Henrik Theorin, headmaster at Hagaskolan in Umeå, wears nail varnish and sometimes also a dress to work. “I want to show the students that it’s actually okay for a guy to wear a dress if he wants to,” says Theorin to SVT. 

“I think it’s important to show the students that you can look however you want,” he says. “It’s nothing I do everyday but I want to show that it’s possible to break standards,” he says.

In an interview with SVT, where he also shows off his dress, Henrik Theorin says that it all started with the school having its own Pride Week.

The male headmaster says that he’s been wearing nail varnish at work now and then “for a few years”. He may have been inspired by Fredrik Plahn, former headmaster at preschools and schools in Tyresö.

Plahn was praised in the media when he, in 2014, announced on Facebook that he wore nail varnish in “all colours of the rainbow” at work. The purpose was, according to Plahn, to “challenge the heteronorm”.

Today, Fredrik Plahn is working as a headmaster in multicultural Botkyrka, and it is unclear whether he has brought the nail varnish to the new workplace.