Room 42

42.1
For many centuries, yellow evoked negative – xenophobic and moralistic – associations. From the Middle Ages, it was used to identify Jews, Muslims and prostitutes.

In combination with green, another dangerous colour, yellow was associated with fools and court jesters.

Despite these negative associations, yellow was a fashionable colour in the eighteenth century, probably influenced by the mode for Chinese fabrics and ‘chinoiserie’ in interior decorating.



42.2
Yellow was still a controversial colour at the end of the nineteenth century. In France, pornographic and ‘dangerous’ books were covered in yellow wrappers as a kind of warning.

Many prostitutes wore yellow for optimum visibility on dark streets.

These attitudes changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when sunny yellow, often in combination with sky blue, was seen as a sign of hope. Bas Kosters has used these two colours in his United States of HOPE project from 2018.
 

42.3
Man first set foot on the moon in 1969. Earlier in the 1960s, the space race inspired futuristic fashions by designers such as Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne. They favoured synthetic fabrics and plastics, and the colours white, silver and bright yellow to herald the clothes of the future.

For centuries in China, yellow was reserved for the imperial family. In 618 C.E., during the Tang Dynasty, a proclamation was issued that forbade ‘ordinary people and officials to wear clothes or accessories in reddish yellow’.