¿When Did We Lose The Colors?
A black jean, black belt, black turtleneck, black t-shirt, black leather jacket, black sweatpants, black combat boots…
Almost each and every clothing item in my closet has a black sample. Even though I have a relatively colorful wardrobe, it is an upsetting fact for me to not be able to make the same statement for the rest of the color chart. Maybe for white. But definitely not for orange. I don’t necessarily avoid wearing an all-black outfit; however, by my personal choice, I have always been prone to wearing colors. Myself being the last person to want drawing all the attention on, this poses a great problem towards my fading-with-the-crowd mission. The yellow trench coat smiles in between the clusters of black, beige, and grey ones. My seven-colored balloon sleeve pullover seems so colorful that even only its existence on my body makes my friends wonder why I might be wearing something “too colorful.” Looking back at the pre-2000s wide color palette, it is inevitable to question when and why we traded all those colors in to embrace being “interesting”.
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For the sake of wandering through our minds, I will put the “natural tones being the easy-matches” card aside. That would have been a waaay too easy answer to explain all the similar figures and styles we faced throughout the day.
According to Anabel Maldonado, a fashion journalist and, as her saying, a fashion psychologist, “we wear what we wear for an item’s psychological pay-off. (...) The dark hue creates a barrier between itself and the outside world, keeping people away while providing comfort, protecting emotions, and hiding vulnerabilities, insecurities, and a lack of self-confidence.” Very much like an armor, she suggests. Also, the way societal culture initiates the meanings behind the colors adds to this psychological phenomena. The graduation gowns, lawyer togs, ecclesiastic clothing, meaning education, law, and religion, all refer to the color black as a must-wear of the official occasions. Meanwhile, the bridal gowns, uniforms, doctor coats are white, following the very same reason. In the 2000s high-competitive, self branding environment, as worded by Maldonado, people cast their votes to the empowering, serious presence of the settled tones. Vivid colors identified with a childlike, playful, superficial characteristic, but the majority does not prefer to attend the first day of work wearing green pants and a fuchsia shirt.
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“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body - usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological.
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In today’s fast developing, media based structure, people have a lot of platforms and a lot of opportunities to express themselves in the way they want to represent themselves. They are more than free to use the aesthetic they want. And on top of these, with sky-rocketing possibilities, fashion is currently another medium of art, as opposed to once limited production and availability means. It is now a matter of choice if you want to splash some color to your fabric. It is a matter of taking the risk to catch glimpses, challenging the appropriateness, and accepting to be the different one. It is a matter of personal preferences and not obligations.
Who knows, maybe pop-culture’s small hints to disco era and vintage are little hopes of new breathes for the dusty multicolored combines? What can bring the colorful podiums of the fashion industry down to the streets of our homes?
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