection was a paean to pink, a specific shocking shade – PP Pink – that he developed with Pantone (and, by the way, I am dangerously close to throwing an epic toddler tantrum to get hold of a pair of those pink Mary Jane platforms. It worked back then…). In the show notes it explained that the collection was about ‘pink as a manifestation of the unconscious and a liberation from the need for realism’. And really, can you think of a better time than now to give life a bit of rose tinting?

Laura