D.V. by Diana Vreeland

Author:Diana Vreeland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1984-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Violet is a color I really like. But then I like almost every color. I have an eye for color—perhaps the most exceptional gift I have. Color depends entirely on the tonality. Green, for instance, can look like the subway—but if you get the right green…a spring green, for instance, is marvelous. The green of England and the green of France are the most beautiful spring greens. The green of England is a little deeper than the green of France, a little darker….

Red is the great clarifier—bright, cleansing, and revealing. It makes all other colors beautiful. I can’t imagine becoming bored with red—it would be like becoming bored with the person you love.

All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, “I want rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple”—they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.

I loathe red with any orange in it—although, curiously enough, I also loathe orange without red in it. When I say “orange,” I don’t mean yellow-orange, I mean red-orange—the orange of Bakst and Diaghilev, the orange that changed the century.

At the same time, I love nineteenth-century colors. I love the names of the colors of men’s clothes of the Regency period—buff, sand, fawn…and don’t forget snuff! My God, there were words in those days. But where is snuff today?

Balenciaga had the most wonderful sense of color—his tête de nègre, his café au lait, his violets, his magentas, and his mauves. Every summer I’d take his same four pairs of slacks and his same four pullovers to Southampton with me. Then…one year I went down to Biarritz. I laid out exactly the same four pairs of slacks, exactly the same four pullovers…and I’d never seen them before! It’s the light, of course—the intensifying light of the Basque country. There’s never been such a light. That was Balenciaga’s country.

Lighting is everything in a color. It’s affected by the way the sun shines in certain countries. And the farther north you go, the more sense of color you get. I’m not talking about little gray stone Scottish villages…but the roses of Scotland are so rose-pink! And the purple heather—the violent violet of heather under the blue Scottish sky…I adore Scotland. If only I didn’t have to sleep there at night—it’s so bloody cold.

I don’t like southern skies. To me, they’re not…enough. Although the most beautiful sky I’ve ever seen in my life was in the tropics, over Bahia—until I saw exactly the same sky over Hong Kong. I’d been told in Bahia that the only other place where that special blue existed was China, although they couldn’t be farther apart. Bahia is practically on the equator, and most of China is very cold northern country; but the blue of the sky is identical. It’s a cold blue of hard enamel, and it’s too beautiful.

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