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What's new in summer fashion
Don't just be blue when you could be iris blue. Oh, and marigold yellow and hibiscus red too!
By David Livingstone
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When Baday landed in Paris last winter to purchase fabric for clothes to be worn this spring, she already knew that she wanted colour. She doesn't wear a lot of it or have it around her house, and she designs primarily in a neutral palette, but she had her reasons. In fashion, there has been a return to basics. To the slight degree that she went along with the recent vogue in embellishment, she is pulling back, making simple even simpler. "It's a time when it feels great to see that simple shape or that cut in a real splash of colour," she says. And so, collaborating with the textile mill that dye to her specifications, she settled on clean, clear shades of blue, green, yellow and red - one an orangey red she poetically calls "hibiscus," though she has no doubt that it has been recorded as a number somewhere.
In the chromatic world, the mathematics is staggering: to colour your world in antiquity, there were only a few types of shellfish, bugs and plants that were known to yield shades of purple, scarlet and indigo; today, the phosphorous dots of a computer screen make 17 million colour combinations possible.
That's quite a figure given in the catalogue for Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, an exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York until May 12. Tracing the evolution of hue from handmade to synthetic, curator Ann Temkin points out that before the 19th century - which was when chemistry created mauve and all hell broke loose - certain rare and expensive pigments were luxury goods, and Renaissance patrons specified the exact colours desired for the works they commissioned in contracts. As the show demonstrates - with Andy Warhol happy to work in unnatural chemical shades and Frank Stella delighted to paint directly from the can - even fine artists have come to embrace colour as a factory-made commodity.
And vice versa. The MoMA exhibition is supported by Benjamin Moore Paints, which also honours achievement in colour in architecture and design with its annual HUE Awards; past recipients have included Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis Group, a group of architects and designers that coloured the '80s.
Keeping up with the rest of star-struck culture, the colour world has been making celebrities out of It shades. Pantone has crowned 18-3943, or Blue Iris-a shade of blue that is said to combine the calming aspects of blue and the spirituality of purple - as the colour of 2008. ICI Paints insists that yellow is the colour of the year, claiming that it blends the intellectual and the spiritual and is warm and sociable - which could come in handy when you find yourself talking to the wall.
Indeed, we might want to give the experts at ICI Paints more serious credit: after all, they did say that 2007 would be the year of masculine pink - and, as it turned out, they were right. Pink neckties were everywhere - a sign of a peacock phase that menswear was going through at the time - at least until fall, when designer runways exploded with colour. Yohji Yamamoto showed suits in marigold yellow and delphinium blue. At Hermès, there were sweaters in harvest gold and leaf green. At Jil Sander, Raf Simons sent out a suit in Santa Claus red - the same colour as shoes at Dries Van Noten. And even Ann Demeulemeester - a devotee of black-dressed guys in dusty pastels.
From dusty to dust, colour has become a matter of mortal concern. Dyes - and the mordants used to make them last - have been recognized as potentially dangerous to the planet. While you may be romantically inclined to resent the forecasters for making colour such a logical tool of commerce, you can only be glad for the scientist, who is familiar with the degradation of dye pollutants and such matters. Not to be would be more than absurd; it would be silly.
Related articles:
Get easy style with the shirt dress
Top notch: Floaty blouses
Top 10 fashion must-haves for 2008
Image courtesy of Marcio Madeira
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