Doctor Who: The Main Inspiration Behind Each Doctor's Costume

8. The Sixth Doctor

Doctor Who Colin Baker the Sixth Doctor
BBC Studios

Over the first couple of decades of the show, the Doctor's costumes gradually became more bold and colourful, and this approach clearly hit its peak with the Sixth Doctor's garish, multi-coloured garb.

With an assortment of clashing colours and a patchwork design, it's a showy costume that seems like it was put together in a hodgepodge manner, and this is exactly what the designers intended it to feel like.

"Totally tasteless" was the brief that costumer Pat Godfrey worked from, creating some extravagant clothing to reflect the Sixth Doctor's brash and boisterous personality. It actually took Godfrey several attempts to get the costume right, with the initial designs being deemed "too good" and not tasteless enough.

Star Colin Baker actually wanted to go in the opposite direction, ditching the vibrant colours in favour of a simple dark velvet. It's safe to say that he was overruled.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!