Chromophobia
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Hey there. I just wanted to say this is the last episode that I'm going to put out this year. It's been a lot. Thank you for listening. It has been such an honor to be in your ears, and I hope you enjoy this finale. I'll have an addendum at the end about the future of the show and little ways you can help if you'd like to hear more. But that's all I'll say for now. Okay, here we go.

When I was little, I thought that my favorite color was blue. But it was interesting because I had never seen blue. And so I have no recollection of why this was the case. Matthew has never seen blue. Nor has he ever seen any other color.

ever. "I have no perception of it because I've never seen it. I don't imagine it because I don't have the capacity to imagine it. I can list you names. I know we have fuchsia and we have burgundy and those I think are shades of red, but it is a huge memory strain. It's another list of vocab to memorize."

When I, as a blind person, am trying to understand the world of clothing that is out there, it's like dealing with a language that you never will be able to speak. But Matthew still tries to speak this language.

He still has to get dressed. Because everyone's looking at you. You're a blind person in a sighted world, like it or not. As a blind person, I remember I asked my dad when I was little, he was saying that I had to turn my head to face people, which was a foreign concept to me because the ears are surround devices. And I remember I asked him, Dad, why? Can you explain why I have to do this? And he said, you know, just because you can't see sighted people doesn't mean they can't see you.

We don't want to admit it, but fashion is such a big part of the world around us. Because, I mean, as a blind person, you read about stuff. You know that there are colors. You know that some work with others. And you know that others don't work with others. But it's very hard to understand. Goodness, sorry, I don't know how to phrase this. There is sometimes a feeling that there's a whole new world out there.

A world that you will never quite be able to fathom. Like many people trying to access another world and speak another language, Matthew gets by with his phone. Okay.

It says everything around me is black, brown. There's an app that identifies colors. Teal? What is teal? My wall is teal? Okay. But even with the color identifying app, that doesn't mean that you're free to point to anywhere and can trust the app. No. I went to music school. And when you go to a conservatory or a music school, you have these performances. And I...

was in my dorm room and I was putting on clothing for a performance and I was using a phone to identify colors. And the phone kept saying, "Gray, gray, gray." And I was thinking, "You know, I don't have any gray shirts. What is going on?" And I Skype my mom and I say, "Mom, please, could you help me? I have a performance in 10 minutes. I don't have any gray shirts, do I?" And she says, "No." And I say, "Well, my phone keeps telling me that everything's gray."

And she says, honey, you need to turn on the light. And I said, is it off? And she's like, yes, I can't see a thing. So I turned on the light and miraculously the phone reads, this is what. So, you know, if you're really trying to say something and express yourself, it's hard to do that through an app. Like, yes, I can go, I can scan all my clothing with my phone. I can make these big lists of this works with this, that doesn't work with that. But it's just,

It's so hard to comprehend. It's impossible. Color! I mean...

I don't think Matthew is alone. Even in the sighted world, it's hard to tell if colors clash or not, or if certain colors go or work. What the heck do I know? I'm blind. Matthew mostly just uses pre-made outfits that have been vetted by a sighted person so he knows they work together, even if he actually doesn't know what colors some of the garments are. I don't remember color of pants. I can go now and scan color of pants.

But it's ridiculous. But my question for Matthew is a question that I also have for myself, which is, could you opt out? Could you just not wear color? And I ask this as someone who is currently wearing all black and white and has been wearing black and white more or less for the past week. It's what I do when I travel. It's what I do when I want to make sure everything matches. It's what I do when I want to feel sophisticated.

Because it seems to me that maturity is grayscale. That the thrust of life could be characterized by a loss of color. That I was born into the waiting embrace of a pink and blue blanket, and then shed my bright colors out of childhood into my monochromatic, serious adulthood. Until I shall be put to rest in a plain white shroud. Seems to be the way it goes anyway, right? So...

With fashion, I don't know, is color really necessary? Maybe we could all just let it go? After the break.

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So here's an example of where colorful clothes come from. And that's like so much water. This is the size of a dumpster, probably. Yeah, this is 800 gallons of water. So can you describe it for me? It's like bubbling like a sauna. It's bright blue and it's got like a churning wheel in it. Yes, it rotates back and forth. So it agitates the water constantly and it's just filled up with the water and the garments. We put the dye inside.

This is the last dye house in New York City. In the five boroughs, yeah. There's a few in New Jersey, but the last one that survived in the boroughs. This dye house, called Not Just Lace, was established back in a time when New York still had a bunch of dye houses, back when New York was an affordable place to make garments, which was honestly not that long ago. Because, I mean, this industry was booming here in the 80s.

80s or 70s. There was dye houses everywhere in New York City back then. Not Just Lace is a family business. Chris took over the company from his grandfather. And Not Just Lace was founded in 1976.

But, you know, a lot's changed. And we quickly changed our business model kind of to upscale specialized work. Now, not just lace, dyes, garments for very high-end New York designers. Ones who can afford domestic prices. You name the designer, I'd probably work with them, that's simple.

And the bonus is this dye house can move super quickly. Not just lace can turn around a dye job within one week and then there's no need to wait for shipping. A lot of people send Ubers and we run out and drop it off and they pick it up. The small warehouse is piled high with plastic bags and it looks like a bunch of clothing donations or yard sale fodder, but it is so not. Like there's a clear plastic bag full of like green sweaters.

It looks like a pile of crap. That's got to be worth like $2,000 or something, I would imagine, if she's selling those for probably like $200-something per jumpsuit. And this is the funny part to me. Some of those clothes piled up in those plastic bags are actually being sent back to the dye house a second time.

designers will send back garments that didn't sell to get them re-dyed. They sent it back here. I guess they haven't sold them to the store that well. Does that happen often where they're like, this color didn't work, try again? Oh yeah, constantly. Just last week, Chris dyed a garment four different colors, three of them sold, one did not. And so the ones that did not, which were light blue, were sent back to the dye house. We ended up dyeing half of them to a faded black and some of them to a darker navy that...

I guess people would maybe sell a little better. Maybe subconsciously I could have guessed this, but it's wild to hear in stark business terms that the color of clothing very directly impacts what we buy. So I was looking for a jacket, right? And I saw this blue micro puff down jacket, nice lines, looked really great.

Tried it on, I looked at the price tag, I'm like, "Whew, well maybe not today." Put it away, and I'm like, "What's over on this sale rack?" I found the exact same jacket, same line, same season, same everything. But it was yellow. It was 75% off. Color can be the difference between selling a garment and not selling a garment.

And this is what Dr. Julie Lamara teaches her design theory and design fundamentals students at Utah State University. So you want to sell something, right? You're making a product for people to buy. But what makes the blue jacket so expensive and the yellow jacket so cheap is just perception, right? It's just taste. Which is fascinating because there are actual price differences in different colors, at least from a dyer's perspective.

Yeah, I mean, I'll go in stores and I'll be like, oh, that's crappy dye job or, oh, man, that's an expensive color. And the crappy dye job and the expensive color could be on a rack right next to each other, maybe on versions of the same garment. But they're not priced differently by color. If they were, a garment that was ivory or cream might cost more because colors like that are actually expensive.

hard to make. They're very tricky because you're adding yellow and they could sometimes look too yellow and it's hard to make it look not yellow. Olive green is also a difficult, subtle color. Gray is a very difficult color just because you're combining so many colors to get it. And then you just have the easy one, like black is pretty standard. It's just like a black dye.

But even an easy color like black might not take a lot of skill to mix, but because its hue is so deep, it can take four or five hours in the dye machine of soaking and retouching and re-soaking to make that color truly stick. So richer hues can also be more expensive. Like a rich cobalt blue or rich scarlet reds. Those are very nice colors that are like hard to achieve. Isn't that funny?

I don't tend to think of colors as being hard to get. I think I'd assume they sort of get printed out and I assume we can just sort of get whatever color we want. The idea that certain colors are more expensive or harder to get is something that sounds ancient, you know? Perhaps you've heard

One of the historical examples about how some color used to be considered fancy because it used to be rare. Maybe you heard this story about red, which used to come from cochineal bugs, or purple that used to be made from mollusks, or blue that was made from indigo, or black that was made from logwood. All of these colors at some point were elite or royalized.

royal colors because their ingredients were hard to get, they required a lot of skill to make, and they required tons and tons of time. It just seems like every color was a wealthy person's color because they were all hard to make. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, exactly. Alden Wicker is an investigative journalist and the author of the book To Die For, spelled D-Y-E. But it's a very apt pun because right at the dawn of industrialism,

"die" was in very high demand. It was democratized, but what I'm starting to think about this word, like, we're going to democratize this, we're going to democratize that, usually what that means is that somebody's losing.

And the most obvious example of this was the color green, like a bright, brilliant green, which at one point was also a color reserved for rich people because green used to be made from this complicated blend of indigo mixed with florals and it took a lot of skill and a lot of time until a mixture of arsenic and copper made it possible for anything to be green.

So, arsenic green exploded. It was on wallpaper, it was on all these fashion items, including these floral head wreaths. So there were these workshops where they would, all these young, poor girls would make these floral head wreaths and they would have arsenic all over their hands, their skin would be peeling, their nose would be peeling, and then one young girl ended up dying.

on the job, in the workshop. This worker died on the factory floor frothing green foam from her mouth. This was actual poison. And so of course, even if you just wore one of these arsenic wreaths, you could also feel it. It would make your forehead break out if you wore these head wreaths and everything.

Why do you think green is worth it? You hear about all these things about your forehead breaking out and people literally die. And why was it worth it just chasing a color? I guess, well, a couple of reasons. One is that the people who were suffering were poor and you don't really see them. And wearing green meant that you were wealthy and powerful. And so when everybody was able to get green in this simple way, people were not going to say no to that.

But arsenic green was just the prelude to the artificial color that would actually change everything. Purple used to be really hard to make. You had to make it from mollusks. And this game-changing purple wasn't just any purple. It was...

Mauve was invented as the first coal tar color. So coal tar was the byproduct that was made when you distilled coal to make gaslight. And everything was lit with gaslight back in the mid-1800s. So there were barrels and barrels and barrels of this oily tar just lying around. And if you were, say, a scientist who wanted to experiment with coal tar, you just get barrels and barrels of it for free. It was trashed.

And so a young chemist named William Perkin wanted to use some of this tar to try to synthesize a cure for malaria. And in the process of tootling around, searching for something that would be like quinine, he created a beaker of brilliant purple. And this was actually not a big deal at all.

Chemists came across new colors at random almost every week and just as easily dismissed them as an irrelevant side effect, Simon Garfield wrote in his book about Perkin called Mauve. But such colors were considered to have no practical use. So it wasn't like Perkin uncovered something wild and new. This was just one colorful beaker among many. What was novel was what Perkin did with it.

The context here is that in the 1800s, chemistry was functionally still in its infancy. It was almost seen as this philosophical calling. It was about discovering that air is a mixture of gases called oxygen and nitrogen. It was about finding a cure for malaria. It was about experimentation and exploring the world around you.

Which is why it was so shocking in 1856 that this promising young scientist, William Perkin, who was 18 years old, walked away from established scientific study to sell stuff. He turned to the world of commerce.

He believed he could sell his purple tincture to clothing manufacturers to color ladies' dresses, and everyone thought this guy was being an idiot. Even Perkin himself had this little moment where he was like, what am I doing? Why did I abandon my respectable career? And then, two years after his discovery, in 1858...

Queen Victoria wore mauve to her daughter's wedding. And Empress Eugenie, the most influential woman in the world of fashion, decided that mauve was going to be her color. And then suddenly, mauve was on every glove and skirt in London. It was mauve mania.

And to give you an idea of how earth-shakingly huge this was, a 1906 headline from the New York Herald read, "Coal tar wizard transmuted liquid dross into gold." This was alchemical. This was Rumpelstiltskin. So they took coal tar waste

that nobody wanted, this sludge, and they turned it into a color moth. Apparently the Victorians pronounced it "morf." And it was taken up by the textile industry, incredibly profitable. As Garfield writes, "Perkins' discovery affected the whole nature of scientific investigation. For the first time, people realized that the study of chemistry could make them rich."

And then a lot of the chemical companies today and pharmaceutical companies today got their start as dye manufacturers. After mauve, coal tar chemistry also led to artificial scent, including the production of artificial musk, artificial violet, rose, jasmine, and wintergreen. Coal tar also inspired leaps in immunology and chemotherapy. But mauve had opened the floodgates.

And so, of course, more bright colors started to come out. The next year, this lilac-y mauve was coming out of this factory, and then not long after, all these other colors started coming out. Manchester Brown, Bismarck Brown, Mardiis Yellow, Magdala Red, Nicholson's Blue, Hoffman's Violets. Each new color was like this

Big splash. Regulars at the Black Horse Pub near the Perkin factory would watch as the Grand Junction Canal turned a different color every week. And at that point, what's so interesting is that before that, the average person would have access to essentially just

earth colors. And so all these magazines started talking about like, well, now that you have access to an infinite rainbow of colors, it's really easy to mess it up. So color theory came in, right? Obviously, like painters had had color theory and rich people had had color preferences for their gowns and their parlors.

But now everyone, not just the elite, had to understand. To learn what goes with what. Like you can't just vomit everything together. Now you have to know how to put your colors together. And so a bunch of books came out to tell you the language of color. And what messages colors send when they're grouped together. So this is...

Kobayashi's book of colors and it goes through 130 basic colors and then it combines them in over a thousand different ways. I mean, do you think it's like correct? Well, this is what I'm testing. Right. So my research is kind of delving into that space of like, why are we attracted to certain color palettes, not colors specifically, but palettes, groups of colors together,

versus others. Dr. Lamara flipped through her copy of Kobayashi's Book of Colors, this really famous color guide, which shows you combinations of colors that look dandy or Western or Japanese or tasteful. Like, I don't know if I consider that a tasteful color combination. That looks pretty 80s to me. That book is 30 years old and it kind of shows.

It's proof that the language of color really depends on context, even an individual color, let alone a combination. And a really simple, explainable example of this is text.

which for a long time was associated with arsenic. It was seen as the color of poison and toxic stuff. Like you think of Disney, old Disney flicks where you like pop the thing and like, ooh, like the skull and crossbones come out because it's that green goo. And it wasn't until the 80s that green starts making this reemergence as being fresh and being healthy for you, right? Yeah.

And as meanings and associations change, colors come in and out of style and drive the trend cycle and drive consumption. And so caring about color or caring about fashion, keeping up with the stuff came to be seen as something feminine, something immature, something queer, something foreign or exotic or quote unquote primitive.

It's not for the serious-minded person with other things to think about. Those serious people needed something more dependable and timeless. What are, like, the timeless colors? I think that's a relative question, right? And so that's going into... Come on! Okay, Dr. Lamara can't speak authoritatively about her findings yet. Her research on color is still ongoing. But in her own life...

Surprise, surprise. She mostly wears black. I joke with my students. I have my dark blacks and my light blacks. Very rarely will I go outside of that comfort zone unless I really want to make a statement. Like everyone's afraid of color. I don't want to say everyone is a blanket statement, but at least all the people I talk to for my fancy pants little podcast. Your listeners can't see, but I'm wearing beige and white right now. Alden Wicker.

and I just so happen to match in our colorlessness. We're both sitting here in beige. That's weird. Actually, we kind of match. I wonder where we live. Could it be Brooklyn? Yeah, right? To think that people clamored to get their hands on anything mauve.

By the mid-20th century, that paradigm totally inverted to look more like where we are today. If you go to the market where everything is like a few dollars, you see these things, they're all synthetic colors and it's just all the colors together. And then you go down the street to like the luxury artisan boutique with the white plaster walls and everything is earth dye and natural. In white living rooms and white coffee shops,

In galleries of white walls, in parties in the Hamptons clothed entirely in white, or fashion weeks where everyone is clad in black, you see it, the turn away from color itself.

which is a movement that actually had been in place since the days of arsenic green and mauve. Mauve in particular opened this Pandora's box of all of these different colors that are made from various petrochemicals that as ingredients have been linked to a whole range of toxic effects, right? Because by the end of the 19th century,

Some doctors were starting to say, "Hey, we're seeing reactions. We're seeing really bad skin reactions from these colors." Around this time, the British Medical Journal noted that the cheaper magenta and scarlet fabrics are much sought after by the poorer laboring classes. And the journal insisted that the safest plan in regard to clothing is to discard all transient colors. Avoiding color became a matter of health and taste

and class. So you see these loops where people get really into bright colors and then they like pull it back. So as bright colors became available to everybody, the upper class wanted them less. This fear of bright, loud color, at least in high culture in the West, is a phenomenon that the Scottish artist and writer David Batchelor has dubbed chromophobia. This idea that bright color is unserious and

unsophisticated, unnatural, unpure, and even unhealthy. It's like, you know, organic whole food. It used to be like peasant to have like whole foods and country bread, and then everybody had access to white bread. Now it's like an elite thing to have peasant country bread. And so you see the same thing in natural fibers, in earthy colors and everything.

But, I mean, there's also a good reason for it. I mean, it kind of is like whole grain bread in that undyed organic clothes are healthier for you.

Because the health problems that came from color and from petrochemical dye wasn't just reserved for the coal tar colors of the Victorian era. To this day, we still put ourselves at risk for colorful clothes and synthetics and all the commercial chemical products that mauve hath wrought. And now most of what we buy today has some sort of petrochemical in it. But that's after the break.

It was like a biblical plague had been unleashed. All across the sky,

On multiple flights from different airlines, flight attendants were reporting strange ailments. It would start with rashes or a mild cough or they would get puffy eyes and then it would progress to losing all their hair. Alden Wicker says that around 2012, flight attendants were reporting anxiety, racing hearts, severe nausea, trouble breathing. Some of them would just have to be taken off the plane because they were anxious.

in respiratory distress or having severe nausea or flu-like symptoms. Nobody knew what was going on. But as flight attendants started talking to each other and comparing their symptoms, they realized where it might be coming from.

The airline attendants would get their uniforms at the same time, right? They would roll them out on a certain day and then they would start getting sick. It had been a big year for new uniform rollouts. Yeah. So in 2012, Alaska Airlines attendants got new uniforms. Then I want to say it was American Airlines and then Delta and

and then Southwest. And also I will say that it was three different uniform makers. So there was Twin Hill, Cintas, and Land's End. So looking at this whole thing, it's like, okay, this isn't just like one brand. This isn't just one airline. And then the next question is, okay, is this just an employee uniform problem or is this an everyone problem? And my answer is it's an everyone problem.

The difference between airline attendants and non-airline attendants is that most people wear too wide a variety of things to know if we're having a reaction. You would almost have to go on an elimination diet to figure out, like for your wardrobe, to figure out what is causing this. And then also, like, you're not going to be able to compare notes with other people the way the airline attendants are. These flight attendants were wearing their new uniforms every single day.

And these uniforms were especially souped up. They had everything. They were bright, eye-catching colors. They were anti-wrinkle. They were waterproof, anti-odor, anti-fungal, fire-retardant, stain-proof. These are all features that appear on all kinds of garments, maybe not all at once like they were on the flight attendant uniforms. But these are not rare. All of that can also be found in normal clothing.

I have to admit, when I first read Alden's book, I was like, "Oh man, that sucks. Like, you sensitive people have to be careful out there. But not me. I'm hardy. I'm not even allergic to anything." And then,

It's like I manifested it. Quite recently, I wore this slinky synthetic dress to a wedding and I danced up a storm and I sweated all over it. And then a few days later, I broke out in this huge itchy rash. And I definitely wouldn't have known what it was from if my dress didn't have a very distinctive asymmetrical neckline and the rash was exactly in the shape of the dress. And the dermatologist told me never to wear that dress again.

Clearly something in the dress had messed with me, but I don't know exactly what it was. I think some of it is dye. I think it's just the layers of chemistry. Many of our clothes are now functionally chemical products, and we really don't know what's in them. There are four

40 to 60,000 chemicals used commercially today. The vast majority of them have not been tested for human safety. I just want to give a caveat here. I'm not trying to be alarmist. I don't want to be like, "Oh, chemicals, they're all bad." No, not at all. There are petrochemicals that are just fine. Like Vaseline, for example. It's made from straight up petroleum. It even smells like gasoline when you open it up. And that is totally safe and fine, you know? Like, some chemicals are fine.

But with garments, it's becoming this numbers game. Like there are so many different petrochemicals in our clothes, in all of our dyes, in all of our performance material, in all of our preservatives. In all likelihood, we just don't know what they are.

not even the brands really know what's being put on their clothes as they get trotted around the web of the global supply chain. There's bolts of fabric that are sitting in a warehouse, so they put pesticides and biocides in the warehouse and then chemicals get put on, chemicals get stripped off by other chemicals. But even the stuff that the brands intentionally add, like dye,

The dye companies don't publish a list of ingredients. And for good reason. Like, if they just like opened up their ingredient list, they know that some place would just copy them. Dye is all proprietary. So they don't share what is in these barrels of chemicals that they send to the dye houses. So even a fancy upscale dye house like Not Just Lace doesn't know what's in their dyes. There's reactive dyes, there's dispersed dyes, and there's acid dyes.

Like the chemistry behind them, I don't really know. And so the dye houses don't really know what's in here. And then consumers really don't know what's in there.

Let's say I wanted to figure it out, right? I want to learn what was in my party dress that made me break out in hives so that I could avoid it in the future. People hope that there's a little strip that you can just like dip and get an answer. Um, no. If you want to get a garment tested, good luck. A special lab would have to run tests for every conceivable phthalate and ingredient.

It's laborious. And it's prohibitively expensive. I paid almost $10,000. $10,000! To get five things tested for a very narrow list of stuff. There's probably a lot more that's in there that I would never know unless I spent $100,000. So it's not only a mystery what chemicals are being put on our bodies,

It is often a mystery what chemicals are being dumped into the earth and the water supply.

Because there are a lot of dye houses out there that do not do what Not Just Lace does. We had to write a full 50-page report and we had to come up with a plan on how we were going to treat the water. The biggest factor in dye, and in fact one of the biggest factors in clothing manufacturing, is the local water supply and what dye companies dump into it.

Not all dye companies. Not all dye companies. They're definitely good dye houses. Yeah, for sure. I visited one in India, actually, and they had to charge more for their product. Good dye houses charge more. And it's not because they hopefully use higher quality dyes and do better work and pay their workers fairly. No, the thing that defines a good dye house, the thing that makes them expensive, is

is the water use, the water purification. We are far past the days when you could just grab a beer to watch the canal outside the Perkins factory change color every week. I mean, that totally still happens, just now it's in other countries where we can't see it. And so once the EPA in the 80s started being like, hey, you can't do that anymore and you have to clean it up, the dye manufacturers moved to places with fewer regulations. Dye cleanup is regulation.

Really, one of the big reasons why clothing manufacturing has left the United States and Europe. That combined with the fact that labor is more expensive here than in other places. A dye house that doesn't have to pay for a comprehensive filtration system has a lower overhead and they can charge less. So who ends up taking up the cost?

dye houses, right? Dye houses, they pay to get certified and inspected. They pay for the more expensive certified chemicals that come from the reputable chemical companies. May I ask the company that you buy your dyes from? Oh yeah, there's Dyestar. Okay. They're probably one of the biggest suppliers. They're a reputable chemical and dye manufacturer. So if you want good dyes, you would probably go to Dyestar.

I will say that we are always learning new things about the health effects of various chemicals and the environmental effects of various chemicals. And I cannot say that everything they're doing is perfect. So, like so much in fashion, this is so annoying. It's like, you just got to find brands you trust, which is wild because at least in the US, they're like almost entirely self-regulating. You have to find who reports that they have good practices.

It's this leap of faith to a degree. You have brands like Levi's, Eileen Fisher. Always Eileen Fisher. H&M's really good about it, surprisingly. You have all these different brands that are like spending millions of dollars getting things tested and they work with reputable dye houses and...

They're on it. You can check and see if there's a little sign on the site that says Oikotex. That's the company that issues the clean textile certificate, which is entirely optional. You also have luxury brands that do nothing. You have...

Like children's brands who do nothing. You have mid-market brands who do nothing. So this isn't just like if you spend more money, you're safer. It really has to do with the leadership and the structure of the brand and whether they think this is worth caring about. And a lot of brands can absolutely get away with not caring about it. Even...

If you and a few thousand of your coworkers wore the same uniform every single day, and many of you were starting to develop rashes and breathing problems and nausea and complained loudly about it to management,

companies could still decide not to care. Alaska Airlines started calling it an individual sensitivity, which means like, it's your fault, not ours. Eventually, airlines couldn't ignore the symptoms anymore. They got too severe. And you know what really tipped them over the edge? So all these airline attendants are complaining, right? And then a pilot...

said it was a safety issue. And a few days later, American Airlines caved and said they were going to replace the uniforms. Perhaps it's just too bizarre to admit that clothes, like food, are made of ingredients. And some of those ingredients have the potential to mess with you, particularly if they're synthetic, particularly if they're brightly colored. But I'm not trying to say that our closets should be tan and white, that we should play it safe and avoid color.

I don't think chromophobia is the answer. When considering large entrenched problems, both in and outside of fashion, I often think about the conceit of this book from 1978 called The Starship and the Canoe. It's a fictional story about the astrophysicist Freeman Dyson and his brilliant son George, who's a recluse who lives in a tree.

and they are both facing the breakdown of the environment, and they both have their own solutions. The astrophysicist is working on a rocket to take him to space, and his son is working on designing a giant seafaring canoe. The metaphor is clear. When faced with a tenuous present, do you choose the starship or the canoe? Do you trust that innovation and new technology can present answers, or do you think that the solution is to revisit the wisdom of the past?

They both have their pros and cons.

But let me first present you with a kind of starship. Our technology is dyeing textiles, what is normally done using water and a lot of chemistry. And we developed and designed a technology that we can do that without water. Dyeing without any water at all. You have your dyed fabric without all the chemistry and without water. So it never has been wet. And instead of water, using...

Carbon dioxide. There is a hell of a lot of CO2 in this world, and you can use it in a good way. It's like turning coal tar to mauve. It's all chemical. It's Rumpelstiltskin. My name is Eren Sievers. I'm the technical director of Daico Textile Systems. Daico is a Dutch company. And in the Netherlands, like the U.S., there used to be a lot of textile industry there.

There used to be a ton of dye houses. That's all gone. And the textile industry left the Netherlands for a lot of the same reasons it left the U.S. By the 90s, it was too expensive for dye houses to pay labor and to regulate and manage their wastewater. It became too expensive to clean it. That is completely overcome by using this technology, because you've taken out that problem. In fact...

We are now installing a machine in the Netherlands, so soon there will be a company dyeing fabrics again in the Netherlands. Isn't that cool? This technology could completely change the geography of clothing manufacturing. Although for now the system is a little pricey for the average dye house. But eventually, Ernst hopes, dye houses' operating costs could be much lower because this system uses much less dye and again, uses no water. You can tell your...

Grandchild, do you know that in the past, they actually misused water for these kind of industrial processes, putting all kinds of chemical shit in it so that you cannot even live in it? The fishes could not swim in it and you could not drink it anymore. Madness. But if you're skeptical that this miraculous machine could solve all these problems, let me also present you with a canoe. So who are you? What are you doing?

clearly like some nut right no really can i ask you to introduce yourself okay my name is my name is sally fox sally fox is a bit of an icon in the sustainability world i mean listen to alden wicker's reaction when i brought sally up legend i love her tell me what do you think of sally fox i think it's amazing sally fox is a plant geneticist so i've since 1981 been doing

traditional plant breeding on naturally colored cottons with the goal of having it as a viable alternative. Cotton is not just white. There could be below the dye

world of color. There's no reason we should not be using natural colors of natural fibers. So what is the range of colors that you've gotten cotton to? So far, the range of colors. Cotton always grew in these colors, but what I've done through classical plant breeding is introduce brown and green and now just recently that sienna red.

Through her company Fox Fiber, Sally Fox sells textiles that are pink and green and khaki with no dye. The cotton is just grown that way. To be clear, the colors are still a bit muted. Sally has been breeding them bolder and bolder and bolder over time.

But still, when you think about what the dye house said at the beginning about how complex and difficult it is to mix a delicate ivory or an olive green, it is so cool to think that some fabrics can just get born that way. So were they bred out? Why do we only know white cotton? A funny story. So the guy that invented the spinning, machine spinning, Sir Richard Arkwright, he was a wig dyer. And it's really easier to dye white

And so he designed the machinery around the qualities of the white cotton grown at the time. And so white cotton was in demand for all the spinning machines. And as industrialism picked up, there was an even greater desire for cotton to be white so it could be more easily standardized. And this is where the racial metaphor makes itself.

In the southeastern United States, slaves had gardens and they were not allowed to grow white cotton in their gardens. They could only grow colored cotton. And in fact, all the colored cotton that I started with in my breeding program came from

the Cajun people who still grow these cottons, but there are naturally colored cotton, strong naturally colored cotton traditions in Peru, in South America, and all over the world. Color is not at odds with nature. Color is not at odds with health. Color is culture. All kinds of color, not just the naturally occurring ones. Because the truth is,

We don't really have to choose between the starship and the canoe. It's not either or. So I'm not saying you shouldn't have any other colors, but I'm saying why don't we use this as a way to use less dyes?

There could be a world where you dye a dark Sally Fox fabric with dyeco technology and get this beautiful, deep, rich hue with way, way fewer chemicals and no water. And these two companies are just two of the many, many, many other startups and natural dyers and weavers and fabricators experimenting with new and old ways to address color.

to incorporate it into our clothes, to make it better. Because it's not an option to just let it go. I would want to. I would want to opt out of color, but I can't because as a performer, it's more visually engaging. It has more pop and flavor and spunk to it. You know, Matthew's a musician. He wants to relate to people on and off stage. Colors are relatable if you want them to be relatable. People have learned about colors because...

You've been taught about colors since you could comprehend things. And they have become the quintessential part of people's lives. Because ultimately, why are we using fashion as mediators? We're using fashion as a mediator to talk to people and to learn from them and to learn about them and to engage with them. Even if you can't see it, even if you think you don't care about it, fashion is a mediator. And color is part of that world. And so for Matthew...

It's worth the effort. It's just a desire to learn more about the world, learn more about the parts of the world that I cannot see and do not understand and will never understand because they were not designed to be understood. Color is a language that works in metaphor, a set of references to constantly shifting circumstance. It is not meant to be codified and translatable and perfectly understood. Not by Matthew.

but also not really by me or by anyone who can see the light as it bounces off a shirt or a dress or a tie and feel in that calibrated reflection of its light rays magically inexplicably drawn to it

Articles of Interest is written, performed, researched, edited, sound designed, mixed, and mastered by me, Avery Truffleman, with research help from Ellie Gilbert-Bair. I use original music from my brilliant friend, Ray Royal, and the theme songs are by Sasan. Matthew Shiffrin also has a podcast. It's called Blind Guy Travels, and guess what? It's on the same network that I'm on, Radiotopia. So Radiotopia.com.

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