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A review by lajacquerie
The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
4.0
If you want an intro to how interesting color can be, this is a good—and good-looking—place to start.
Kassia St. Clair took a series of column's that she wrote for Elle Decoration and turned them into this book, which offers bite-sized historical and cultural reflections on a number of colors. You'll read about the chemical composition of colors (and why emerald green, for a time, was accused of murdering Napoleon), some sartorial scoops ("scarlet" was originally a type of cloth—fine and affordable only to the rich, who frequently dyed it in similarly sought-after colors, like the deep, saturated red that we now associate it with), and if you're like me, you'll never forget what hue "puce" is again (it's taken from an insulting description that Louis XVI lobbed at Marie Antoinette's new dress, which he found to be "flea-colored").
Could be a book-book or a coffee-table book, but either way it's a pretty good book. And St. Clair knows her stuff, including some helpful references for those who want to go deeper (including that master of color, Michel Pastoureau, more than once).
Kassia St. Clair took a series of column's that she wrote for Elle Decoration and turned them into this book, which offers bite-sized historical and cultural reflections on a number of colors. You'll read about the chemical composition of colors (and why emerald green, for a time, was accused of murdering Napoleon), some sartorial scoops ("scarlet" was originally a type of cloth—fine and affordable only to the rich, who frequently dyed it in similarly sought-after colors, like the deep, saturated red that we now associate it with), and if you're like me, you'll never forget what hue "puce" is again (it's taken from an insulting description that Louis XVI lobbed at Marie Antoinette's new dress, which he found to be "flea-colored").
Could be a book-book or a coffee-table book, but either way it's a pretty good book. And St. Clair knows her stuff, including some helpful references for those who want to go deeper (including that master of color, Michel Pastoureau, more than once).