A rose pink by any other name...
could actually be mauve
My favourite clothes shop in the world at the moment, is a vintage emporium in Hastings Old Town, where I live, called Hawk & Dove. Check it out on Instagram to see why I love it (there are various posts below, you can click through on).
Owner Jade (I don’t know her surname and the marvellous thing is, because this isn’t for a newspaper, I don’t have to find it out, I can just call her Jade la la la).
Anyhoo, Jade curates the stock in her wonderful shop entirely according to her own inclination at any particular moment, which is the secret to wonderful clothes shops.
Which I do like to call boutiques. That’s a word we need to revive, right now.
So, Jade’s boutique has a point of view – her point of view – which I always realise on entering, is exactly the one I didn’t know I needed to have until that very moment, but then immediately do.
As a result of such realisations I now have something of a collection of tie-neck silk blouses because Jade made me realise I needed them and that when worn with the kind of trousers she sells (men’s…) they wouldn’t make me feel like Margaret Thatcher.
Instead, they make me feel like a haughty rebel. A rock chick who has raided her granny’s wardrobe. I almost feel French.
Jade also has an amazing talent for making her stock, sourced from many disparate and highly secret sources, seem as though it’s a designed ‘collection’.
It’s curated.
So that’s why I love Hawk & Dove – to the point where I have to limit my visits, for fear of reckless spending – but then the other day something on her Insta sent me off on another fashion tangent. (Tan. Jon.)
It was a story post about a silk evening scarf (the one up at the top there…) that is clearly heaven and would create a similar glamour/louche effect to my pussy-cat blouses, but the thing that set me off was how Jade named the colour: Oyster.
I squealed with delight when I read it because the first thing I thought when I saw the image was: ‘What would I call that colour? Rich beige, ultra-light taupe, baby mole…?’
Oyster is just perfect.
Colour naming is an artform – and I don’t just mean the fun I’ve been told the employees of small cosmetics companies having naming their lipsticks, or even the names of Farrow & Ball paints, which have become a kind of currency in the UK.
‘We’ve done the kitchen in Down Pipe’, translates as: ‘We spent £80,000 on a Neptune bespoke and the house is now worth £2.5…’
Equally, the words ‘Oh, you’ve gone Dead Salmon,’ as someone walks into your hall, instantly telegraphs that the speaker smugly resides in a particular sub-sect of the British Middle Class.
The colour-naming I’m thinking of is choosing the perfect words to describe a colour, so that the person reading will immediately be able to picture the exact shade.
It’s one of the main skills you need to report from the Paris and Milan fashion shows, as I did for many years and I came to relish doing it, which was lucky because my heyday of that gig was before you could look at entire collection online very shortly after the show.
Back then, there would be a very few newspaper photos and that was all the public would see of the clothes in the new collections for six months, until they appeared in fashion magazines, at the same time as they went on sale in the boutiques.
So it really mattered if you said a Dries Van Noten print had a background of Granny Smith, New Leaf, or Mint Tea. Three quite different dresses.
What made fashion-show colour naming even more fun, was my great friend Mark Connolly, who was then Fashion Director of US Conde Nast Traveller and my great companion at those shows. He is soooo good at it,
‘Was that dark green in Dolce, in the highwayman coat, Forest, or Pine Needle?’ I would ask him, as we sped off in his chauffeur-driven car (my expenses budget was more public transport) from a show in an old warehouse on the edge of Milan, en route to dinner,
‘Holly Leaf,’ he would reply instantly, always spot on.
If you can make it funny as well, that adds to the general lark of life, but it’s rendering the shade almost visible to the eye through words that’s the beauty of it.
It became a great game for us, that we still play, with our runway-analysing days well behind us.
Back then we’d play it post-shows in the bar at Le Meurice (where he had a pricey penchant for a champagne cocktail), or while scoffing tagliatelle with hare ragout at Bagutta (our favourite Milan restaurant, now sadly closed).
Now we’ll play it sitting in the bar in Flannels in Liverpool, where he very coolly, lives; walking along the street in Hastings; strolling up Dean Street; or wherever we find ourselves.
For eg:
Him: ‘What colour’s the hair on her?’ Me: ‘Weetabix.’
Me: ‘Name the shade of those nails…’ Him: ‘White Handbag You Dance Round.’
Can you see those colours? I can.
We had a particularly memorable game recently in the Tunbridge Wells branch of TK Maxx (we know how to live) where literally all the clothes on the rails were in shades of human flesh (see my earlier post, The Tonal Neutrals Nightmare).
‘Scouse Girl After Four Days in Magaluf,’ he said holding up a T shirt in a particularly pink shade of nude.
‘Tequila Slammer Hangover,’ I rebounded, selecting a flesh-tone legging with a grey tint.
It’s a great game, fun for all the family, and educational, because it gets you thinking about the world around you in a mind-exercising way. Which is important, because it’s so easy just to let it drift past, like that old-school moving scenery on a roll.
Naming colours reminds you to notice everything. And I might have to spend the rest of the day doing it, to stop myself strolling down for a browse in Hawk & Dove…
Love this article and love reading paint colour names. Years ago we bought our first brand new car, getting rid of our old Datsun for $800. The first and only potential buyer from our SMH classified asked one question only. What colour is it? Beige I replied. Ahh he responded - is it boring beige? Is there any other kind I replied. He didn’t ask anything else as obviously does it work wasn’t important and hung up. So boring beige is the best descriptor for that non-descript colour. What a fun job and game you had picking colour descriptors.
Would like to see some more photographs of that shop, please, Maggie. The colour naming reminds me of working on Follow Me magazine in Sydney in the Eighties. The sub-editor asked the whole floor: "Does anyone know a butch word for powder blue?"