Now I wonder whether you've written about the imaginative/bordering on bonkers world of the names of paints.
I do wonder sometimes whether names like this have nothing to do with customers as such, but are the result not just of (of course) legal requirements ("Sorry, our competitors already have a shade of paint named 'stressed garlic'"), but also of, what, boredom? desire for play? competition? or some other internal-to-the-design-world reason.
Oh, very good. I'm not sure that I personally "enjoy" the process of decoding color-name implicatures, but then again, I'm not a frequent consumer of color-themed merch.
I was fooling around with HTML colors recently and was interested? pleased? to see that one of the named colors is "Dodger Blue". Even tech, it seems, has at least a mild interest in going beyond purely descriptive names.
True story: the paint color in my living room is "Elitist." I had mixed feelings about it, but when you want a warm-ish eggshell color, you ignore the unfortunate name.
I'm trying (and, I think, failing) to make this comment not about me, but: I really enjoy reading articles like this one that are about a subject that fascinates me and is entirely outside my own sphere of knowledge. Which is to say: What a great article. Thank you.
This was wonderful! It took me back to the days when I wrote copy for Tweeds and their color names were so lengthy, inventive and bonkers that they became the subject of a New Yorker cartoon. (I didn't name the colors.)
There's a thriving market for Tweeds clothes on resale sites like Poshmark, and thanks to your comment I just discovered that someone has bought the Tweeds dot com domain and is promising (spuriously, I'm pretty sure) to bring back “the iconic 80s brand." The items on the site are suspiciously cheap, and they come in colors like Red and Yellow.
They are not Tweeds! Somewhere I have that cartoon .... and I don't remember them being a thing till the 90s. Oddly I have no memory of the clothes. They were such a delight to work for, one of the two places to tell me, you aren't asking enough, we are going to pay you more. Until they went broke.
I've only been to the 5th Avenue MD in Manhattan (now permanently closed). It was several cuts above the chaos that that is Zara, but neither intimidating nor posh.
I'm sure my posh-meter is broken, since I was an Old Navy person in the states, and I've changed over to Primark here in Europe. 😄 (I really should get away from fast fashion.)
I like when you go deep on something so small. I am still trying to figure out what happened to my favorite copywriter, at Carbon 2 Cobalt, who got replaced with someone far less poetic.
"Lavado" can also be used as a noun meaning "wash" or "washing" — that's a general thing in Spanish, they often use past participles that way — and at least one site uses some phrases like "lavado de arena" ("sand wash") and "lavado de arcilla" ("clay wash") as color names: https://www.cdslightingstudio.com/es/producto/color-arena-lavado/ . (I think the "lavado"/"wash" part relates to the nonuniformity of the color, rather than the color itself, but at least it's in the right semantic ballpark.)
So, this is a definitely a stretch, but maybe Massimo Dutti's "lavado" is a truncated version of something like that?
The only other use that I can find of "lavado" as a color is that the DRAE says that in Cuban Spanish, a mixed-race person who's very light-skinned might be described as "lavado". But I don't know if that usage is current, and anyway it seems even less likely than the "lavado de [something]" idea.
> a balance between imaginative and bonkers.
Now I wonder whether you've written about the imaginative/bordering on bonkers world of the names of paints.
I do wonder sometimes whether names like this have nothing to do with customers as such, but are the result not just of (of course) legal requirements ("Sorry, our competitors already have a shade of paint named 'stressed garlic'"), but also of, what, boredom? desire for play? competition? or some other internal-to-the-design-world reason.
I touched on the subject in an old Visual Thesaurus column: https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/where-have-all-the-ordinary-color-names-gone/
But it would be exhausting — sorry, *interesting* — to take a deeper dive. Wasn't Kory Stamper writing a book about colors and color names?
Oh, very good. I'm not sure that I personally "enjoy" the process of decoding color-name implicatures, but then again, I'm not a frequent consumer of color-themed merch.
I was fooling around with HTML colors recently and was interested? pleased? to see that one of the named colors is "Dodger Blue". Even tech, it seems, has at least a mild interest in going beyond purely descriptive names.
https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/
Yep, that vertical band in my Visual Thesaurus column is HTML color names.
True story: the paint color in my living room is "Elitist." I had mixed feelings about it, but when you want a warm-ish eggshell color, you ignore the unfortunate name.
So much nicer than Hoi Polloi White. (Yes, I read Benjamin Dreyer this morning.)
I was going to go with Economic Anxiety, but it was too white.
I was with you every single step of your color investigation journey.
Hahaha. It *was* a journey, wasn't it?
I'm trying (and, I think, failing) to make this comment not about me, but: I really enjoy reading articles like this one that are about a subject that fascinates me and is entirely outside my own sphere of knowledge. Which is to say: What a great article. Thank you.
Thank *you*, Benjamin!
Hey, you ever need a pal to go down those rabbit holes, call me!
This was wonderful! It took me back to the days when I wrote copy for Tweeds and their color names were so lengthy, inventive and bonkers that they became the subject of a New Yorker cartoon. (I didn't name the colors.)
There's a thriving market for Tweeds clothes on resale sites like Poshmark, and thanks to your comment I just discovered that someone has bought the Tweeds dot com domain and is promising (spuriously, I'm pretty sure) to bring back “the iconic 80s brand." The items on the site are suspiciously cheap, and they come in colors like Red and Yellow.
They are not Tweeds! Somewhere I have that cartoon .... and I don't remember them being a thing till the 90s. Oddly I have no memory of the clothes. They were such a delight to work for, one of the two places to tell me, you aren't asking enough, we are going to pay you more. Until they went broke.
Oh gosh, there's a Massimo Dutti at the mall I'm going to tomorrow. It looks intimidatingly posh!
I've only been to the 5th Avenue MD in Manhattan (now permanently closed). It was several cuts above the chaos that that is Zara, but neither intimidating nor posh.
I'm sure my posh-meter is broken, since I was an Old Navy person in the states, and I've changed over to Primark here in Europe. 😄 (I really should get away from fast fashion.)
I like when you go deep on something so small. I am still trying to figure out what happened to my favorite copywriter, at Carbon 2 Cobalt, who got replaced with someone far less poetic.
Thanks, Emily!
"Lavado" can also be used as a noun meaning "wash" or "washing" — that's a general thing in Spanish, they often use past participles that way — and at least one site uses some phrases like "lavado de arena" ("sand wash") and "lavado de arcilla" ("clay wash") as color names: https://www.cdslightingstudio.com/es/producto/color-arena-lavado/ . (I think the "lavado"/"wash" part relates to the nonuniformity of the color, rather than the color itself, but at least it's in the right semantic ballpark.)
So, this is a definitely a stretch, but maybe Massimo Dutti's "lavado" is a truncated version of something like that?
The only other use that I can find of "lavado" as a color is that the DRAE says that in Cuban Spanish, a mixed-race person who's very light-skinned might be described as "lavado". But I don't know if that usage is current, and anyway it seems even less likely than the "lavado de [something]" idea.
Thanks for your research! I would have found “lavado” more persuasive if the color were light tan, but it's definitely dark brown.