On a recent afternoon in my neighborhood, I stood behind a man and his dog at a stoplight, staring absently at the back of the man’s t-shirt. It was a splotchy tie-dye brown mixed with beige like the crema on top of an espresso. In fact, the best way to describe it would be to say it sort of matched the colors and spidery pattern of a certain brindle pit bull mix standing next to him.
Coincidence? Possibly.
A couple of days later, I watched a lithe, sportily trendy man tie up his lithe, sporty dog outside a bodega. The man wore a camel Carhart jacket that was nearly the exact shade of coppery desert-brown as his dog. Both wore white ankle socks (one pair was made of fur); the man’s sneaker were white, too. When I later passed a woman in a fringy sweater that exactly matched the creamy color of her retriever, I decided these were no mere flukes. I texted my sister Madeline—herself the owner of a black brindle mutt named Rosie (alias Pigpen).
“Mad, I have begun cataloguing instances when people dress like their pets. Please send any if you spot them.”
“Omg,” she replied. “We are doing it right now.” (She hadn’t noticed until she got my text.)
It’s not just an age-old punchline that people often physically resemble their dogs. There’s actual scientific data to back this up—though I’ve yet to find studies exploring why we might wear clothes that match our dogs’ fur (whether consciously or not). In a study published in 2004, Michael Roy, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, photographed 45 different (purebred) dogs and their owners separately. He then asked a group of participants to try to match them up. Without any additional cues, the participants were able to determine who lived with whom quite accurately.
There’s a fascinating, if dead simple, psychological mechanism underpinning our tendency to choose a dog that physically resembles us. We like things that are familiar, which, apparently, includes our own faces.
“If the general features of one breed of dog’s face look something like the general features of our own face, then, all other things being equal, that breed should arouse a bit more of a warm and loving response on our part,” wrote psychology professor Stanley Coren in a terrific, slightly disturbing 2013 piece on this topic for Psychology Today.
Some psychologists believe this to be a spillover tendency from the way humans evolved to find mates: Dating someone who looks like us might help ensure their genes are compatible with ours. (I suppose you’d call this Darwinist narcissism?)
Even so, we don’t feel the need to go around wearing matching track suits with our genetically compatible life mates. My husband won’t even wear the same color shirt as me in public.
Do we dress to match our dog simply because we’ve always had an affinity for the color of their fur? Or perhaps the colors grew on us with time. Maybe it’s because a dog is something we technically possess—that can in some ways reflect the self we wish to project to the world. I’ve always loved that the Spanish word for pet or animal companion is mascota, which additionally translates to the special person, animal or thing that symbolizes a sports team or other group. To me, this seems like a much more comprehensive definition.
It had been probably three or four years since my husband and I adopted Penny, a brown and white cartoon pittie mix, in 2011, when I realized that not only had I developed an affinity for orangey-brown accessories (clogs, handbags, jackets), but that I was also now dogsessorizing our apartment.
I came upon Penny one afternoon in the living room, snoozing peacefully in a patch of sun on a high-pile wool rug whose diamond pattern almost exactly matched her coloring. She stretched deeply, and gently pushed her front paws against the leg of the coppery-brown wood coffee table, which mirrored the chestnut undertones of her fur as it glinted in the sun. As I took in the espresso brown couch, outfitted in throw pillows and blankets sporting various shades of copperish brown and cream, I came to the realization that I’d been subconsciously phasing in an entire living room color scheme to coordinate with Penny’s fur. Penny, la mascota, had become my living, breathing Pinterest board. If it hadn’t been so funny, I think I would’ve been deeply unnerved.
However, when I told Penny this, she seemed thoroughly unsurprised as she replied in the Gollum voice I’d given her. “Yesh, I very boo-ti-foh.”
Pen!!! ❤️‼️