Blue shade Sunday

The other day, an especially hip page cited a recent roll-out of frocks from a noted House, in which their differentiation seemed to depend upon the arbitrary selection of colour, as in an automotive show-room. The presentation raised the question of why the implications of colour - universally perceived if not universally agreed - were not more exploited in a searching act of design.

Prudence is fine for a hundred dollar work shirt, but it struck one as a little mean in a pricey statement, recalling, paradoxically, Henry Ford's "available in every colour as long as it's black" approach to the Model A. Can a profile, expressive in orangoutang-tongue coral, be inter-changed with one in drowned-for-two-days blue, one wondered. More to the point, in these matters, Would we like to think so. The first sense that enters the mind in the use of coverings, is touch, in the broadest sense. We are aware of transforming our texture, which bears on how we are seen. The first obligation of the devil, then, is to comprehend desire.

..
I see my vices
lying like abandoned works of art
which I created so eagerly
to be worldly and modern
and with it
what I can't remember
I see them with your eyes.

Frank O'Hara
Poem V (F) W
 Texas Quarterly, Spring, 1962
Donald Allen, editor
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
University of California Press, 1995