Do you know the color that was 'poor' and now exudes 'posh'?
In a viral TikTok video, a three-year-old boy is given a yellow toy car, and the mother throws it away because it's a harmful color. Both mother and child are dressed rigorously in beige and brown, matching the home's decor. She's undoubtedly following the trend of Sad beige mums, who believe their children are chromatically overstimulated and that they need to be surrounded by beige tones that provide calm. Mothers who spray-paint their children's toys, and even the plastic Christmas tree, to neutralize the chromaticism of the holidays. Something that, apart from demonstrating that human stupidity has no limits, reveals that, far from a pedagogical concern aligned with methods such as Montessori, it is a clear demonstration of class. And the fact is that the beige mums distill posh and that kind of idleness to avoid having to work that gives them time to paint all the pieces of a mocha-colored puzzle.
Colors are always accompanied by symbolism and psychological connotations that mutate according to the cultural context. Beige, which we now frame in the exclusive world of horse riding, leather goods, the foam of a good cappuccino, silent luxury, and brands like Fendi, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, or Prada, is a far cry from the symbolism it had centuries ago. The word beige comes from the French name for natural wool and, until the 19th century, it was a "non-color" that dressed poor people who could not afford dyed fabrics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, beige gained more presence and changed its symbolism. Apart from the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque that would frequently use it, Coco Chanel, queen of inverted power dynamics, would make beige and black fashionable and turn these two traditionally lower-class colors into two fashionable shades among wealthy women. In the context of the First World War, beige continued to gain ground with the invention of camouflage. Pieces such as the safari jacket, a sand-colored jacket worn by Western soldiers when fighting in hot areas, ended up penetrating street fashion and were tinged with glamour thanks to Clark Gable in Mogambo and at Yves Saint Laurent.
The hippies and environmental awareness of the 70s will also cause a chromatic shift, moving from the vivid colors of Pop Art to a range more linked to the earth. Iconic campaigns such as "Indi llorant" by the Keep America Beautiful association were decisive in demanding respect for nature and, consequently, making beige fashionable. A desire to be rooted in the earth that will also reflect the Zen style and New Age fashion of the 90s, with beige as a color of calm and renunciation of the non-essential.
Beige has also been used to simulate the nakedness of the female body, from the wet-cloth-effect Balmain suit that Zendaya wore in 2021 to the suit that Bob Mackie designed for Marilyn Monroe for President Kennedy's birthday. In it, she sang the Happy Birthday most sensual in history, which sparked rumors of an affair between them. A shade, beige, that we have often called "flesh color" as a testament to the racist belief that white skin is the standard of what is human, to the detriment of all other phenotypes. Something that underwear brands like Kim Kardashian's Skims or Rihanna's Savage X Fenty have tried to correct by expanding the concept nude (naked) to the real diversity of skin tones.
But if we talk about beige, we can't end the article without the artist Miss Beige, who uses that color as a symbol of the dull, insipid, and irrelevant.
With her photos and performances, she uses this color to question the stereotype of feminine beauty and turn it into a tool of punk terrorism that challenges the enslavement of the posturing culture that governs our society.
