A 1970 colour television test at the Mt Kaukau transmitting station - but are New Zealanders increasingly seeing the world in monochrome? Photo/Supplied
From kitchens to cars to Kardashians, the world is becoming less colourful. What's driving the shift to neutral - and what effect is it having on our psyche? Kim Knight meets the individuals raging against the beige.
On Day 270, Rose Austen wore yellow.
"When you think your outfit is inspired by daffodils in spring, but actually it is just camouflage for a meeting room at work," she posted on her Instagram account.
Click through the photographs. Austen at home in the Wairarapa, posed by a mid-century light fixture. Austen at work at Treasury, leaning against the canary-bright wall that matches her Zara jacket and Merchant heels.
"People still have a view of the Treasury from the 1970s," says Austen. "Men in beige suits or knee-high socks . . ."
On New Year's Eve, Austen took a sartorial stand. For the entirety of 2022, the team leader at a Very Serious Public Service Department resolved to wear all colour, all of the time.
"I was kind of known for wearing colour in the office, but as soon as the day was grey, or I was feeling a bit down or uninspired, I'd reach for the same black jacket, the same black pants. I set myself a resolution to retire black."
Cobalt blue wide-legged pants. Vintage tartan maxi skirts. Pink houndstooth blazers. Austen started playing around with different combinations and her ambition grew. Now, she aims to finish the year with 365 unique looks documented on @colourthecapital.
"I look around the train in the morning and there are a lot of greys and blacks. When we're feeling low, or want to look more professional, we go for these really neutral colours. Sometimes it's appropriate - but often you can push it.
"You can wear colour and have a professional career and be taken seriously. Just because you're wearing Barbie pink doesn't mean you are dumb!"
Austen says an unexpected benefit of colourful clothes is their power to connect.
"For women, especially, clothing is a natural area of small talk . . . it makes networking easier. You're figuratively wearing an icebreaker! I was at a women in leadership summit recently - the first big post-Covid conference I'd been to, and I was a little nervous. Wearing colour meant people came up to me and it gave me the confidence to do the same to others."
Key to her experiment, says Austen, is that it reflects her reality.
"You look at overseas influencers and there are some phenomenal people who wear brilliant colours, but you're thinking, 'You didn't actually have to do anything today - you didn't have to hit any meetings or actually live a proper life and make a salary.' It was important to me to show that this is actually what I'm living my life in . . . it's important to me that I'm seen as being a capable, smart person first, and then colourful afterwards."
In 2020, data scientist Cath Sleeman published research suggesting the world was becoming less colourful. Pixel analysis of photographs of more than 7000 everyday objects from the United Kingdom's Science Museum Group's collection showed a rise in grey since the 1800s. Sleeman noted a corresponding decline in brown and yellow (likely linked to a switch from wood to plastic). She observed the introduction of very saturated colours from the 1960s but said, overall, the most common colour detected (in 80 per cent of objects) was dark charcoal grey.
When a graph of that research reappeared recently on Twitter, it sparked references to everything from 1970s bathrooms and kitchens (remember when "avocado" was a colour and every hallway carpet featured orange swirls?) to the dulling down of the global vehicle fleet (last year, international automotive paint company PPG reported 35 per cent of all new car builds were white).
Is the world really becoming less colourful? It depends on who you ask - and where you look.
On the day Reset calls Louise Hilsz, she is wearing yellow corduroy pants with a matching jacket, a yellow, pink and blue floral fur hat with a matching bag, a pink Minnie Mouse T-shirt and blue sneakers.
"Ideally, when I'm dressing, I want at least five colours. I feel you've got to balance it out. If I've only got two colours, I have to rethink the outfit," says the 37-year-old stylist.
Hilsz recently had her kitchen cabinetry wrapped in turquoise vinyl. Her dining chairs are pink and, any day now, she'll take delivery of a yellow and purple couch. Once, when she was working backstage on a live production, she received a call sheet asking her to wear all black.
"I rang up and was like, 'Is this for real?' I had to go out and buy something to wear."
Perth-born and Auckland-raised, Hilsz says the New Zealand colour palette can be "pretty bleak".
"It kills me. Unless you've got a lot of money and can afford to get stuff custom-made, you can't walk into an interiors store and find a colourful sofa or a colourful television cabinet. It just doesn't exist. I've searched high and low.
"You walk into a store and it's just beige, with a little bit of brown and there might be some khaki green, but it's very neutral . . . There's this aesthetic that is very tonal and beige. For some reason, New Zealanders love looking the same."
Hilsz points to the influence of influencers - reality television star Kim Kardashian, for example, and her famously neutral aesthetic - and the aspirational nature of stores like Superette "where you wear your denim and your white shirt and you have this white candle and this sandy-coloured cushion and people see that and think, 'I need to be part of that tribe' and then you can go into Kmart and see they have a cheaper version of it . . . are people looking for some calmness? I'm not sure - but there's a lot of it out there."
She wonders if "post-pandemic" the world might literally brighten. Luxury brands are leading the way - think Louis Vuitton's "pop pink" denim or Dior's raspberry sandals.
"The Barbiecore trend is huge in fashion and beauty . . . you can see it in the high-end places, right down to your Portmans, Glassons and Zara."
Once you start wearing colour, says Hilsz, "there's no going back. People look so much better. It amazes me they just default to black. It's so drab."
And it's not just our clothes. Internationally, one report revealed that, in 2021, some 78 per cent of the world's vehicle fleet was white, silver, grey or black.
The most recent local research into car colour preference, based on registrations at the end of 2018, showed silver and white vehicles made up 48 per cent of this country's fleet, followed in popularity by blue, grey and black. The least popular colour, with just 7462 registered cars on the road, was pink. (Jeep Wrangler recently offered international customers a vivid "Tuscadero Pink" option - but the shade was not made available in New Zealand. One importer told Reset that while they'd sold 27 of the all-terrain vehicles in "Hellayella", Kiwis were, for the most part, "a conservative lot when it comes to car colour choice - lots of shades of grey, silvers and white for sure.")
A quarter of a century ago, Resene released its first "whites only" colour chart. Today, its top 15 best-sellers are all variations on that theme (double alabaster, for example, is described as a "bisque white"; rice cake is a "sharp, clean yellow-white").
Marketing manager Karen Warman (who signs her emails with a green signature) confirms "whites and neutrals have always dominated - because even when decorators opt for colour, they usually use a lot of whites and neutrals for areas like ceilings and background walls".
But: "The types of neutrals we are using have changed over the years. Even they, in most cases, have become less coloured."
Warman says a trend to lighter neutrals is possibly driven by changes in how we use our homes - more of us work from home and later into the night, for example - and she also wonders whether the bright, white light of computer screens might have recalibrated our default understanding of "neutral".
Current interior paint trends include colour blocks that wrap around a corner, tone-on-tone colour layers, deeply-hued shades on panelled and battened walls, and a coastal or "Hamptons-style" palette with dusty, duck egg blues instead of light greys.
And on house exteriors?
"Most will keep bright colours to areas like a front door or outdoor furniture. Kiwis tend not to want to stand out from their neighbours. Often, we will decorate to fit in."
Alex Fulton, a Christchurch-based interior designer and a former guest judge on The Block NZ says, simply, "people are frightened of colour". She once installed neon orange kitchen benchtops in a 1903 villa renovation; her current home features a yellow couch and a vivid green tartan carpet.
"I always get the 'you're so brave' and that's a real head-scratcher for me because it just seems so natural. These colours feel right in the space. They're calming."
Fulton says "colour makes you feel". It contributes to our emotional state, it acts as an identifier (on everything from flags to uniforms) and it can remind us of experiences, the past, a person or a memory.
"I'm still not a huge fan of maroon, as that was an old school uniform colour."
She disagrees the world has become less colourful.
"It's probably more true to say that colour directly correlates to mood. We have gone through some pretty dark and scary years with this pandemic and I'm sure it would be reflected in how colourful the world is. But we're a hardy bunch . . . post lockdowns there has been a surge in home renovations and updating of our interiors.
"We've spent so much time in our spaces, we really have come to appreciate how and what we live in. We need colour to lift mood, that's just psychology 101. Not many people hate rainbows."