Pale and Interesting

It began in Milan at men’s fashion week in June 2017, when Versace debuted a head-to-toe pastel look for Spring/Summer 2018. Then, in September, at the women’s fashion weeks, similar hues – pale strawberry, mint green and lilac – were dished out like confectionery by designers. Starting in New York, where Victoria Beckham and Tom Ford’s collections majored on the pastel palette, the trend carried on to London at Peter Pilotto, Preen By Thornton Bregazzi and Pringle of Scotland, before sweeping through Milan, with Versace’s head-to-toe blue and pink ensembles providing a stylish highlight. In Paris, even design heavyweights Céline and Hermès proved themselves not too grand for a lighter touch.

To car connoisseurs, these sugared-almond shades strike an immediate aesthetic chord. For it’s the pastel-coloured Cadillacs, T-Birds and VW Beetles of the 1950s – along with everything from fitted kitchens and appliances to full-circle skirts – that defined the era. Such was their prominence that one could almost believe pastels were invented in that decade, although modernist designers in the 1930s and ’40s had certainly recognised the appeal of these lighter shades. But the big change in the 1950s – and why we so strongly associate pastels with Cadillacs and Capri pants – is that advances in technology meant that paint colours and colour treatments for products were suddenly available in any possible hue. American families were flocking to the suburbs, and as they found more time for recreation, they also sought out a more fun, modern style of interior design for their spacious new pads. With the growth of advertising, there was also more scientific interest in colour and its benefits and appeal.

Cars, almost more than any other consumer item in this most consumerist of eras – took particular advantage. Look through any 1950s car brochure and the pretty-as-a-picture palette leaps out. If you’d ordered a Cadillac DeVille in 1956, for example, you could have selected from Dawn Gray mauve, minty Duchess Green, baby Sonic Blue or butter-yellow Cape Ivory (names that would give Farrow & Ball a run for its money). In fact, any commercially available paint colour could be specified via Cadillac’s Special Order service. The following year saw plenty more options too – your Ford Thunderbird could be Dusk Rose, a vanilla Sun Gold or Stormiest Blue. And it wasn’t just Americans who were getting in on the act. Volkswagen Beetles were Iris Blue or lilac (just like Palma Violets), while the first Fiat 500s in the late 1950s and early ’60s were available in beiges and creams, powder blue and mint. Quite a progression, when you consider Henry Ford’s much-quoted remark about the Model T on its release back in 1909: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” No doubt he was biased, having discovered that of all the colours, black paint was the fastest to dry. Nevertheless, pastels won over in the end, with contrasting interiors that made the bodywork shades really pop.

The fashion designers of the 1950s were in on the act too, dressing many of the decade’s most notable figures in sugary shades – most notably, Mamie Eisenhower. General Dwight D Eisenhower’s wife was a popular figure, whose outgoing character, overt femininity and love of dressing up endeared her to the public. She wore what became one of the most famous dresses in American fashion history to the 1953 Inaugural Ball – a pink peau de soie gown embroidered with more than 2,000 rhinestones, designed by Nettie Rosenstein. And she didn’t stop there. A woman who had carried around a colour card of her favourite shades to all the houses she’d moved into as the wife of a soldier, she decorated the White House with so much pink, it was known by the press as The Pink Palace. And her chosen shade of pastel, now firmly associated with 1950s decorating, became known as Mamie Pink.

From palest pink to mint green and icy blue, these lively shades were wholeheartedly embraced after years of dreary wartime khaki and restriction. What’s more, they reflected the comfort and stability craved by families reuniting after the conflict. Pastels were reassuring, homely and warm. It’s striking, too, that this time around, the new season’s latest pastels crush comes in the wake of a long run of earthy, 1970s-style colours in fashion, which are often thought of as difficult: brown, ochres, vivid yellows and flashes of orange and scarlet. The comparative simplicity of pink, blue and lilac feels now – as then – something of a relief.

For pastels have always evoked the same feelings – springtime, youthfulness, good weather, fun and a certain innocence – associations and sentiments which, like the colours, also go in and out of fashion according to the mood of our times. At various points, pastels will seem lame, girly or slightly embarrassing, or, as now, cool, refreshing, optimistic even. In times of political uncertainty, perhaps it’s not too far a stretch to suggest that this is the reason we’ve once again sought them out.

A more cynical view might be that designers are only too aware how well eye-catching colour does online – the world in which we all now live and shop. From retail sales to likes on Instagram, colour works. And none more so than pink, which has certainly proven its mettle via the millennial demographic – to the point where the phrase “millennial pink” has entered the lexicon. Big brands are still desperate to romance millennials. If only they could expand that love of pink into an equal fondness for, say, lilac, baby blue, mint green or primrose yellow... Well, wouldn’t that be a pretty picture?