It’s Time to Stop With the Bogus Colourways
In 1672, Isaac Newton refracted white light using a prism, radiating a spectrum of red, orange, blue and yellow 22-feet high along the wall of his apartment. People were transfixed by Newton’s discovery and his formula for understanding colour; it was light, and light alone, that created colour.
Since Newton's discovery, human beings have been desperate to create our own prisms of colour. So we painted, we contorted the garden hose beneath the sun, we bought cheap kaleidoscopes and expensive telescopes. We developed 3D technology and virtual reality. We took DMT. But despite whatever revelation we managed to scrawl out during the trip, we have, indeed, already hit the frontiers of the discoverable; Newton’s colour wheel has remained locked ever since his experiment almost 400 years ago.
Well, until now.
Just this month, Virgil Abloh unearthed ‘Bright Mango’ and ‘Hyper Jade’ whilst mining for ‘Desert Ore’. Gucci scaled a cliff face to pluck ‘Gorge Green’ for the Air Jordan 4. The M2K Tekno paid a visit to the ‘Yukon’ river, and ‘Ye even managed to find a new colour suiting his recent political leanings: Triple White.
These colourways are laced with the terminology of discovery. Combine the above and you have a warped screenplay for Indiana Jones — jacked up on ‘Hyper Jades’, in the shallows of the Yukon River, rambling about a new and improved version of the colour white.
But the real issue is the fact that these are all recycled silhouettes. Brands are loading up their language to put you on the edge of something new. It plays into our drive for the unknown, and in a world that has been 3D-mapped, explored, documented, trodden and Wikipedia'd, is this what we’re left with? The lazy adjective + noun combination providing a kind of momentary narcotic for our adventurous primordial instincts?
What’s next?
The adidas Yeezy 3053 Interstellar Carmine BOOST Frontier Expedition 3.0 Zero Zero Wine-Coloured Cherry Starburst Rose Comet?
You know another way to say this?
Red.
