Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the northern lights perform
There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes

–Joni Mitchell, ‘Little Green’

There’s a shade of green saturating the SS2022 fashion marketplace. Lush, flat, intense, evocative of emerald, it diverges noticeably from an earlier – but still very present – shade of what we might describe as Gen Z acid green, which was popularized a few years ago: a green that has offered itself as a kind of ‘apocalyptic chic’, actively courting bad taste and mocking the traditional symbolic bond between green and nature.1

Unlike that artificial green, the new green of the season registers as tasteful, probably because it chimes with aspirational visions of the natural world – be that a tropical resort, country estate, or Edenic paradise. Bottega Veneta calls it ‘parakeet’ green. It’s the green of their ‘pouch’ and ‘padded cassette’ bags (£2,275 and £2,560 respectively), of their shearling ‘resort teddy’ slides (£560), and, additionally, of their current website logo. Their ‘dot’ stiletto sandal (£845) is offered in a related shade of ‘grass’ green.

Other brands have products in the same green: I’ve found a Loulou Studio cotton-poplin mini dress with an oversize collar, a Jacquemus bag, a Loewe clutch, a Miu Miu wool eyelet-crochet scarf, Jil Sander earrings, Balenciaga X Crocs logo-embossed platform slides, a Rejina Pyo zip polo, a Frankie Shop oversized poplin shirt, a Hunza G embellished seersucker swimsuit, a Tom Ford wool and cashmere-blend cardigan, a Rixo cable-knit sweater, a Zara midi halter dress. 

When I first noticed these items, I admit that I found them appealing. But as they proliferated on the internet and in my social media newsfeed, I began to doubt my instincts. Why do I want green? What does it promise? What would it mean to buy the green of the season?

GREEN CUTS BOTH WAYS

The historian Michel Pastoureau begins his study of green by acknowledging that it ‘seems to be an ambivalent, if not am ambiguous color’.2 A ‘symbol of life’ and ‘the color of destiny’, green is also associated with ‘disorder’ and everything ‘changeable and fleeting’.3 Long devalued and disliked in the West, it has only lately become the definitive color of nature, freedom, and ecology. Pastoureau traces this shift to the Romantic period, which affirmed closer ties between ‘nature’ and ‘vegetation’.4

Writing in the wake of that Romantic revaluation, Baudelaire proposed green as ‘nature’s ground-bass, because [it] marries easily with all the other colors’.5 Rimbaud sought a lexical referent for green, associating it with the letter ‘U’.6 Sculptor and poet Jimmie Durham reminds us that our ability to distinguish green is the result of an optical experience of light: ‘a leaf appears to be green because the green part of the spectrum is reflected. We might therefore more correctly say that a leaf is anti-green’.7

Modern color theory understands green as a secondary color – or ‘composite’ color, in the words of van Gogh.8 Different amounts of the primary colors blue and yellow will produce different shades of green. The result is also affected by which blues and yellows are mixed: ultramarine, cobalt, or Prussian; warm cadmium yellow or cooler lemon yellow. Further shades arise when brightness is adjusted through the introduction of white or a dark umber.

Kandinsky, like van Gogh, understands green as the product of yellow and blue, and his relationship to green is itself mixed. ‘Green is the most restful colour that exists’, Kandinsky tells us.9 It can be ‘represented by the placid, middle notes of a violin’.10 Neither statement is exactly a compliment. In his opinion, green ‘becomes wearisome’ to look at unless you’re an ‘exhausted man’ who needs to convalesce.11 Kandinsky shows his true colors when he declares that green is just like the ‘bourgeoise’, ‘self-satisfied, immovable, narrow’.12

Adorno criticizes all art that ‘childishly delights’ in bright color – an indictment that would surely include SS2022 green.13 ‘The injustice committed by all cheerful art’, he continues, dragging us down with him, is ‘an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain’.14 Yet the author Ann Wroe reminds us that ‘Dante used the colour of young beech leaves for angels’ wings in heaven’.15

Derek Jarman associates green with tranquility, hope, youth, and renewal, citing the fourteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino’s idea of green as a source of aid and support: ‘While we are strolling through all this greenery we might ask why the colour green is a sight that helps us more than any other’.16 Ficino’s statement appears to reflect a common position held in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance period: the idea that green was beautiful because it was located in the middle of the chromatic range of colors, and therefore associated with ‘cultivated temperance’, virtue, and the golden mean.17 Occult science of the seventeenth century asserted the therapeutic benefits of looking at green – claims that have been corroborated by modern research in environmental health.18 Still, Jarman acknowledges, ‘not everyone finds solace in green’.19

SURREAL GREEN

‘Subjective and objective, physically fixed and culturally constructed, absolutely proper and endlessly displaced, colour can appear as an unthinkable scandal’.20

In this statement, art historian Stephen Melville calls our attention to the contradictions that arise when we start to think about color not just as a pigment or artistic resource, but as a social and cultural phenomenon.

Substituting Melville’s term ‘colour’ for ‘green’ allows certain perceptual tensions I’ve been circling around to come into focus. I imagine the revised statement as a Lawrence Weiner installation, huge sans-serif block letters stenciled in SS2022 green on some gallery wall:

One question this statement raises for me: how might the tranquil, placid, nurturing, and therapeutic green of art history – the essentially temperate green of both Kandinsky and Jarman, despite their divergent relationships to the color – transform into its opposite? In other words, I’d like to try to demystify the process by which this historical green has been ‘displaced’ in some sense by our current culture, giving rise to the minor, yet symptomatic, ‘scandal’ that is SS2022 green – Bottega green.

To do this, we need to return to the parakeet green Bottega Veneta shearling slides and the relationship between texture, color, and functionality they triangulate.

Consider how fluffiness allows this green commodity to unsettle an outdoor-indoor binary we normally take for granted. On the one hand, the lush greenness of the Bottega Veneta resort teddy slide evokes the freedom of bare feet in grass on a summer day. Sink into green. Green between your toes. On the other hand, the slipper is genuinely hygge – a material enclosure of cozy shearling: form triumphs over accessory color.

Given the tension it sets up between parakeet green color and fluffy shearling texture, the Bottega Veneta slide verges on the surrealist: its overtly mischievous, hyperbolic relationship to utility enabling it to tap into an art historical tradition that likewise plays with social norms. Yet I’ve always understood the surrealist impulse as stemming from the willed desire to counter and not just unsettle utility – to resist social incorporation and normativity.

Swiss-German artist Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), composed of a fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, offers us a clear example of this counter-utilitarian impulse. Here, the ritual intimacy of lips on cool porcelain is substituted for precisely what one shouldn’t experience while drinking tea: the soft index of creaturely surface, of an animal’s sensuous coat, with its connotations of sexuality and desire. Eroticism blends with revulsion, as the viewer imagines placing their mouth against a furred edge. Both joke and high art, Oppenheim’s teacup insistently refuses use, subverting an archetypal bourgeois occasion and its established etiquette.

Unlike Oppenheim’s Object, the Bottega Veneta slide is alluring at least in part because it functions no differently than other slippers. Yet, like the fur-lined cup, it serves as the site of projection for conflicting bourgeois desires. We might conclude that the creation of this shearling slipper involves a theft of surrealism for the purpose of financial gain. Or is theft too strong a word, if we accept that surrealism, like capital, works by tapping into repressed urges?

The Bottega Veneta ‘pouch’ further underscores the ambiguous relationship between these commodity forms and Surrealist art. Soft and smooth, its organic amoeba-like leather form hides a clasp, rather like a Venus flytrap or other plant form – masking its functionality while covertly reminding us that it possesses the bag-defining capacity to both hold and be held.

But there is a larger problem here: the potential oversaturation of the market with green. The irony of too much green at a time when that’s exactly what we need. Here, we’re forced to confront what’s been facing us all along: the fact that SS2022 green is an obvious signifier of sustainability, an association that is fundamentally at odds with the projected vision of last season’s green shearling slipper languishing discarded in the back of one’s closet.

The cycles are predictable and even inevitable. But I want to propose a special aptness and even dystopian horror associated with SS2022 green – the shadow of its lush utopian promise. ‘Chromatic experience’, for Julia Kristeva, ‘is the place of narcissistic eroticism (autoeroticism) and death drive – never one without the other’.21 Kristeva emphasizes color’s potential for inversion, which, she argues, doesn’t inhere in color itself, but in us – in our warring ‘proclivities’. Given that we associate the idiomatic phrase seeing red with a strong affective response of anger – with loss of proportion or reason (hence, the metaphorical blinding by color) – what does it mean to see green?22

Green as envy, as dissembling. The color of money in the United States. As Josef Albers reminds us, color has deceived ‘continuously’ throughout history.23 Why should the green of today be any different?

NOT JUST A COLOR

There’s a part of green that is not a color at all but a set of cultural coordinates. As the great semiotician Umberto Eco argued, ‘When one utters a colour term one is not directly pointing to a state of the world (process of reference), but, on the contrary, one is connecting or correlating that term with a cultural unit or concept’.24

Eco’s statement is particularly useful for thinking about what it means to say or use ‘green’ as part of a political, ecological, or economic discourse. In the phrases ‘Green Party’, ‘Green Planet’, and ‘Green New Deal’, ‘green’ becomes enmeshed in a linguistic network that allows cultural meaning to be made.

For Eco, not only does culture ‘interact’ with the ‘phenomena’ of color; it ‘frequently overwhelms’ our individual chromatic perception.25 If we accept the broad contours of his argument, the question that would seem to follow is: are current political and ethical imperatives to be ‘greener’ in some sense overwhelming green? Do they overdetermine or supplant older cultural understandings of this color? What I am trying to understand are the complex aesthetic, affective, and economic effects of these imperatives – an understanding that may help us to disentangle aesthetic greenness as an entrepreneurial venture from the urgent politics of climate justice.

Consider: a commitment to green. Greening as becoming. Green as capital, as moral capital, as political capital. Greenwashing. Green, the color, consumed or dematerialized by green as a signifier of sustainable growth – and thus green as a promise of futurity, of a better world to come. A promise that is then rematerialized in the form of an economic investment.

Terms proliferate. Rewilding. Net Zero. Carbon Neutral. Sustainability. Roland Barthes: ‘we must remember that color is also an idea (a sensual idea)’.26 Green has come to function as a sensuous index of regeneration, implying a commitment to future generations. But a problem is encoded in this valuation: green as deferment, signifying absolution in the world to come. Green as a form of guilt-assuagement.

I want to consider the idea that our guilty relationship to the environment, which can’t be disassociated from the cultural matrix in which green is situated, leads us to act in counterintuitive and illogical ways, tempting us to buy ‘green’ commodities, including the luxury items I’ve been discussing, that we otherwise would not. The genius of fashion has always been its capacity to demand our anxious presence at the expense of a genuine encounter with history. ‘I have known persons so anxious to have their Dress become them’, Coleridge once wrote, so as ‘to convert it, at length, into their proper self, and thus actually to become the Dress’.27 Could green become me? I certainly tell myself it can. I want the reassurance that I can and will become greener.

Consider: green at the limits of semiology, tied to a complex economy that condenses instinctual drives with ideological attitudes of the given culture in which it exists, is exchanged, and is valued. Buying SS2022 green clothing and fashion accessories can be understood as the displacement of a genuine wish to be or go ‘green’ – to achieve a more sustainable, ecologically conscious way of living.

GREEN IS ALSO REAL

Virginia Woolf: ‘Green in nature is one thing, green in literature is another’.28 How do we think this relationship between green as language, as signifier, and as idea, on the one hand, and ‘green in nature’, on the other hand?29

Green in nature is multiple, unsettled, kaleidoscopic, and difficult to pin down. Tim Dee describes it as ‘living growth’, ‘raw electric fluid’, ‘surge and buzz and flow’; ‘like light’, it is ‘hard to speak of’.30 The experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage highlights this estranging and sensuous multiplicity in his 1963 essay ‘Metaphors on Vision’, asking: ‘How many colors are there in a field of grass to a crawling baby unaware of “Green”’?31

If we are to attempt to think the relation between green in nature and green in art, we also need to consider the unstable tactile reality of green as pigment, which ‘humans reproduced, made, and mastered late and with difficulty’.32 Neither Jan van Eyck nor Nicolas Poussin, for example, mixed blue and yellow pigments to create their greens. Instead, they enlisted a range of green pigments, including earth greens, malachite, artificial copper greens, along with the use of glazes, to create their paintings.33

In van Eyck’s era, as Anita Albus explains, green was particularly challenging to work with. Pigments developed out of plant juices were intense but unstable. Pigments derived from green earth were weak. Malachite (a green copper carbonate mineral, opaque and related to emerald in tone) and chrysocolla (a blue green crystal, with a high copper content) were also limited in their capacities to produce color. Artificially developed mineral colors, such as verdigris and copper resinate, were likewise unstable and incompatible. A ‘great deal of skill and resourcefulness was needed’, Albus concludes, to ‘produce the brilliant green of a meadow, a parrot, a coat, or a dress’.34

Still, we can’t get away from the fact that the choice of green pigment to color a dress, as in the case of van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), is itself highly symbolic.

In the Middle Ages, marriageable young women often wore green dresses to signify hope for the future. During this period, green also became the color of pregnancy.35 We see this in The Belles Heures (1405-1408/9), an illuminated manuscript commissioned by Jean de France (duc de Berry), in which the pregnant St. Elizabeth wears a loose green dress.

The Arnolfini Portrait, then, offers a masterful affirmation of the symbolic association of green with the promise of futurity. In his illusionistic painting, van Eyck represents a pregnant woman swathed in the luxurious folds of a full-length, fur-trimmed green dress. Her hand is held by a young man – her betrothed or new husband. These figures are further entwined in a small mirror placed strategically in the composition’s center. In this miniature, mirrored version of the double portrait, we can just make out the woman’s body, which is no longer facing us, her emblematic color muted but still discernable – green reflected at the point of vanishing.

GREEN TODAY

Green paints and dyes are now synthetically produced on an industrial scale. This development is a direct consequence of the nineteenth-century revolution in coal chemistry and corresponding acceleration of fossil fuel use, which led to radical changes in color manufacture. In 1834 the organic compound aniline, a waste product of coal, was first extracted in Germany. As Michael Taussig observes, this substance ‘not only spawned all the colors of the rainbow within a few decades, but, as a result of the discoveries in chemical color, massively expanded the depth and reach of capitalist industry’.36

Indeed, for Taussig: ‘The brave new world of artifice created by chemical magic was to Germany what empire was to Britain and France’.37 Central, here, was the German conglomerate Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG, known as IG Farben, once the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world, and later infamous for its involvement in the Holocaust.38

Walter Benjamin warns us of fashion’s complicity in the industrial production of color, claiming that it ‘couples the living body to the inorganic world’.39 While the green of the season offers the naïve reassurance of a symbolic commitment to nature, history reminds us of the concrete links between coal and color in the modern-day chain of production.

American painter Peter Halley made this severing of color from nature the foundation of his artistic practice. In the early 1980s, Halley began using unmixed Day-Glo paint colors and commercial products to create his paintings, a practice he continues today. Halley’s avowed ‘non-judgmental embrace’ of commercial materials stems from two related beliefs: first, that this strategy ‘can flip around to become a critical act’; and second, that ‘one’s psychic life’ is ‘inseparable from one’s social identity’.40 Embracing obviously artificial colors is, by implication, an acceptance of art’s embeddedness in contemporary economic reality.

In his book Chromophobia (2000), Scottish artist and writer David Batchelor traces how color was marginalized in Western history, coming to appear ‘inessential’.41 This devaluation, he argues, masks ‘a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable’.42 But does the proliferation of SS2022 green suggest that we are beyond the era of chromophobia as Batchelor theorized it at the turn of the millennium? Have we entered a new era, an era of chromophilia? Halley’s paintings ask us to entertain this counternarrative – or, at least, to consider the possibility that ‘distaste for vivid color’ has always been ‘an unstable mix of attraction and repulsion’.43

Any encounter at the borders of the chromphobic-chromophilic also raises the specter of orientalism, fetishism, and cultural appropriation at the foundation of traditional Western aesthetic norms. A law of 1720 passed in Great Britain, for example, made it illegal to use or wear ‘all printed, painted, flowered or dyed calicos in apparel, household stuffs, furniture or otherwise’.44 While this ‘Calico Act’ was framed as economic protectionism, it can also be understood as cultural discrimination that sought to preserve Western aesthetic values against the threat of ‘effeminate luxuries of the east’.45

The British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare asserts that color can be ‘a vehicle for subversive exuberance that challenges race, class and taste as a radical political statement, a sort of colour insult to viewers with so called “good taste”’.46 Yet if color always carries ‘cultural and colonial baggage relating to taste and class’, as Shonibare asserts, then this ‘baggage’, which often takes the form of marginality, can also be appropriated and monetized. Taussig goes so far as to describe color itself as ‘a colonial subject’.47 The green of the season does not just serve, then, as a signifier or promise of sustainable futurity. It is also an example of the appropriation by capital of a type of color historically outside the bounds of Western decorum.

We might conclude that the impulse behind SS2022 green is at once utopian-idealist and rapacious-materialistic: encoded in it is a tacit desire to be nature. This is nothing if not a Faustian desire, which blends certain archaic or repressed forms of religiosity and veneration of the natural world with a scientific commitment to the possibilities of replacement, substitution, and synthesis: immaculate conception as artificial conception.

Today, the digitization of the economy has engendered a relationship to color still further alienated from the body and the natural world. To hold, stroke, slip on, or adorn oneself in SS2022 green – a green programmed to mimic the lush greenness we imagine nature to be in its ideal state, the green of palm trees, rain forests, water plants – is necessarily, then, to participate in a form of dissimulation at once individual and deeply social.