Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Where do we think yellow is going?" The captain of the Color Directions workshop scanned the faces of her troops intently. It was time to commit, to make sense of hundreds of amber and gold chips and swatches that lay strewn about the polished tabletop like autumn leaves on black pond ice. This was it--crunch time. Whither yellow...
...stolid urban grays I had long championed, I would come to be a yellow person? Actually, quite a few people had more or less bet their careers on it, and some of them were hunkered down in this Seattle hotel room. The participants belonged to the 1,500-member Color Marketing Group, the Virginia-based color cartel that has held a largely unknowing public under its sway for more than 30 years. It was the CMG that forecast avocado refrigerators in the late '60s and mauve motel rooms in the '70s and hunter-green automobiles...
There have always been color crazes, historically brought on by mere availability. In the early 1800s, bright yellows were popularized by the introduction of chromate and cadmium pigments, a development that greatly affected the painting of J.M.W. Turner. Likewise, the Impressionists made generous use of the new blues and greens that emerged in their day. In this century, novelty gave way to marketing as manufacturers came to shape public tastes in color. In 1934, for instance, the American Tobacco Co. found that women wouldn't buy Lucky Strikes because the then green box clashed with their clothes. The solution: make...
...postwar color technology had so expanded the usable universe of hues that without some sort of coordination, the public was in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by mismatched home furnishings, clashing car interiors, repellent fashion combinations--in short, a crisis of widespread bad taste. Thus was the CMG born, and ever since, a small army of colorists has congregated twice a year to bring order out of chaos. In closed caucuses, members hash out the social and political trends affecting future tastes, then produce the 15 color "directions" that will appear everywhere three years hence...
...found myself thinking about this as I examined the samples of yellow spread out before us. The blinds were open, and this being a typical Seattle day, the sunlight falling on the table was intermittent, and the swatches kept changing in intensity. Color is a moving target under the best of circumstances, so how, I wondered, could these color mavens function in such variable conditions? How could they ever hope to pinpoint the hues my wife or I would choose (by dint of inexorable social forces) when it came time to rethink our apartment for the 21st century...