Blue is in fashion this year…
was the title of an essay by Roland Barthes in 1960.
But it seems like blue is in fashion… always.
A YouGov poll in 2015 claimed that blue was
the world's favourite colour, and we see it
everywhere in the world's favourite place…
social media.
Not to mention messaging apps, email - it's
truly the colour of digital connection, even
of the links you can click on.
And this 10-hour video of a blue screen has
over 800k views.
You could say blue is in our… in our…
genes (jeans)
It's even described by musician Regina Spektor
as 'the most human colour'
[music] "blue lips, blue veins; 
blue, the colour of our planet from far far away."
So I wanted to take a tour around our relationship
to blue - not only the intrinsic qualities
of blue, but things that happen to be blue,
that we happen to call blue.
Like, speaking of tourism, we'll of course
start with something that isn't actually blue at all:
The Blue Guides - a series of travel
guides first published in 1918 and the subject
of another Roland Barthes essay.
Not that I'm a fan or anything...
Barthes criticizes the reductive cultural
selectiveness of The Blue Guide, claiming
it "hardly knows the existence of scenery
except under the guise of the picturesque."
replacing the exploratory potential of travel
with the more prescriptive reality of tourism.
It's an exchange that's repeated in the iconic
cerulean blue speech in The Devil Wears Prada,
which similarly exposes the guiding hand of
homogenous authority:
[The Devil Wears Prada] "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 a sweater
that was selected for you by the people in
this room."
Truly, influencer culture has a rich history.
But just as the people behind the blue sweater
are obscured from us - in documenting only
art, architecture and archaeology, Barthes
suggests that The Blue Guide too obscures
the human: "the human life of a country disappears
to the exclusive benefit of its monuments...
To select only monuments suppresses at one
stroke the reality of the land and that of
its people… and as a consequence, the monuments
themselves become undecipherable…
What is to be seen is thus constantly in the
process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes…
the very opposite of what it advertises, an
agent of blindness."
Though maybe it's fitting that the artefacts
chronicled in the Blue Guides are frequently
manufactured, because blue has no place in
the natural world.
There are hardly any blue flowers or fruits,
and of the earth's 64,000 vertebrates only
two have blue pigment.
And where blue is present, it too is constantly
in the process of vanishing.
These blue morpho butterflies aren't really
blue, it's just light refraction!
And to think we made you an emoji!
And the sky isn't really blue, nor is the
sea - that's just how our eyes perceive their colour.
And even that perception hasn't always been
expressed as 'blue'.
Many ancient civilisations had no word for
blue, like how Homer's Odyssey famously described
a "wine-dark sea".
We might associate blue with clarity, like
clear blue skies - but clearly clear blue
is lie, a conspiracy peddled by butterflies
- there's nothing clear about blue at all.
In the comedy special Nanette, Hannah Gadsby
draws attention to the many conflicting faces of blue:
[Nanette] "… it really is full of contradiction.
Blue is a cold colour, it's on the cold end
of the spectrum.
But the hottest part of the flame… blue.
If you're feeling blue, you're sad.
But optimism: blue skies ahead.
A blueprint is a plan but if something happens
that's not on the plan, where does that come from?
Out of the blue."
So if there's any defining quality of blue,
it's confusion - and it did give its name
to one of the most confusing choruses of the 90s:
[Eiffel 65 - Blue] "I'm blue da ba dee, da ba die…"
But as well as or maybe because of the absurdity
of these "lyrics", there's an oppressive uniformity
that - at the risk of being
overly dramatic about a novelty 90s pop song
- is almost overwhelming, to the extent that
this song has always made me kind of uncomfortable
(even before I saw the music video, which
I think frankly would make anyone uncomfortable).
Or maybe a better example of an overwhelming
blue is Derek Jarman's 'Blue' - a film from
1993 whose 79 minute runtime visually consists
of a single static shot of blue, audibly accompanied
by voiceover and a musical score.
And, to again borrow from Barthes' assessment
of The Blue Guide, this blue, too, is a true
"agent of blindness" - as the film documents
Jarman's experience with AIDS, the illness
causing his impending death and partial blindness,
his vision now impeded by blue light.
But this is a blindness marked by presence
as much as absence, and its void is one of
liberation more than oppression.
A review by Gridley Minima states that, in
this blue: "we are free to become what only
death can make us, human, and hence free to
realize the true potential of our estate.
Beyond words, beyond names, beyond subject
and object."
[Derek Jarman - Blue] “In the pandemonium of image, I present you with the universal blue.
… an infinite possibility becoming tangible...”
It's then in this lack of meaning, this infinite
possibility, that blue can also begin to represent
the creation of meaning.
Barthes examined the phrase "blue is in fashion
this year" partly to demonstrate the arbitrary
nature of fashion and taste-making - a colour
selected for you by the people in that room.
The phrase suggests "that there is a kind
of physical causality between fashion and
the colour blue, … it is all about changing
an arbitrary link into a natural property…"
A way of guiding fashion, or a way of finding
meaning - meaning in connections as arbitrary
as a travel guide that happens to be named
blue, an essay on fashion that happens to
concern a phrase containing the word blue,
or a quote from a film about a sweater - which
was originally a plaid skirt in an earlier
draft of the script - but was eventually given
the defining characteristic of being cerulean
blue.
Because humans don't really cope well with
lack of meaning.
We can't even cope with da ba dee da ba die,
given this extensive list of misheard lyrics.
But I don't think revealing that these connections
are more forged than innate invalidates them.
Writing to fellow artist Emile Bernard, Paul
Cézanne said that "blue gives other colours
their vibration." and Bernard continued that:
"in nature it is always found over and around
objects and they merge into it the more they
draw away…"
It's both a unifying and distinguishing force
- describing a world of associations, relationships
and connections.
In a biography of Cézanne's work, Kurt Badt
translates Fritz Novotny's description of
Cézanne's blue shadows as "the veins of the
pictures design" - like blue veins pulsing
under everything in an imitation of our own
quest for connection.
Blue connects us over skies, seas… twitter
- or as Derek Jarman put it: "Blue transcends
the solemn geography of human limits."
And this is maybe what makes it the most human
colour.
It represents not only our physical bodies,
but also our desire to push beyond these limits,
to even see our planet from far far away.
Blue is our search for meaning, our lack of
meaning, and the meaning we create.
And while it doesn't organically appear in
nature, it does appear in us, in how we perceive
the world - the sky, the sea,
what leads us to call the place we inhabit
the 'blue' planet.
[Music: Blue Lips by Regina Spektor, performed
by Grace Lee] "Blue... the most human colour,
Blue... the most human colour,
Blue... the most human colour,
Blue lips,
blue veins,
blue, the colour of our planet from far far away.
