"It was one of those stifling Milan days when the heat sparked off the sidewalk and humidity turned the city into a sauna. As I dodged into Napapijri, a new store carrying hefty outerwear in techno fabrics (this was July), a strange thing happened to my sweat-drenched body.
"No, it wasn't air-conditioning, although this was one of the rare public places in Italy where there seemed to be some attempt to control the temperature. It was when my eyes looked up to a series of photographs -- vast glacial stretches of empty polar landscapes, icy white, with pockets of deep blue -- that I started to feel cooler and calmer. The display of Sebastian Copeland photographs, from his book 'Antarctica: The Global Warning,' did more than make me admire the integrity of individuals who are trying to raise awareness of threats to the environment. I also realized that those ice-floe colors of nature at its most distant and untouchable are part of a new palette appearing on the fashion runways.
"It seems as if we are all yearning for distant travel. When people talk excitedly about a vacation, it is nearly always in a place so far off the tourist map that it is uncharted territory: visiting ancient Greek ruins in Libya, swimming on the farthest shores of Anatolia, viewing the peaks of Patagonia. I contrasted that with the travel explorations of previous generations, from the Grand Tour of Europe in the 19th century to the hippie trails through India and Morocco in the 1970s. And I started to evolve a theory that vacation exploration is the spice in the fashion palette of each designer generation.
"Hence the 'I'm just mad about Saffron' ocher shades and weird mixes of dung brown and burnt orange in the '70s. They came from the Maghreb at a time when Marrakesh was the doomed Talitha Getty's hippie playground (she died of a drug overdose a couple of years after posing there for languorous hippie-deluxe photographs). Then there was the kaleidoscope of hallucinatory pattern and color drawn from India via the Beatles album covers in their guru-and-Ganges period -- long before Rajasthan had became a mass tourist destination.
"I started to think of the pale shades in last March's Marc Jacobs fall show as a reflection of a polar planet. And I noted how many of my memory clicks from the collections were the eerie pink strips of a sunset on the rim of the earth, and of the glacial tint to neutral shades.
"There was also the advent of 'green.' Our dream, now that it has mostly disappeared under urban sprawl, is of a lost pastoral world with sylvan landscapes. So leaf green is a new fashion color. Dai Fujiwara, the designer for Issey Miyake, told me that his spring 2009 collection was all about 'color hunting.' He printed 3,000 color samples, took them on a trip to the Amazon, and finally matched eight shades to jungle and river.
"Then there is turquoise, an unloved fashion color since the Egyptomania that followed the discovery of King Tutankhamen in the 1920s, when all things Pharaonic became suddenly à la mode. Now turquoise is back, in a slightly different register: the cerulean blue of the waters that you hope to find when traveling to Greek islands but are more likely to see only if you go deep-sea diving.
"Like the polar regions, the underwater world is one of the last frontiers of humankind, an area within the reach of only the most intrepid travelers. I always pause in wonder when I see the glinting colors of tropical fish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. I am mesmerized by the swaying, translucent jellies, and ask myself whether fashion designers have been inspired by these sea creatures to create the ethereal looks we see in their collections.
"In reality, such inspiration would more likely be caught on the Net than in the net. Cyberspace can create virtual journeys, giving us an enhanced vision of color and space. When I click on high-resolution sites, I am entranced by the intensity of the effect, even for familiar locations. A ski scenario suddenly shifts from picture postcard to hyperintense visions of blue sky and glacial pools. Equally awesome is the range of color available on a computer. Theoretically, it should be possible not just to enhance color, as designers do when they play with print and pattern, but also to dream of a walking trip in the Hindu Kush mountains, find the images in cyberspace and match the colors: from dream of distant travel to fashion reality at the click of a mouse."
New York Times
"No, it wasn't air-conditioning, although this was one of the rare public places in Italy where there seemed to be some attempt to control the temperature. It was when my eyes looked up to a series of photographs -- vast glacial stretches of empty polar landscapes, icy white, with pockets of deep blue -- that I started to feel cooler and calmer. The display of Sebastian Copeland photographs, from his book 'Antarctica: The Global Warning,' did more than make me admire the integrity of individuals who are trying to raise awareness of threats to the environment. I also realized that those ice-floe colors of nature at its most distant and untouchable are part of a new palette appearing on the fashion runways.
"It seems as if we are all yearning for distant travel. When people talk excitedly about a vacation, it is nearly always in a place so far off the tourist map that it is uncharted territory: visiting ancient Greek ruins in Libya, swimming on the farthest shores of Anatolia, viewing the peaks of Patagonia. I contrasted that with the travel explorations of previous generations, from the Grand Tour of Europe in the 19th century to the hippie trails through India and Morocco in the 1970s. And I started to evolve a theory that vacation exploration is the spice in the fashion palette of each designer generation.
"Hence the 'I'm just mad about Saffron' ocher shades and weird mixes of dung brown and burnt orange in the '70s. They came from the Maghreb at a time when Marrakesh was the doomed Talitha Getty's hippie playground (she died of a drug overdose a couple of years after posing there for languorous hippie-deluxe photographs). Then there was the kaleidoscope of hallucinatory pattern and color drawn from India via the Beatles album covers in their guru-and-Ganges period -- long before Rajasthan had became a mass tourist destination.
"I started to think of the pale shades in last March's Marc Jacobs fall show as a reflection of a polar planet. And I noted how many of my memory clicks from the collections were the eerie pink strips of a sunset on the rim of the earth, and of the glacial tint to neutral shades.
"There was also the advent of 'green.' Our dream, now that it has mostly disappeared under urban sprawl, is of a lost pastoral world with sylvan landscapes. So leaf green is a new fashion color. Dai Fujiwara, the designer for Issey Miyake, told me that his spring 2009 collection was all about 'color hunting.' He printed 3,000 color samples, took them on a trip to the Amazon, and finally matched eight shades to jungle and river.
"Then there is turquoise, an unloved fashion color since the Egyptomania that followed the discovery of King Tutankhamen in the 1920s, when all things Pharaonic became suddenly à la mode. Now turquoise is back, in a slightly different register: the cerulean blue of the waters that you hope to find when traveling to Greek islands but are more likely to see only if you go deep-sea diving.
"Like the polar regions, the underwater world is one of the last frontiers of humankind, an area within the reach of only the most intrepid travelers. I always pause in wonder when I see the glinting colors of tropical fish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. I am mesmerized by the swaying, translucent jellies, and ask myself whether fashion designers have been inspired by these sea creatures to create the ethereal looks we see in their collections.
"In reality, such inspiration would more likely be caught on the Net than in the net. Cyberspace can create virtual journeys, giving us an enhanced vision of color and space. When I click on high-resolution sites, I am entranced by the intensity of the effect, even for familiar locations. A ski scenario suddenly shifts from picture postcard to hyperintense visions of blue sky and glacial pools. Equally awesome is the range of color available on a computer. Theoretically, it should be possible not just to enhance color, as designers do when they play with print and pattern, but also to dream of a walking trip in the Hindu Kush mountains, find the images in cyberspace and match the colors: from dream of distant travel to fashion reality at the click of a mouse."
New York Times
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