So the other day I had the pleasure [read: distaste] of dining with my charming younger sister. My sister Vivian wants to be a doctor. She, along with all the lovely people who want to be lawyers, businessmen, school teachers, journalists, electricians, and a whole array of other professions make up a huge bulk of people necessary to operate our society. And these lovely people, to whom I am very thankful for because I owe them various elements of my life, generally believe that things like color, fabric, and silhouette are completely banal and stupid.
Well, please, let me assure you, Vivian. First of all, I did not singlehandedly makeup color forecasting, trend forecasting, or marketing as you seem to believe. Believe me, you and I both would be much happier if I actually had. You and the whole world can laugh all you want when I say Honeysuckle is the color of the year. It must be very funny for people to pay over $4,000 for the color swatches for just one set of color books. For just now-then just rebuy them when new colors and color reports emerge.
Is that funny to you Vivian? Because $4,000 multiplied by every makeup brand, by every interior furniture company, by every lingerie company, by every car company, by every diaper company, by every... do I need to go on? [Sorry, multiply all that by every one of their international counterparts, by all the other countless services offered by Pantone, by all the other color forecasting systems out there.] Does color still seem trivial, because it seems like color is making a lot more fucking money than you are, now isn't it?
Now, not to seem bitter but I wouldn't hand a surgeon a butter knife then seem confused when they weren't able to perform their job with it. So why do people seem so unwillingly to accept the tools and effort behind every single decision which goes behind the aesthetics of the universe around them? I promise you, from the car you drive down to the paper you wipe your ass with all the products you use are designed, created, and marketed to ensure that you need them, love them, and use them as much as possible.
I always refer back to that speech Meryl Streep's speech in The Devil Wear Prada where she responds to Anne Hathaway calling some clothing "stuff":
This... stuff'? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets?And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff. Truth.
Maybe you still think I'm a design school lunatic trying to compensate thousands of dollars of tuition and make myself feel better about my future. Maybe you still think it's funny if you happen to have actually read through this whole mess, and maybe it is since I'm not the man behind the door deeming honeysuckle the color of the year. I can, however say the joke's on you in the end, because whether you read Vogue for fashion advice, or peruse InStyle, or scope out some D-list celebrities in US weekly in the checkout line, you are all looking at the same shit in the end, fed down from the same sources when you trace them back.
♥ Lini.
