La Fashionaria, 09/23/2007 - Miss navy blue? Patience!

You’ve got your black, your brown, your bone and your ... hey, wait a minute, where the heck is the navy?

That’s what New Mexico Magazine editor Tricia Ware and her friend Linda Smith inquired in recent e-mail to La Fashionaria. OK. It wasn’t that recent, it was last fall. I was busy, blah, blah. But now it’s fall again and I’m starting to see what they were talking about. Good old neutral navy blue seems to have been replaced by metallics, red or even green.

Ware wrote that an Internet search using the keyword “pea coat” revealed color options for women including red, black, olive, cream, brown leather, black velvet, blue plaid, gray herringbone, chocolate brown, camel, and zebra print. “But no navy!”

As Ware pointed out, navy is as versatile as black, and looks better with denim. Plus, I look good in navy.

So I asked Margaret Walch, director of the Color Association of the United States. What did happen to navy?

“The first answer is, navy is still with us,” began Walch in her upper-crusty East Coast accent that sounds European. “Navy the standard still exists. It still represents the form of authority that came from the naval branches of the military.”

But navy, in these neoliberal times, is not quite green enough.

“It represents to me an establishment that maybe we question now,” said Walch, who after writing three books about color and spending 21 years as director of the Color Association still talks about color with a dreamy reverence. “It just doesn’t seem to have relevance.”

Walch may be partly to blame for its disappearance. Her organization sells seasonal color forecasts to people in all quarters of the fashion world. The colors her group picks this year may well be the colors you and I end up wearing next fall.

“We have new ideas about what saturated blues are going to look like,” she said. “And they are not going to look as authoritarian as navy. New blues are water blues, the yellow blues that you see in the water. The tendency now in fashion is to have a more complex color. If someone walked into this office in a navy-blue suit, it would seem very passé, very conservative. Like a beige suit today would be very boring.”

Well, like Tricia and Linda, I love navy. But now is not navy’s time.

No matter. Let those new watery blues have their moment. Navy will be there when they’ve gone the way of Day-Glo.

Navy is a real color. A standard color. Color No. 80174 in The Standard Color Reference of America, Tenth Edition.

Navy is one of only 200 colors in the book, which was first published in 1915, the year the Color Association was founded. Only those colors with lasting power make it into the book, which helps people who design flags or uniforms be sure they’re using the exact blue (national flag blue: 80075) when stitching up a batch of Old Glorys.

“It’s very hard to get into this book,” Walch said. “You have to be a color of importance. Very few fashion colors get in.”

The Standard Color Reference, which contains silk swatches of the colors champagne, cherry, claret, cocoa, Copenhagen, coral, cork, cornflower and crabapple and dozens more, has been reprinted only twice since 1915: once in 1943 and once in 1981.

Walch said she participated in the 1981 revamp of the book and even suggested colors. “I nominated Coca-Cola red,” she said. “I thought we should have some commercial colors, but none of them made it.”

Indeed, no new colors made it into the book during the 1981 rewrite. No new colors have been added since 1943, when the book nearly doubled in size.

Some form of blue is almost everybody’s favorite color, Walch says.

“Blue is America’s favorite color by over half, and the world’s favorite color by about a third of the population,” Walch said. “It’s a universal color which is easy to understand, if you consider there is a lot of blue sky and water around.

“And it’s a very calming. It’s not like naming yellow or orange to be head of the list,” she added with just a whiff of color snobbery.

It seems as if I’ve done nothing to help navy. But wait.

“I was at an event last night were a woman was wearing a large black Audrey Hepburn style hat that covered her face and she kind of stood out, like something from the past that was out of place,” Walch mused toward the end of our conversation.

“That could be the answer — (navy is gone) until it finds another way of appearing before us.” She was nearly whispering now. “Navy is a beautiful prototype. If you want to be a dark, serious, reddened black and blue. It’s a good idea to be navy.”

Perhaps navy will appear in the Color Institute’s fall 2009 forecast. We can wish, Tricia and Linda. And we can wait.