Tag Archives: fashion

White is a Cloud Dancer.

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I ran across the news that Pantone’s choice for Color of the Year 2026 is WHITE! No, not just white, of course, but “Cloud Dancer” white. This is the first time they have chosen a shade of white as the color of the year. I’ve never heard about this practice before, in the 25 years that the company has done it, but that’s because the colors I am interested in are in my garden or my clothes closet, not in a lab.

I personally wouldn’t want to take too much time thinking about one shade of one color, because God has generously given us so many, all day every day, unless we are living in the Arctic. White is a color many of you are seeing a lot of already right now, and not on your walls. Have you thought about giving names to the different shades of snow you are shoveling, or watching fall outside your window?

It’s not because of my lack of snow that I take the trouble to post about this, but because of G.K. Chesterton. He probably wouldn’t think much of someone choosing a Color of the Year, but he did himself write about one color in particular, without regard to style or global trends. For him, it was not merely about things seen, but things unseen, the Cosmos and the Kingdom of God:

“White is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.

“And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

“In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

-G.K. Chesterton, “A Piece of Chalk,” in Tremendous Trifles

 

The writer can’t help it.

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“Anyone who writes is beset by all kinds of dangers. The list is extensive, it’s not difficult to guess what traps it holds. The intellectual dangers are particularly unpleasant, though. Very briefly speaking, the writer cannot think, he can’t help but participate in the intellectual life of his age to some degree. He cannot, he must not, take refuge in absolute, childish innocence, since with time this becomes stupidity.

“But what’s to be done, since an abundance of theories, beliefs, and even, in relatively recent times, ideologies proliferates on all fronts? Absolutely accepting any single theory means losing all freedom of thought. The greatest misfortune is — was — embracing some fashionable or dominant ideology. But we can’t escape at least partial asphyxiation, the era poisons us all. Poisons and redeems, since we can’t live outside time.”

-Adam Zagajewski, in Slight Exaggeration