colour block

Isn't it funny to think that some civilizations don't have specific words for colours? It doesn't mean those people can't perceive colours in the same way we do, or that they're unable to refer to them, they simply don't codify their colour experiences with single words that are inflexibly used to generalise terms of colour experiences. For example, the Piraha tribe in the Amazon use the phrase "it is temporarily being immature" for green.

Which is what I was thinking of as I read the New York Time's review of Jil Sander's menswear SS2011 collection. The show took place in the famous gardens of Villa Gamberaia, Milan. These gardens are renowned for their structural rigor and restricted palette, so much so that a historian once detailed the number of tonal variations of green. He said "There is the blackish green of cypress, the bluish green of boxwood, the mossy light-absorbing green of yew. There was the lacquered limousine-green of privet, the almost acidic green of lemon trees, and the refreshing green of new mown grass". That's a whole lot of temporary immaturity...

So if I were to talk about all the colours of the rainbow would I really just talking about what we have decided to define as artificial boundaries in the spectrum of visible light? Hmm well Raf Simmons took a selection of naturally occuring colours and intensified them to the MAX. Imagine how brilliant it would be if boys were as bold as to dress like this, everyone would look so happy all the time!