My journey into colour
My stomach lurches as I walk into the Garden Room in this smart Berkshire hotel. The sun’s in my eyes, patterning brilliant squares across the top of a vast table piled with manuals. The room is cavernous, Georgian, with a huge and handsome marble fireplace.
Around the table sit five women: wearing crimson, ochre, cream, blue, magnificent roses on black. Their faces turn toward me and they smile a welcome, but four of them will surely be feeling just like I do. The fifth is Lucy, founder of the Lulu Boutique School of Colour.
‘Hello, come in, Caroline.’
I fumble my laptop as I sit down, say something silly. Confidence can desert you when you’re standing on the threshold of a new life.
I’m realising a long-cherished dream: training to be a Colour Analyst.
I’ve always been passionate about colour. Aged six, I was given an ice-cream dress. That was my name for it from the moment my mother fitted it onto me, à la Sewing Bee, lips anxiously pursed around a mouthful of pins. I wriggled as she adjusted the hem.
‘Can I wear it today?’
Edible shades of vanilla, strawberry pink and peaches, chocolate and cafe-au-lait. A pale green that I decided was pistachio - a mystery flavour the adults liked. A classic little-girl style, gathered skirt and short sleeves, with a bow at the waist that my mother never got around to stitching on. At least, I remember there being a safety-pin involved.
Fifteen years on, I started my first job after university, at Monsoon’s head office in Hammersmith. Another morning of nerves, a different set of expectant faces. I’d been appointed as Assistant to the Accessories Buyer, who I never got to meet during the interview process. I think I wrote a good letter, and they decided to take a punt on an English graduate who said she wanted a job in fashion.
Monsoon’s warehouse was an Aladdin’s cave of colour. Rows of pristine new summer dresses, swathed in shiny plastic. I remember the names of the season’s colours, and their codes on the paperwork. Pomegranate 30. Mediterranean shades for summer picnics. Ice-cream dresses for adults.
How many Colour Analysis students does it take to change a lightbulb? Maybe seven, to pour all the colours of the rainbow into pure white light?
I need to work a bit on that joke, but I’m not training in comedy. I’m very serious about colour and its power to captivate and delight, to lift us up in times of trouble and make us float on cloud nine. The Bauhaus artist, Wassily Kandinsky, said: ‘Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.’
The skills I’m learning in that sunny room enable me to use science and art to determine the colours that best suit my clients, providing - if you like - a set of colours that an artist might use in a portrait of them, to radiate light onto their faces and make them look and feel beautiful.
On my first day of training, I wore a lemon-sorbet shade of yellow to remind me of my little ice-cream dress.
In this blog, I’m going to explore the colour-related topics that fascinate me: in history, art, textiles and fashion, inside and outside our homes. I’m going to tell you how I get on in this new chapter, living my life in colour.