Kassia St Clair on colour

Whilst studying 18th century women’s fashion, Kassia spent time researching in the archives of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. What did she uncover and was their language more descriptive than ours?

I read a lot of magazines, letters, and diaries from the time where people were talking about their clothes. Colour of course came up when talking about making a new dress, in ‘hair brown’ for example, so it's brown but what exact colour is hair brown? Well, to find out you'd search for a visual reference, maybe there's a dyers manual with a sample that hasn't changed too much over time. Or you might find a painting where there's a description of the sitter saying, “I had a portrait painted while wearing my hair brown dress.”

I found it fascinating that the colour of language had shifted so much in two centuries and that people were writing to each other with this vernacular that had for the large part disappeared. They had very strong and clear ideas about colour and the way colours work together that are so different from our own; and they wrote about how colours went together, which colours suit each other, what colours you should wear if you're a pale or a dark complexion or had rosy cheeks. 

Being a much bigger investment of time and money people knew the difference between fabrics, they would be able to name them and imagine a garment that they would want to wear. So, they were much more steeped in the language of textiles and colour because for the most part, they were designing everything they wore and their home furnishings themselves, either by repurposing older fabrics or purchasing new ones.

How do global events such as wars, elections, or pandemics influence the way that people use colour, or want to use colour?

Things like anxiety and wars do influence the global mood; if people are feeling happy and confident there'll be drawn to more exciting colours, and they'll be braver with their choices. If you're anxious, you’re probably going to be torn between two impulses: the desire to give yourself nice treats, or the desire to hunker down and not think too much about the future because you don't know what it is going to hold. 

I think that does influence our colour choices; hunkering down probably means being at home, it means feeling safe, being cozy, feeling grounded – you'd have more white spaces, soothing colours, and grounding textures. In terms of fashion, there’s the desire to give yourself a little pick me up. I'd imagine spending on nail polish increased particularly during the pandemic and, given we're in a zoom era, I imagine people spent more on lipstick than ever before.

I get asked about some colours all the time, but I found it really surprising and actually a bit moving that during the pandemic I had a lot of people asking about yellow. I think people were craving joy and yellow is a colour that's associated with joy in a lot of cultures.

What role does colour, or the lack of colour, play in the building of a political regime?

Countries like Soviet Russia or fascist Germany are about real nationalism. They want everything to be made in Germany, purchased in Germany, evoke German ideals, and live up to German values, or, in Soviet Russia, the same, what does it mean to be Soviet? How do we reflect that in every aspect of people’s lives?

In the early days of fascist Germany there was the idea that people would be healthy and going out on adventures, in Germany of course, but that was the rhetoric. Obviously, it shifted, but very often leaders of countries that are autocracies want people to be strong and proud of that nationalism and strength, and those values sit quite uncomfortably with fashion and bright colours.

For practical reasons, these countries gear their whole economy towards growth. Which means producing more cars, steel, and tractors, that does not mean producing more dyes or luxurious fabrics. So, for practical reasons and for ideological reasons, you get historical regimes where the fashions are much more restrained and less colourful over the course of maybe a decade.

What does it mean to have a favourite colour? Is the colour you most like to look at also a colour you love to wear and would want in your interior?

I think this is a question you’re asked a lot in childhood, but you don't generally get asked as adults, and I think that can be a bit of a shame because when you're a child other people are generally making choices for you.

Choosing a favourite colour is about reflecting on yourself and your feelings about different colours. Thinking about it only as a child and then never really paying it much attention again is a lost opportunity for self-reflection – who are you and how do you want people to perceive you?

I really love wearing terracotta’s, I find them very soulful colours and they make me very happy, but I think the colour that I would say is my favourite is lapis lazuli blue. It reminds me of holidays. It reminds me of when I first pitched The Secret Lives of Colour, and the colour that I talked about was ultramarine. So, I've got a lot of different favourites for different contexts.

Our colour palettes evolve slowly overtime, adding pops of fashionable colours into our enduring curation of perennial shades. Whilst colours differ across our brands, shades of terracotta, blush, moss, and citrine feature strongly in both ranges; Kassia shares her response to these key shades.

I love terracotta. It’s the right blend between soothing and confident, because reds and oranges are confident colours, but because they evoke something that's very natural and familiar they also feel soothing. These colours are very much after my own heart and I wear a lot of burnt reds, burnt pinks, and burnt oranges myself.

I like blush personally, but I don't like that it's sometimes used as a shorthand, or as a shortcut to femininity, whatever that is. The pink version of femininity feels too narrow, and while it's lovely to have it if you love it, I don't think it should be the only way to feel feminine or to signal that you're a girl.

Moss is another colour that I really like. I think that green with a lot of grey is really liveable and very natural. Easy on your eyes, easy to live with and comforting. I think you can live with a colour like moss green for a very long time without feeling like you need to change it, and that's a real blessing.

I think of Citrine as a blast of energy. A very invigorating colour. It's a colour that I can imagine using as an accent in an interior palette for that jolt of energy; it feels very refreshing. I think the name helps with the idea of citrus – refreshing and energetic and jolting.

The 19th century was abundant with technological advancements in dyes and textiles. Will we experience a similar burst of innovation in our digital era?

The wave of new dyes available to the world in the 19th century was revolutionary. Before, certain colours like reds that would stay red rather than fading over time, were incredibly expensive and you could only access them if you were very wealthy. After the 19th century, most of these dyes were made from chemicals and the prices evened out so that reds cost the same as blues cost the same as yellows, and people could access the colours that they wanted. 

Suddenly you get this excitement; people can put colours together in ways that they haven't been able to before. They can put red, which has always been a very expensive colour, on a very coarse fabric and see what that looks like. Whereas before, you would only ever put red dye on a beautiful, very fine wool or velvet because to put it on a cheaper cloth is a waste of expensive dye. This wave of experimentation causes a huge alteration – social, psychological, cultural – in the way that people think about colours and fabrics and dyed fabrics. 

In the time since then, obviously there have been huge advancements and people have wanted to make dyes safer for the environment, which has been hugely important, but nothing has been as seismic as that period in the 19th century when suddenly the palette of colours massively expanded.

Now, new colours are being discovered, not all the time, but they are being discovered. But do we mean a new pigment that you could apply to a canvas? Do we mean a new dye that you can apply to cloth? If you create a whole new dye, it may be that it looks very similar to another dye, but it is in fact different – do we call that a different colour, or is it still just red? Or is it still just blue? So, what we mean by a new colour is very, very tricky. 

I certainly think that now that we live more of our lives digitally, there is the capacity for new colours to be created digitally that can't be created physically, and for us to experience a new digital colour.