Meet Ella London, the Yellow Lady or as she is happy to be known as Miss Sunshine. Yep, she’s a woman who wears yellow from head to toe. Ella London aka Miss Sunshine, a Brit lives in LA for seven years.
Why yellow? She retold the story of when she was organising her wedding ten years ago, she was thinking of how to honour and acknowledge her father who passed away when she was only two months old.
It was her fiancé who suggested bringing in the colour yellow as it was her father’s favourite colour. He had painted their front door and window frames bright yellow and whenever someone spoke of her father it was always about his happy smiles and making people laugh. Now if that was a colour it would be yellow!
Ella knew she didn’t want a typical wedding colour. She felt that red was too Christmasy, lilac and those typical wedding pastels overused… and after her fiancé suggested yellow, it just clicked, and she was surprised she hadn’t made that connection sooner. Making yellow a feature of her wedding made Ella feel she was honouring the memory of her late father.
This is where Ella’s colourful fascination began, and it continued over the years as a way for her stay connected with her father. For her this “isn’t about any morbid connection with someone who has died” she sees it as “a way to continue my dad’s legacy.”
From a professional perspective this shows that Ella’s connection to yellow actually has its roots in personal colour association which is one of the three main ways we relate to colour (the other two being colour symbolism and colour psychology).
Ella’s love of yellow started at the wedding and it was never her intention to go all yellow. This just happened organically. Initially, she was thinking “this is a cool colour, people like it, I like it and this will be my Steve Jobs thing” – he famously only wore black.
So over the next four years yellow was appearing in more and more areas of her life – when something in the home broke she would replace it in yellow. Receiving lots of yellow gifts, one day someone gave her a yellow cardigan – and this Ella says was the “catalyst to me wearing yellow everyday”.
By 2012 Ella was wearing yellow every day.
This hasn’t come without attention. She has had people worry about her, praying for her and she says she’s fine with that. She kept wearing yellow because people always smile. People stop and chat with her. She feels that people stop her because of the yellow and others because yellow makes her approachable.