Dress in ‘monoclo’, says artist Pascal Anson, and you’ll rethink your relationship with clothes for ever. Jess Cartner-Morley gives it a go
It started when Pascal Anson’s mum bought him a yellow jumper for his birthday. “I already had a pair of yellow trousers, yellow socks and a yellow belt. So I thought I’d wear them all together, as an experiment.” He enjoyed the experiment so much he gave it a name – “monoclo” – and turned it into an event at Kingston University, London, where he was a senior lecturer in design. Staff and students were invited to dress in one colour, fabric or pattern from head to toe. An exchange system helped people struggling to find the missing piece: one person has a spare pair of pink trousers, another needs size 10 blue shoes, and so on.
“On the day, what I loved was that people were in everyday pieces of clothing – normal stuff from Gap or wherever, not fancy dress – but there was a newness and strangeness to it,” says Anson, now a tutor at the Royal College of Art (he is also one of two mentors on the BBC’s Big Painting Challenge). Christmas jumper day but make it art school, if you like. Monoclo grew into an Instagram project, with Anson styling himself in immaculately curated single-shade outfits (when stumped, he occasionally went shoeless) that not only look glorious, but make a serious point. “Monoclo is about re-enjoying what you already have,” he says. “It has rewired how I think about clothes, and how I think about myself.”
Carving new looks out of the mountain of clothes many of us already own is the key to marrying style and sustainability. Monoclo delivers the dopamine hit of fashion newness, without having to hit the shops.