I've Been Dressing Like an Apology. The Beige Era Is Over.
By Simone Mazloumian, founder of Eklektik Mama — the community for mothers in Abu Dhabi & the UAE
The world has a very specific vision for how mothers should dress.
Neutral. Practical. Inoffensive.
Something that asks nothing of anyone. Something that says I'm fine, I'm managing, I'm not making this about me.
Beige. Obviously beige.
The slow slide into the fog
Look — I get it.
When you're running on three hours of sleep and someone has already wiped their nose on your left shoulder, you're not exactly reaching for the cobalt.
You grab what's easy. What's clean. What won't make anything harder than it already is.
And then you do it again the next day.
And the day after that.
Until one morning you open your wardrobe and you're staring at a fog of neutrals — wash well, hide stains, fit comfortably — and you can't remember when you last chose something that gave you a little oomph in your step.
I'm done with it.
Miranda Priestly never wore beige. Just saying.
There's a moment in the first Devil Wears Prada — you know the one.
Miranda explains, slowly, without raising her voice, that the colour of the jumper Andy thought she'd casually pulled from a discount rail was actually decided years earlier by someone in a room she'd never be in.
Every choice you think you're making was already made for you.
Because the whole thing — twenty years ago and apparently still — is about what we think we're choosing versus what we've been quietly assigned.
Mothers get assigned comfy. We get assigned beige.
We're watching The Devil Wears Prada 2 this Wednesday at our BYOBaby cinema morning — babies on laps, coffees in hand — and I've been thinking about this ever since the tickets went up.
Feeling dope in your clothes makes you feel dope in your life
And there's neuroscience that backs me up.
Colour hits the brain's limbic system — the emotional centre — before we've consciously registered anything. Before thought. Before coffee. Before you've decided what kind of day you're going to have, your nervous system has already taken a reading from what you put on your body.
The grey I almost wore
Last month I had a meeting I was dreading.
The kind where you're already composing the debrief in your head before it's started.
I almost wore the grey. I've worn the grey to a hundred things like it.
Instead I put on something I actually loved — a colour that felt like mine — and walked in differently.
Not better prepared. Not less nervous. Just differently. Like I'd arrived as myself, rather than a version of myself trying to be small enough to get through it cleanly.
The meeting was fine.
But the walking in differently — that was the thing.
"When your outer image matches your inner self, you stop performing — and you start embodying."
Feel dope in what you're wearing. Walk into the school run differently. Take up space differently in the work call. Say the thing you'd usually swallow. Hold the eye contact a beat longer.
Show up for yourself in fifty small ways across a day that would otherwise quietly flatten you.
It compounds. It starts at your wardrobe and it doesn't stop there.
Nobody told you to shrink. You just did.
There was no memo.
Attention: upon becoming a mother, please report to beige. Effective immediately.
It just kind of happens.
You adjusted. You streamlined. You made things easier where you could because everything else was already asking so much. And getting dressed was one place where you could just… not fight.
So you stopped wearing the colour you love. Stopped reaching for the thing that makes you feel like yourself. Started dressing for everyone else's convenience — wipe-clean, invisible, easy.
The world loves a mother who blends in. Who is grateful and gentle and doesn't take up too much visual space. Who saves the interesting stuff for when the kids have grown.
Well, we're not doing that.
Technicolour motherhood
The beige-on-beige era has officially left the building.
In its place: a movement that's louder, prouder, and psychologically more powerful.
I've been living in cobalt blue lately and I am not taking questions.
Find yours. The colour that makes you stand differently before you've done a single impressive thing. Wear it on a Tuesday. For no reason. While doing nothing more special than the school run, a coffee, and the general chaos of a Wednesday morning.
Which — speaking of — you should spend with us.
Come feel it in person
Wednesday, 6 May — The Devil Wears Prada 2. Babies welcome. No one's judging what you arrived in, but we'd love to see you in something you actually chose.
→ BYOBaby Cinema Morning — grab your spot
And if you want to leave in something that says exactly what you're thinking — made by a mother who got tired of things that pretend — we've got you.
→ The Eklektik Collective — shop EM Merch
Miranda Priestly didn't build an empire in beige.
Neither will you.
Join us
At Eklektik Mama, we're building a community of over 3,000 women and mothers across the UAE who refuse to accept that motherhood means losing yourself.
We create experiences — boat trips, breakfasts, fitness classes, co-working mornings — where mothers can be messy, honest, and fully human. Where you can say the hard parts out loud. Where you'll meet other women who are also brilliant, exhausted, ambitious, and done pretending everything is fine.
Because mum fun is better together.
Ready to prioritise yourself? Join our mum community and find your people.
This is Eklektik Mama. Where we raise hell and humans, together.
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