Fashionclick^®  Style Interview

"I started in fashion because that is where color always begins. The colors come down the runway and you know they will end up up in homes, cars, and all kinds of consumer goods whether it’s linen for the table or plastics. I help Pantone decide names for new colors because the romance of a name is very important. If you give a color a number, it just doesn’t have any romance."

What is the concept behind your book "Colors For Your Every Mood?"

Many people have asked me to write a book on the emotional impact of color. We look at beautiful colors and they appeal to us on a very emotional level. Sometimes we don’t even know why. So what I attempted to do in the book was to explain different color families and why colors have the effect that they do.

Do people have a certain inborn tendency towards specific colors, or does their environment influence to the point that they end up connecting a particular mood to certain colors?

It happens both ways. We can be very affected by color because of the culture in which we are raised. For example, in Asia one of the things that people are taught, is that white is the color that one wears to funerals. White is the color of death. More recently, young Oriental brides are imitating Americans by wearing white wedding gowns whereas traditionally that was never done. So some of the cultural beliefs about color are changing, but much of what we learned is passed on to us from generation to generation through association. We associate certain feelings with certain colors.

But, beyond the psychological effect of color and what we are taught, there is also the physiological effect of color. For example, red, no matter what culture you happen to be in, is associated with excitement, sensuality and danger. And it is all these things, because from earliest times, humans learned that they could not ignore the color red. It was the color of blood, the color of flame and fire; the color of things that were dangerous and yet helped sustain our lives.

Would you say that the trends of a particular season, through color, reflect the awareness of a certain mood among designers and society as a whole?

Yes, there is definitely a connection between the colors that we see as trends and what is happening in the world around us. For example, there is a movement towards designer’s use of the blue family and I think that is going to get stronger as we go into the year 2000. We are coming to the end of a decade where we had a lot of earth tones reflecting concern about the environment and ecology. Now that concern is headed in a different direction, the preservation of water.

We also know that blue is the color that embodies the feelings of tranquility and serenity. People always associate blue with the sky and water, and when we have a beautiful blue sky overhead or blue water surrounding us, we feel more serene. We are less excitable in that atmosphere. People today are leading very active, sometimes over active, lives and when they seek serenity they will often go to the ocean or sit on a park bench.

Exactly. It is a very unexpected time. Going into a new century is something that practically nobody that is living today has experienced, so we are facing the unknown. There is also the futuristic aspect of going into the new millennium. We know that space travel has increased and we are promised that somewhere in the next century we are all going to be traveling around in outer space. The color of outer space in most of our mind’s eye is usually a deep meditative blue. So, again, it is a color that is attached to the new millennium.

I think the biggest surprise in the autumn palette is all the oranges. Of course, when we think of autumn we think of beautiful leaves, so it is not an unusual color for fall. It is just that orange has come and gone in the 90’s and it seems to be back again very strongly. We feel that part of the reason for this too is because it has an excitement. It is an optimistic color. I think the hot pink that was popular for spring and the 

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