From architecture to fashion, our world is becoming increasingly monochromatic, but are retro aesthetics the path out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Irrespective of your personal taste, the concept of colour dying is a stirringly despondent thought – one we\u2019re all probably guilty of contributing to, one way or another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2020, The Science Museum Group conducted an experiment, analysing thousands of objects designed over a 200 year period. With a perceptible \u201crise\u201d in the use of grey, the results constituted a pretty damning indictment of the last few decades in terms of colour and design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since technicolour rocked the silver screen in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz, <\/em>the next 40 years were a kaleidoscopic swirl of colour, with the peak, obviously, being the 70s, inspired in part by those vivid hallucinations that were mysteriously common at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The question is then: how did we get here? Surprise, it\u2019s not the one thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first offers the most robust defence of this continual downtrend in colour amongst designers: minimalism, Bauhaus, brutalism and the holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tel Aviv in Israel is a hell of a city. A well-designed and uniquely modern wonder-city sheltering a people and government who are the most and least deserving of it, respectively. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A reflection of Israel itself – it\u2019s architecture was forged in the crucible of what Dostoevsky called the \u201cbestial cruelty.\u201d The largest concentration of brutalist and bauhaus buildings and installations on the planet, conceived of by a nearly-lost school of jewish artists, designers and architects – displaced and persecuted all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The sharp angles, utility-based, inexpensive and, indeed largely colourless, design ethos of brutalism and bauhaus originated in post-war Britain and Weimar Germany respectively. Bauhaus in particular was singled out by the boarish philistines of the Nazi apparatus as a haven for communist and \u201cculturally jewish\u201d design. The school definitively closed the same year as Hitler\u2019s ascendancy as chancellor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The enormous success of brutalist and bauhaus artists spread beyond Israel\u2019s borders and, for its part, changed the character of architecture and the visual arts for the next 40 years. Minimalism equally finds its root in the inexpensive and efficient design principles of the post-war period and has, in many ways, become one of the preeminent artistic philosophies of the last 60 years. From Apple to IKEA, the stirring imagery of minimalism, of bauhaus defined our homes and gadgets. The dawn of the personal computer, the touch-screen smartphone and the assemblable wardrobe, bed and table – riding a minimalist, white-black aesthetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This, if anything, is an enviable legacy. Though an incomplete one. Bauhaus, minimalism, brutalism and other aesthetics came to prominence in the post-war economic ruin of Europe. Their strength was only redoubled by the increasing demands for space and growth amidst the baby boom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Charming, earthy and expensive marble and stone walls were replaced by monochromatic but cheap concrete. Hand-built wooden buildings and implements replaced by plastic and aluminium. Their efforts democratized art and cheapened housing and labour – but colour went by the wayside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These were not the only art and design movements in the world however and, fortunately, the 50s, 60s and 70s knew it well. From the gaudy visual texture of the 50s diner to the weird but colourful pop art of the 60s, these eras were defined by a complex confluence of different tones and hues – all culminating in the positively psychedelic technicolour of the 70s. A near-permanent acid trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the 2000s, it seemed that the era of lava lamps and the variety of fashion that epileptics still fear was putatively over. The era of sleek desk lamps and incrementally slimmer laptops – silver all – had dawned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We still haven\u2019t crawled out. \u201cClean girl\u201d aesthetics, off-white wardrobe and loving, virgin-white, high-ponytailed, uptight, pristinely Nara Smith vibes permeate the air and envelop the senses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recently though, I\u2019ve felt a new wind, and from the same place as colour previously found it\u2019s cultural apex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The retro craze isn\u2019t the product of a marketing strategy, of grey men projecting colour from a boardroom for profit – but a somewhat depressing yet incidentally fortunate by-product of stagnation, economic and cultural. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lets start with culture, and where you go when you don\u2019t have the creativity to move forward. Spoilers: it\u2019s backward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From Stranger Things<\/em> to Silk Sonic<\/em> to even Usher\u2019s rebirth, we\u2019re experiencing an unprecedented era of nostalgia porn. Even in fashion, Y2K revisionism and the recession pop<\/a> trend signify a resurgent desire for a more colourful era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n