Seasonally Affected Color Preferences
Years ago, when I was still in school, I met a young woman from Hawaii who told me that one of the hardest things for her to get used to, living on the mainland, was the association of certain colors with certain seasons. “In Hawaii,” she told me, “we wear whatever color we feel like no matter what the date is.” I suspected that the lack of four highly distinctive seasons in Hawaii, so unlike the very different four seasons that the majority of the continental USA accounted for this. Yet over the years, I have seen dark colors in Summer and light colors in Winter fashions when in earlier years dark colors were rare in Summer and, except for blouses and shirts, light colors rare in Winter. Is this an indication that seasonally oriented colors no longer exist? Or is it merely that some colors transcend the psychological inclinations of people enduring the various four seasons?
Looking at the fashion color projections for the next couple of years, I see that the trend of muted tertiary colors for Autumn and Fall and brighter but still somewhat muted tertiary colors for Spring and Summer. Is it that we have better heating and cooling systems so that the emotional impact of the changing seasons no longer influences us?
Some colors have always been outside the changeability of fashion dictates. Black and white are constants in that they are always stylish, albeit some seasons moreso than other seasons. My nieces, young women with fairly different tastes, have both (according to their mother) chosen new holiday dresses in black and white. Red, of course, is a statement color that almost every bold woman wears and that in some form or another finds its way onto the fashion scene.
On the other hand yellow remains a color that in its brightest incarnations is a color for the warming days of Spring and the hot days of Summer. Daffodils and Crocuses are not Winter or Autumn flowers but when they bloom we know it is Spring. There is quite possibly the last holdover of seasonally associated color.
As for me, I will wear any color I love no matter what the season. How about you? What color will you wear no matter what season it is? What color will you wear only in Winter or only in Summer?
August 20th, 2009 at 9:14 AM
In my dancewear costume business, I find my clients fall into two basic groups. I have a red-blue-purple group and a green- yellow-orange group. I think it’s entirely personal preference, because the only encouragement I ever give in terms of color is about size and the impression of advancing vs. receeding that color provides. The cool colors tend to receed visually and the warms advance and hence tend to look bigger. If the client doesn’t have more than a dozen gowns made, they tend to stay in their group. If they pass the dozen mark, they tend to have had at least one in every color of the rainbow by the time they hit 20. So for me, the seasonal color choice tends to be less important. But in the re-sale of the gowns, seasonal color is more a factor. I am attanding a competition as a vendor the last weekend of August, and expect to sell the “autumnal” group of gowns. Go furgure. I’m with you Patricia. I wear almost any color, purely when the spirit moves me, but my closet is heavy on the green-yellow-orange group!
August 20th, 2009 at 9:42 AM
Your observation about your clients’ preferences is very intersting. I would have thought there’d be a wide variety of colors for a large performance. I wonder if these schools center their recital/performance costumes around their chosen colors rather than, say, a story for wich they’ve cosen their music. Moreover, I wonder if this carries on to professional Dance companies as well as schools. Have you ever had cross-over schemes such as purple-green?
You’ve also started me thinking on color combinations as cultural artifacts. I am going to research that for a later post.
Thank you, Marsha for your comment!
–Patricia