Aesthetically, as a color resistant, I am enjoying the current mood of natural, pale, dusty, muted, vegetable-dyed almost-color. Painting with it, wearing it, dreaming in it.
Perhaps, I wondered aloud to a longtime friend who stopped to see me in Brooklyn on her way back to Paris just as I was leaving for fieldwork in Beijing, it is an introvert thing: wearing such colors allows one to blend in and go unnoticed. Wasn’t anonymity a big part of why we lived in these harsh cities anyway? Or maybe it was the harmony-seeking, self-effacing, conflict-avoidant, enneagram nine in all of us (and me too)? Or the magical influence of days spent between the pastel lazure walls of the Waldorf kindergarten? I just wish I knew, in the beginning, if it was more a question of life imitating Instagram or vice versa.
John Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice that “the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most,” and I wondered if there was a correlation too with the most thoughtful ethnographers.
Years of living in Paris and New York, commuting on dirty trains and subways, habituated me to a grayscale palette, though Paris is more of a warm beige and New York more of a cool metallic grey. Either city is heaven, though, for a color resistant. In China, with the exception of the smoky saffron and crimson smocks of the monks passing by in the hutong, it felt like I only ever had the choice between red, black, or white, all very elegant colors to be sure (and at some point I did buy a big black tulle skirt) but too high in contrast to support getting lost somewhere between polarities and being barely there, which was my aim.
Color, it occurred to me, is what happens while we wait. Like all aspects of fashion, color reflects our intentions for change and reveals how we see ourselves in relation to time. Between the finalities of black and white, there is Bergsonian lived time, la durée, the time of our perception and experience.
As I folded a summer’s worth of vegetable-dyed linen frocks into my suitcase, I pondered how much the ethnographer’s uniform must have changed since Malinowski, who was usually clad in white. In Professor Taussig’s class, we spent a session discussing the chapter “Administration by Bluff” in What Color is the Sacred? where Taussig shares his theory of color and ‘color’. “Goethe,” Taussig reminds us, “says that color in its utmost brightness is shunned by people of refinement, who prefer black and white. Yet even for such people, is there not a quality of whiteness that is so stunning that it amounts to the brightest of bright colors – as manifest by those men in the colonies (…) who adopted a whiteness that covered every square inch of skin, such as workers wear in infectious-disease units or when approaching a toxic dump?” (80) To support his argument about the relationship between color and ‘color’, Taussig shares a photo (“Ethnographer with a Man in a Wig”) of Malinowski and a native sorcerer who is mostly naked save for his wig, and provocatively asks, “is not the man in white every bit as magical as the sorcerer? (…) Nobody looking at the image, with the possible exception of the natives, would know the sorcerer was wearing a wig. In reality, it is the ethnographer who is “bewigged,” decked out in his colonial outfit, which, in its colorless purity, like a painter’s untouched canvas, suggests that color shall open the doors to the art of ethnography (…)” (83).
Could it be, I wondered, that the current palette of pure, unsubsumed primal colors - dandelion, citron, peat, terracotta, oat – was the new colonial white? These colors, as I learned firsthand during an organic dye workshop, are produced using vegetable dyes which are usually carefully grown, sometimes hard to find and expensive, and always ephemeral, in contrast to the colorfast, flashy, mainly synthetic colors readily available for a few dollars to the poorest people in street markets. Yet, because bright colors cannot be worn more than a season without needing to be replaced by more bright colors, they represent the constraint of capitalism and one's dependency on it. Natural colors may fade, but this only adds to their authentic character. “They look good on all skin tones,” touted the teacher of the dye workshop, “because, unlike synthetics, they contain the entire spectrum of light.”
The trend of color resistance, then, would seem to be an expression of aesthetic privilege: of the luxury of escaping the constraints of capitalism, not only as a consumer in one's own wardrobe choices, but also in one's situation as owner, exempt from the requirement of wearing saturated, on-task hues in order to display one's worth and productive capacity.
Because it is necessary to be well placed socio-economically to be able to afford to dress in rare primal colors, these colors have the effect of obfuscating the historicity of the process of commodification of natural resources. If we view fashion trends as aesthetic attempts to make appealing the enrollment of one's body in a given moment of transformation in accordance with market necessity, we can understand the current trend of color resistance as a way of ostensibly rejecting such transformation of oneself by appearing to stand outside of the process of change - like a native. The silence of neutrals exposes the artifice of the transformed. But the only way such a social distancing is possible in a modern society is if one's position in the economic hierarchy is solidified - accumulated - enough to make it so.
If money is no object, one can find anything. And fashion is related to this economic fact: the more one has, the more one can afford to have, the more it becomes necessary to create an impression of scarcity in the aesthetic realm that justifies and drives real scarcity in the material realm. The disconnect from nature engendered by this process requires increasingly efficient technology that is also enlisted to spew out synthetic fabrics and colors. Through fashion, the process of transformation comes on and into the body and seduces us by its unpredictability and its freedom from the constraints of origin. It offers hope for a body eventually freed from them too. But along the way of commodifying natural resources, scarcity is displaced from the realm of the transformed back to the primal, such that in fine primal fabrics and colors are most à la mode.
Indulging in them hardly makes one beyond capitalism, however, because in a modern society one must stand in a place of privilege vis-à-vis technological processes in order to afford this new earthy trend. One must, directly or indirectly, control access to those natural resources from which such fabrics and colors are derived. This trend is a change of course with fashion traditionally because it obfuscates, rather than celebrates, enmeshment with and dependency on capitalism and its technologies, suggesting that the transformation of the body is something best left for others. It signifies a new aesthetic hierarchy that places the time of salvation back at the beginning, suggesting a denouement of the whole transformative operation.
Color resistance may well be just another operation in colonial concealment, the latest bourgeois aesthetic trompe l'oeil, because it involves not a recovery of living in mimesis with nature (that would require a lifestyle change, and a systemic change for that matter) but a claim to nature from without, from the urban comfort of mastery. A claim to what purity remains in the world by an aesthetic distancing of the colonizer from the exploitative processes upon which his privileged access to nature depends, and an aesthetic distancing from the colonized who no longer have the luxury of living mimetically with primal, untransformed Nature. By appropriating the primal color palette, the privileged take on the appearance of being embedded in the fundamental forces of matter and beyond the social.
My friend suggested that there was something to be said, nevertheless, for the healing potential of such colors, for their warmth and peace and vulnerability. For the mimetic intention they express. Which is why it is good not to restrict oneself, to overcome the habit of color resistance.
Further Reading
St. Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Color. Penguin Books: New York, 2016.
Taussig, Michael. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.