The Politics of Colour

Every year, the Interior Design cognoscenti choose a paint colour of the year.  Acccording to Leatrice Eiseman at Pantone Paints, "choosing the colour of the year has to do with the zeitgeist or the psychology of the colour and what it says to people."

For the year 2014, that colour was christened "Radiant Orchid," and it has had varying degrees of acceptance.  It is a strong pink, with blue undertones.  I have asked myself whether the current and continual year-by-year use of the colour pink, has in effect been accepted as a reflection of our current "princess" culture for very young girls.  In the past, pink has rarely been used in Interior Design.

 

I look back at the long reign of neutrals, from the mid-1990's up until today, featured in many interiors in publication after publication, almost ad nauseum.  Interior Designers have even been advising their clients to paint over lovely, solid oak woodwork and to make it white.  Why is unknown to me, because highlighting woodwork, which is not usually an architectural feature, especially in newer-built homes, seems counter-productive.  Woodwork can rarely be a focal point.

One thing that puzzles me greatly is the long sway held by the colour yellow-green, chartreuse, or variations of the same.  It began in 1995 and continues to this day, usually now seen as an accent colour.

Here I am at a party given in 1996, when this colour first came into fashion.  I am wearing a dyed-to-match Designer blouse and skirt.  And I even bought a short wool jacket, also to dyed-to-match this outfit!

The fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers in NYC fell was a watershed moment.  It began the "Great Recession," which we still have not recovered from, and may well never, in quite the same way as we might have expected to.

Since that time, bright colours have slowly crept back into the paint box of Interior Designers, probably as a way to ward off economic gloom.  Now, we are most likely to see blues of all variations, light, bright and dark used extensively in Interior Design.  I believe that this colour mirrors the appreciation that the need for fresh water on this planet is growing increasingly urgent.

We are not yet seeing much green, especially true greens, such as emerald.  But I believe we will soon, because this colour is beginning to appear in Fashion Design.

Where red was once highly favoured for dining rooms, this colour is not seen as frequently now, as it once was.

It's amusing and also curious to me how the Interior Design pundits can sometimes get it so horribly wrong.  During the year 2012, orange or tangerine was declared "colour of the year" at the IDS in Toronto.  Orange is the colour MacDonald's uses, and why?  They use it so as to make their customers eat and run, because of the inherent discomfort the colour causes to those surrounded by it!

In general, I think it can safely be said that the "hot" colours, such as red, orange and yellow are not very popular in Interior Design these days, other than as accents, because of our generalized discomfort with global warming.

I think you might safely conclude that the customer is always right!