The Politics of Color
Whether you agree or don’t agree that color shapes our perception - what you’re about to read is an exploration of how history and culture has shaped our preference for colors at a very deep level.
Remember when Dorothy opened up the door from her ‘grey’ world into a world of ruby slippers, yellow brick roads and green Oz? Then she taps her shoes wishing she could return home and poof, she’s back in the grey world.
Art historians have explained that in this classic film, grey depicted ‘reality’ and color depicted her ‘fall into unconsciousness’. This scene describes one’s connection to color, deep into the unconscious because colors came to have meaning based on the context of the time that we are in. As I remember the film now alongside a design perspective and an intersectional lens, I could not help but wonder if the film makers wanted to depict a sort of binary black and white world in Dorothy’s reality and when she fell into unconsciousness, she had a taste of how a world with a spectrum of color felt like.
In the book Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, historians have traced how as dye became more commercial, colors began to carry more meaning about one’s status and symbol in society. And, the use of colors became more restricted everywhere around the world to divide people into a color caste system.
White has long been intricately connected with money and power because fabrics like wool and cotton had to be heavily processed in order to appear white and only the wealthy could afford to keep it ‘clean’.
In his book Chromophobia by David Batchelor pointed out that “it is not shades of white that are the problem, but white in the abstract, because it is associated with tyrannical labels like ‘pure’.
Interestingly this sort of ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ aesthetic is still somewhat expressed in the design world today. Now, when we look at many wellness brands and who gets to access and brand wellness, there is this sort of preference towards designing wellness brands with a color palette that is neutral, beige and white. And at the same time, white also means other things in the global culture. In many eastern cultures, white is the color that signifies endings, mournings and death.
As a designer, I do feel a sense of responsibility when collaborating and choosing colors for a brand because a brand’s color palette is communicated across many interactive touch points: website, banner, flyer, brick and mortar, mats, towels, and much more. So I hope that by sharing this, we can learn and grow together by making conscious choices.
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