color me whatever you find fashionable

August 12, 2006 3:19 PM

what are some good essays, books, etc about the relationship of color to social and cultural trends?

why was "kelly green" popular in the 70s and then regained popularity via the retro trend? why do the iranian/persian carpets feature certain shades of blue? why did the 80s feature such shitty browns and purples and teals? i'm sure a lot of this has to do with availability of dyes, etc, but i'm sure that there are interesting cultural studies-type theorists out there who have written about other facets of color popularity. i guess i don't know much about color theory, but i thought that was more about its appeal to physiological concerns rather than social ones.

posted by yonation to media & arts (4 comments total)

I think this is categorized as "colour theory".
posted by acoutu at 3:53 PM on August 12, 2006

The Primary Colors by Alexander Theroux
The Secondary Colors by Alexander Theroux
Remarks on Colour by Ludwig Wittgenstein

More here
posted by mattbucher at 4:21 PM on August 12, 2006 [1 favorite]

Google "color trends," and you'll find predictions of what's expected to be popular in the near future (sometimes the predications are old). Pantone does such an announcement every year, I believe (I'm pretty sure I saw such a report in 1999-2001, sometime around when the Apple iBooks were orange or blue and you saw loads and loads of that shade of blue and orange, and pinstripes in non-Mac-related advertising). Unfortunately, I don't see any retrospective tendencies in these-- no explanations of why colors get hot at a particular time or why the predictions might have been off. I would love to read a book on this topic, should you become so inspired!
posted by kimota at 5:32 PM on August 12, 2006

Most of what I knew before is summarized, and I learned a lot from this extensive post at Making Light. It has links to much more.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:41 PM on August 12, 2006