Purple Is Fashionable Twice

Purple Is Fashionable Twice - meaning Summary

Fashion and Self-perception

This short lyric links a changing fashion trend to shifts in self-regard. Dickinson observes that purple returns as a seasonal color, and when a person senses that inward elevation they imagine themselves an emperor. The poem compresses social costume and inner authority into a single witty observation, suggesting that external signs of status and private self-perception reinforce one another, and that identity can be partly enacted like fashion.