In Praise Of Gray It’s Understated. It’s Mysterious. It’s Efficient. Is It Even A Color? With Designers Putting It To Work In Spring Fashions, Drab Is Becoming Fab
If you go shopping for some fine spring duds one day soon, you’ll run into a palatable palette of warm-weather, lighthearted colors, such as sky blue, nursery pink, lilac, white and, well, gray.
Gray?
It’s not a traditional spring hue. It doesn’t cheer the soul as readily as garden colors. It also has had bad press, often depicted as a mouse color that fades into the woodwork. And it can be a reminder of the string of gray, sunless days of winter.
Color consultant Leatrice Eiseman says word associations with gray yield implications such as “rock solid” and “there for you” on the positive side and “boring” and “mousy” on the negative. Not exactly a glamorous ideal.
In her 1980 book, “The Language of Clothes” (Random House), Alison Lurie writes that gray may indicate a “modest, retiring individual… .”
It also suggests “that one is mysterious, ambiguous, puzzling.” She observes that gray often is worn by ghostly characters as in Noel Coward’s play “Blithe Spirit.”
But never mind all that. For fashion folks the drab has turned to fab. It’s now a fresh, must-have neutral and a new option to you-know-what (black).
Gray was on the spring slate from the likes of Donna Karan, DKNY’s D, Calvin Klein and Carolina Herrera in recent runway shows.
It soaks Gucci’s machete-tailored pantsuit. A gray dress was studded in silver down the sides at Versace. In accessories, it pops up in gray pearls, thongs and sunglasses.
And Yeohlee Teng, a minimalist designer known for her quest for the modern and sleek, introduced gray flannel, a startling idea for spring but so far well-received.
Teng says gray is considered a masculine color - and in today’s busy, competitive world, there is a movement toward genderless and seasonless dressing. “It is a very efficient way to dress,” she says.
Margaret Walch, associate director of the Color Association in New York, agrees in part. Gray is a unisex minimalist color, she echoes, and the similarities in the way men and women dress are expected to stay strong well into the next century.
Unlike edgy black, gray, with its association of bankers and pinstripes, is conservative. “Going forward into the next millennium, I find that very comforting,” she says.
Another positive is that gray’s neutrality fits well into the development of textured innovative textiles, a fashion focus of the moment. The “more neutral the color, the more spectacular the finish” can be, Walch notes. Also in its favor, gray is a mercurial color, easily adaptable for casual dressing and formal nights. “And that’s the way we live,” Walch notes.
Gray already is selling well for spring and is expected to pick up momentum in the next few seasons, says David Wolfe, the creative director of Doneger Group, retail consultants.
“People were tired of black and afraid of color,” he says. “There is no question, we have a new generation of consumers who have no color confidence.”
For spring and summer the gray often is interwoven with white and for fall it’s shot with color for a darker tone. (Color analysts suggests that the darker the gray, the more powerful the psychological message; the lighter, the more innocent.)
Gray is not getting raves in all circumstances. Cheryl Holland, the vice president of merchandising for women’s wear for Kansas City, Mo., specialty store Halls, is cautious about spring grays because they could look like fall. She favors a gray softened with white, a gray with white pinstripes or a gray in soft, romantic styling.
Meanwhile, Eiseman, an author and consultant with Pantone Institute, touts gray as a background because it doesn’t interfere with any other color. But the psychological impact of gray, day-after-day dressing can be a depressant, she maintains.
It “cries out for another color,” she says. She suggests perking it up with other hot spring shades such as blue//green, aqua, turquoise, orange or yellow.
And ditto at the J.C. Penney Co., where it is viewed mostly as an element mixed generously with other colors for spring. Toni Turner, the Dallas-based fashion specialist, says: “We know gray is happening. But we don’t expect our customer to go head-to-toe gray,” she says.
She prefers to promote other colors such as taupe, butterscotch yellow, the blues and sun colors. “We’ve just told our people to be on the lookout for gray,” she says.
In any event, hold on to your gray flannels.