Are we in a 'color recession'?

What is a potentially unpopular opinion that you hold about color? Gray can be really beautiful. There's some really wonderful grays out there. I have to agree. I would say maybe the same thing in the inverse, which is that too much color can be really ugly. Don't get mad in the comments, but. Wow, okay, okay. Maybe my controversial color opinion is that I love millennial pink. One day when I finally get to have like my old lady sitting room, you know, it's like a room in many houses or apartments that like pretty much like your mom, auntie, or grandma is the only person who's allowed to go into. Like my mom has a white carpet. I can't personally go in there, even though I'm almost 40. Mine will be completely awash in millennial pink. But Amogh, you know, I kind of agree with you there. I'm not naturally a color person. I think the only reason why there's color in my home is because of my husband. Like before I met him, I was a black and white girly. I mean, it made my laundry so easy. It's like literally two piles, that's it. I've only warmed up to color in the past like 10 years or so. But as I have become more comfortable with it, I've noticed, and a lot of other people have noticed, that a lot of our world looks kind of gray. Not the trees, the grass, or the sky, but the cars and the buildings and houses and the decor and appliances in them. It is neutral. It is a neutral city, and it's been like that for a while now. One of my guests today, assistant editor at The Atlantic, Amogh Dimri, he calls this the color recession. And there are a lot of reasons, both structural and cultural, why color is leeching out of some of our most important and most expensive possessions. But I also wanted to get a little deeper into the role that color plays in our lives today and why some of us might be afraid of it. So I am joined today by Amogh. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And Katie Kelleher. She's a writer and editor who's written a lot about color, some of which is in her book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things. Welcome, Katie. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Okay. So first, Amogh, what. What made you kind of go into a research rabbit hole about color? Like, how did you come to notice the breadth of the color recession? You know, I was visiting some family in the Bay Area in San Francisco in January, and we were driving up to the city. They live a little south of the city. And as you sort of emerge on the highway and see the city for the first time, it looks like this, like, beautiful, pointless portrait of a city. Like, every house is dotted with a different color. You see blue next to green next to purple. I don't think I'd ever seen a purple house. I don't think I'd ever seen a purple house anywhere except San Francisco. And the whole thing got me thinking, one, why does San Francisco look like this? And two, why doesn't my home city of New York or, frankly, any other American city I've ever been to look like this? And that sort of threw me down this rabbit hole of how American cities actually used to be quite colorful. And slowly, over the last couple decades, you know, a culture of risk aversion has made that impossible. And San Francisco, a city that even today is more colorful than its counterparts, is also becoming grayer and grayer. The world that we're describing, this desaturated world that we're describing, it didn't used to be this way. Like, the mid-century was quite colorful, both in the fashions and in the choices people made in their houses and cars. I was in Michigan for a hot second visiting my family, because that's where I'm from. And I have never in my life been able to go to the Woodward Dream Cruise, which is like this huge, like, you know, car show that happens in Detroit every year, or in the Detroit area every year. But I happened to be leaving the day that it started. I saw all of these old classic cars. Now, obviously, some of these people, they're peacocking, right? Like, they choose these beautiful car colors, because it's a car show. These are for gearheads, car enthusiasts. But still, I mean, some of the older cars, even the interiors, which hadn't appeared to be very changed from the 1950s or 60s or 70s, they had these beautiful leather seats and, like, surprising carpeting colors that I think now people would find very ugly. But at the time, I mean, it looked really cool. I don't know. I wonder, like, Amogh, what changed? You know, the car industry is so fascinating, because truly, like, for most of the 20th century, after the 20s and so, cars were really super colorful. The auto industry, in part, sort of blames a lot of environmental regulations for why car paint got harder to make. Specifically, the Clean Air Act and Toxic Substances Act in the 70s, they say, made the lacquer paint that they were using harder to use and the sort of eco-friendly paint that replaced it was a little more expensive. And so, in their calculation, like, streamlining it and just sort of having different shades of gray and black and white be the dominant car color was more efficient and cheaper for them. And that's what they began to sell. And that sort of changed how consumers saw cars from, like, this sort of expression of your personal taste to, like, an investment that you might want to resell one day and not get wrong as a result. And it really is sad, because some of the photos of parking lots from back in the day are, you know, stunning. And then you compare that to what you might see today. And Target, it's very different. I mean, I think a big part of it is that people stopped feeling that their large appliances, and I think that that applies to cars and also appliances in the home, stopped seeing those as a necessary extension of themselves and their personal taste. I think that people, you know, started to shy away from, for various reasons. And some of them might be kind of good, like, I think that there's a little bit less of an emphasis on, like, the car. I think there's a little bit less of an emphasis on consumerism as being the main way one can identify and, like, showcase their personality, which, personally, I think is great. But then I also think that there is, you know, the subscription-based model of the world. And when everything is on subscription, you're much less likely to get something like a bright red car or a bright red stove. If you own objects less, you're identifying with them less. And again, there's good and bad things about that. That's a really good point. I mean, it kind of reminds me. It reminds me of this whole trend of millennial gray. Like, I don't think it's necessarily a choice of millennials. Like, for example, I'm a millennial. I rent my apartment. The floors, the wood floors of my apartment are, they have a gray wash, which is not my choice. It's not my choice. It doesn't go with, I mean, and we have exposed brown brick. So the gray and the brown, it's not what I would have picked out. But I'm just renting. And I'm sure this applies to a lot of millennials who do not own their homes, right? It was the choice of my landlord. And in many cases, in the broader sense, that color was the choice of flippers and landlords who are just picking probably something that feels vaguely neutral to be as appealing as possible to whoever is going to be looking at this listing. So if you're renting or subscribing, as you say, Katie, maybe you don't even have the choice of color. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, they call the landlord special nowadays, like this, like all. White paint job that like cakes over every inch of a rental unit, sometimes going over the power outlets and doorknobs and everything. And I think like that is sort of indicative of how not just landlords, but like a lot of people think of what they want to do with how they design their house. Like you want to use a color that is inoffensive. If you might sell your house one day, you don't want to use like red paint on the wall or blue paint on the wall because that might deter some buyer. And that risk doesn't seem worth taking. Because like Katie said, like we're living in this era where you don't know how long you're going to stick with all your possessions and assets and stuff. And if you ever need to resell it, you don't want to be stuck in a bind because of an aesthetic choice you made. Like now the aesthetic choice has become a flourish and it's sort of seen as unnecessary. The idea of expression, you know, like who is using color to express themselves and how? And there is definitely has been a movement away from seeing bright colors as sort of like chic or luxury expressions of technology. I think a lot of this has to do with class signaling, you know, a lot of people want to go for the like least offensive color, the most classy color, you know, I put that in quotes because like who determines what is classy, you know, and I think the whole idea of quiet luxury has been like an absolute bane on the existence of color. I second that. Yep. Yeah. And it's also based on such a sort of silly idea of like what rich people are doing. Like who are we talking about here? What rich people are we looking at? Are we just looking at? The Kardashians, beige kitchen, or are we actually seeing inside the homes of people and seeing how they live? And I'd argue, you know, we're not, we're, you know, seeing inside some Instagrammers homes and then deciding our taste based on that. I actually want to talk about the class of it all. I mean, you know, we've just talked about how people who might be more financially insecure might choose neutrals for their largest physical assets in case they have to sell them or, you know, people who are renting and can't choose certain colors for themselves. But then as you mentioned, Katie, there's also Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian's all neutral house, which, you know, might be another controversial opinion of mine. I love it. I honestly love it. That's great. Or really loud color. Really loud color might be seen as tacky for some. But Katie, I mean, you mentioned to our producer, Liam, Farrow and Ball, which is a fancy, fancy paint brand with a limited selection of paints. And they have some really loud, really bold colors. I wouldn't dream of painting even a mug in Farrow and Ball because it ain't cheap, right? But all this to say. I think color could be coded in all sorts of ways. How is color versatile as a means to convey class? Well, I think that, you know, with Farrah and Ball, their sort of magic touch is in selecting a range of colors and creating this, you know, sense of this narrative of heritage and this narrative of luxury out of choosing, you know, very specific colors, giving them very specific names. Sometimes sort of off-putting weird names like Mouse's Breath or Elephant Foot or, you know, they always choose sort of off-putting ones. The names are wild, yeah. You know, it's a little gatekeeping. I do work for Interiors Magazines in Maine, and, you know, I see a lot of homes that use Farrah and Ball paints, and some of them are the bright orange that's called Charlotte's Locks. You know, some of them are colors that are sort of intense and garish and in certain contexts would definitely read as maybe a little tacky, maybe a little… But when paired with specific other cues, you know, like certain kinds of furniture or in a certain kind of home, it reads differently. So there's also the context in which you see the color is like how you understand the class of it. And with color, too, so much of it is about texture. A plasticky color, like, you know, seeing something in plastic in a bright, bright orange, you know, that reads a certain way, that reads traffic cone. Yeah. And then you see silk in bright orange or leather. It feels very… Very different. Yeah, I agree with that. You know, I think part of the class divide when it comes to color is people want to differentiate themselves from what the mainstream is doing. And historically, like, you know, pre the Industrial Revolution, that meant using as much color as you could because color was so hard to acquire. Like, there was a shade of purple, Tyrian purple, that for, like, centuries only royalty in Europe could wear because it required, like, slaughtering 10,000 sea snails just for one gram of the purple dye. And, like, the Roman emperor, like, killed the king of Mauritania because he wore it once on a trip. And there's a whole thing about it. And the moment color becomes, like, synthetic and it becomes mass-producible, now you have everybody's using color and now using less color becomes, like, the more refined thing to do. And I think maybe the countertrend now that Katie's pointing out is because the world has become so gray that now, like, such a, you know, more elite, more exclusive paint companies are able to market color in this new way. As a way of, again, distinguishing people who can afford color from those who might be deferring to neutrals now. Join the team by subscribing today. Coming up after the break. You know, if you've ever met a purple person, there's sometimes purple people, you know, who, like, get really into purple. Listen, they ride for it. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Stick around. Also, I mean, I can't help but think about how, like, race might be associated with this as well. Like, there are a lot of cultures where people might be from in the United States that really value color. Yeah. In a way that, like, sort of the wasp home of Chippendale furniture doesn't. This conversation has reminded me of this video that I saw, like, lovingly joking about, like, the four bright paint colors that you might see in a Latino American household. I saw this TikTok about it and had me rolling. And just reading people in the comments being like, yeah, that's it. Add teal. It feels like there is a lot sort of wrapped up in here culturally around who thinks color is okay and for whom and when and how. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think aesthetics in general are incredibly fraught in that way. And I think that we've seen in the past, you know, 15, 20 years a real homogenization, you know, a real, like, desire to, for lack of a better term, whitewash aesthetics. There seems to be a sense of fear of picking the wrong color, signaling the wrong thing. And I think that that comes from several different places. One of them is economic instability. And then I also think, you know, if you feel. That you are living in a surveillance state, you're less likely to want to stick out. Like, I think that all of these things are actually related. Just one of the things that you had mentioned before was Tyrian purple. Amogh, you had mentioned that that, you know, was a color that you were sometimes penalized for wearing. And I think that's such a great example, along with sort of bright red, this vermilion color, of colors that historically have been reserved for a certain class of people. So this isn't the first time we're seeing that. You know, this is something that has happened throughout history. And it's usually been with purple or red. And these colors were often, you know, they weren't just only afforded by the wealthy. Those were the only people allowed to wear them. There's evidence of sumptuary laws, which are laws that govern sort of dress and things like that, and expression from, like, the medieval period in Europe, that people were prohibited from wearing, like, bright cardinal colored red. There is an idea that color is risky that we have today. You know, that choosing a bright color might be a risk. Oh, going back to the. Risk aversion that Amogh was talking about. Right. And this goes. Yeah, I think this goes back really well to, you know, what you were talking about and what was in your article that there is the idea that color could be a risk is not totally without precedent. It's not new. And, you know, it has a lot to do with control and, you know, fitting in. And those things are both matters for many people matters or survival. I also think that there's we all know what it means when someone on Twitter has a Roman statue. In their picture, their avatar. If you don't know by now, usually they're used by people who want to, quote, return to tradition, which often signals far right ideas about white culture and masculinity. Yeah. Yeah. We all we all know what that means. And it's always right. It's always the white marble, you know, but that's also based on a misreading of history. Like those marble statues weren't white. They were painted. They were incredibly colorful. Oh, my gosh. And they have like an exhibition. I want to say, yeah, the Met put on an exhibit where they displayed like painted versions. Versions of these statues. And people thought they were so ugly. And right. I mean, they're wild because they have that like Tiffany blue and yellow and mustard. You know, it's it's really looks crazy to us because we're so used to thinking of like these refined classical Hellenistic, beautiful ideals. And it was all this like glittery white marble. And like, that's not real. That's not what it was. That's not what the ancient Greeks preferred. So I think there's a sort of false return to. You know, these sort of blank aesthetics, you know, with the idea that you're signaling a sort of class mobility, maybe that you don't feel like you have or signaling allegiance to a system of power. I also do a lot of writing about Pantone and their colors of the year. The 2026 Pantone color of the year was Cloud Dancer, which I mean, you know, maybe you could describe it a little better than I could. It's just kind of white. Yes. It's a cold. I think it's a cold leaning off white. You know, it's not a warm leaning, not an ivory. It's. It has sort of a cold tinge to it. And I remember at the time I wrote a little bit about it, about how I thought it felt to me like I think one of the words of the year by one of the dictionaries was rage bait. You know, it felt a little like rage bait. That's actually what I thought when I first saw that. I was like, I think they're kind of, they kind of just want to get us talking. I'm kind of, I'm being provoked right now. There was a lot of backlash after that came out about what choosing white meant in the midst of a rise of white supremacist ideas and backlash to DEI in the United States. You know, as you're pointing out, white as a neutral color isn't always a color that's politically neutral. We did an episode earlier this year on how white supremacists have used milk as a symbol, in part because of weird ideas about white people being superior for being able to digest lactose, but also in part because it is white. But, you know, one thing I've been thinking about is how this color recession doesn't really extend to social media. For an upcoming episode, I've been reading Ruby Tando's book. She's a cookbook author. She's a cookbook author, chef. And the book is called All Consuming, which is about food culture. And in her research, she spoke to someone who really credits color for how certain food videos go viral. The vibrant orange of a gochujang pasta, for example. The rich marigold of egg yolk. And I think that super saturated color on social media works really, really well, actually. Have we changed where color lives now? We are seeing as much color as we ever have. You know, we just aren't seeing it in the same places. Seeing color online, you know, you still can see color in nature. And there's color in a lot of disposable consumer products. I mean, fast fashion is a wash in color. Yeah, I find the 50s so interesting. You know, back then there was this sort of robust color advising industry. And, you know, these theorists, Faber-Berlin is one of the most famous ones, would sort of write columns sort of telling people what colors were in and what wasn't in and how to match your hat with your shoes and match your car with your house. And it was like this very detailed, minute level of advice giving. Basically, because people wanted to know not just how to buy color, but how to use it properly. And sort of using a color in this cohesive way was seen as being part of the middle class in some way. And obviously that industry no longer exists in the way it used to. I talked to one woman who just moved to Arkansas and is repainting her house there. And I was like, what colors are you looking between? Because she was very torn. And it wasn't blue or green or red that she was torn between. It was 30 different shades of white. And she was like, I don't know, Chantilly lace will go as well with my house. As, you know, this other shade of white. And now we have a situation where the Internet is sort of an outlet for expressing color in this landscape. low-risk way. The purple of ube will perform really well in the algorithm, but painting your house in ube purple is like, you're insane, right? Like, people are going to make fun of you for that, or you think they are, and that's why you would never engage with color in any serious way anymore. And I think, in part, maybe the reason that the risk aversion, one of the reasons the risk aversion is so dominant now is because people sort of lack this, like, advisory infrastructure on how to learn how to use color in some way, and that pushes us to use it in risk-averse ways, like social media. Nails and makeup are two places where people can play with color in really bold and really fun ways, and it's so temporary. And we also, hair, you know, we see hair colors that we never used to see, that just didn't exist. You know, now you can have a rainbow in your hair, and that's way more socially acceptable. And I think that there is a sense of, like, well, we can embrace, you know, color as long as you can wash it out, or as long as you can change it the next day. What do you all think the role of color has in our lives now? I think we sort of see color as, like, an experience, you know, in some way. Even with millennial pink in the 2010s, like, a lot of the uses of millennial pink that you would see in that, in the built environment of our society would be at these, like, Instagrammable pop-ups that you could go to and take a photo ad and then post it. Yeah. And I think color has sort of transitioned into that, where we're seeing color as sort of this, like, experiential, different part of what you might do in a day compared to your regular day. You know, I find it so interesting that our phone is where we can find so much color in our lives, and you look up, and neutrals are so dominant. Like, I mean, it seems like a sad dichotomy, but it is in some ways the world we live in now. With all due respect to your controversial color opinion, Amogh, I understand that too much color can be too much for you. But I do think that there is something that's kind of lost with Alaska. Colorful environment. What do you think could unlock some freedom for some of us? I interviewed this one painter in the Bay Area named Dr. Color for my story. He's almost 80 years old. And he told me he started painting in the 1970s. And back then, San Francisco was undergoing this colorist movement, as he calls it. And people essentially were painting their houses in crazy colors. And sometimes they look great, and sometimes they looked a little too colorful and a little, you know, tacky. And so Dr. Color intervened basically to teach them color. He calls himself a polychromist. And basically, he repainted thousands of houses in San Francisco to be both colorful and also aesthetically cohesive. And in large part, that colorist movement is why San Francisco looks the way it does today. Super bright, but also very cohesive. And in some way, we need to get a modern-day colorist movement back now, go wild with it, but still accept some balance in how color is used. And I think color can be daunting because oftentimes, you don't know what's going to look good on you. And so I think color can be daunting, because oftentimes, you don't know what's going to look good on you. And so I think color can be daunting because oftentimes, you don't know what's going to look good on you. And so I think color can be good with other colors. And I think sometimes a bit of color theory from the polychromists and some advice giving could be helpful to that point. A better housing market would also be helpful to that point. I am not going to argue with you there. Katie, what do you think? Like, what could get us feeling a little more free to be colorful? I have a daughter, and she's seven. She identifies as pink and purple and turquoise, and she loves asking people what their favorite color is. You know, and when you meet a bunch of kids, and when you sit down with a bunch of kids, that's something they're going to ask you really quickly is, what's your favorite color? You know, that means something to them. Oh my gosh, their favorite colors are bright. Yeah, they're bright, and they're happy, and they're fun, and they don't care about the taste of it or like, you know, what other people think. You know, there's a sense of total freedom and enjoyment in it, and they change their favorite color. You know, I mean, for a while, my daughter's favorite color was rainbow, and that's what she would tell everyone. You know, so like having that sense of excitement about color is still possible. Like, we don't all lose the ability to do that. We still are able to, you know, really enjoy an orange sunset. I mean, we all post those on Instagram too. You know, we love the color there. So there's still a love of color. There's still a desire for it and a hunger for it. And I think it's just sometimes tapping back into it, remembering like, hey, when I was a kid, I loved like jungle green. You know, why can't I still love it? Why can't that come back? Yeah, let's keep that going. And some people hold on to it. Yes, it's true. You know, if you've ever met a purple person, there's sometimes purple people, you know, who like get really into purple. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's the only color they wear. Yes. I aspire to be like the purple people. Oh my gosh, Katie Amogh, I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was Amogh Dimri, assistant editor at The Atlantic and Katie Kelleher, writer and editor. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Potok. Engineering support came from David Greenberg. Our supervising producer is Cher Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon. © transcript Emily Beynon