THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOUR
What if the colours around you had been shaping history all along? That's the quietly radical premise of Kassia St Clair's celebrated book, which explores the stories behind 75 extraordinary shades, dyes and hues. It's a far richer subject than you might expect. St Clair moves with genuine curiosity from the brown pigment that altered the outcome of battles, to the white once used as a shield against plague, from the charcoal smeared across cave walls at Lascaux to the fluorescent pink that defined punk. Each colour arrives with its own biography. Some are alarming, some tender, and more than a few are genuinely strange. The author channels a lifelong fascination with pigment and its origins into something that reads less like an art history primer and more like a series of vivid dispatches from across the whole of human experience. Fashion, warfare, politics, painting: all of it turns out to be soaked in colour in ways that are easy to overlook until someone points them out. As Simon Garfield noted, you may well struggle to look at a tin of magnolia paint the same way again. Concise, surprising and quietly illuminating, this is the sort of book that changes how you see the ordinary world.
- Author: Kassia St Clair
- Publisher: John Murray
- Genre: Design & Fashion
- ISBN: 978-1473630833
- Pages: 336 pages