Doctor Who: 10 Qualities That Made Peter Capaldi's Doctor Great

5. The Style Icon

Doctor Who Peter Capaldi Gallifrey
BBC

After Peter Capaldi’s first Doctor Who costume was revealed, a poll in British newspaper The Mirror rated David Tennant as the best dressed Time Lord, with Capaldi a distant second. But really - suit and trainers? Or sandshoes as the War Doctor wryly observed? If it was a style contest, the Twelfth Doctor must surely win hands down.

Minus the frilly seventies shirts, Capaldi’s costume is closest to the debonair and dandy Third Doctor as played by Jon Pertwee. He is certainly dressed like he means business, with a licence to kill, even if as it turns out his weapon of choice is once again the sonic screwdriver (oh and those ‘attack eyebrows’).

Fashion designer Anna Fielding describes his outfit thus:

"It’s about being clean and well-turned out, but also quite hard.”

With his Crombie and Doc Martens the Twelfth Doctor is decked out like a seventies mod, the working class antithesis of the hippy peace and love movement. And yet instead of a skin-head he gradually sports his own Pertwee-like bouffant, perhaps reflecting the fact that his incarnation softened over time. Like most of his predecessors, the Twelfth Doctor has been highly selective about what he wears, but this time it’s a perfect match to his personality. The image driving it is that of the non-conformist, counter-cultural cynic.

Contributor
Contributor

Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.