A quick rundown of the salient purple items and their positive or negative impact on the shade:
royal robes (tacky, and in spite of ermine, which is excellent, –)
the Purple Heart (+)
Lenny Bruce and the Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion in San Francisco (++)
Purple Haze (+)
Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple (+)
Donny Osmond’s socks (-)
my adolescent purple denim bell-bottoms worn with a wide white belt with a double row of holes all the way round (++)
the Minnesota Vikings (+/- depending)
Purple Rain (+++)
the cover of 1999 (+)
various Prince concert apparel (+)
Prince’s purple guitar (-)
“The Color Purple” (-)
“when I am an old woman I shall wear purple” (– but considering the sparkling woman in her 70s at a recent holiday party perhaps who was wearing a purple sequined tunic over purple pants, maybe in several decades, +)
Terry Richardson, Hedi Slimane, Karl Lagerfeld, Juergen Teller, and Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (especially of Carine Roitfeld) in Purple Fashion Magazine
And so it is that we find ourselves welcoming back a new dirty purple that digs deeper than faerie lavender, deeper than a clear purple that says, “I am seven,” or “I am 73 and feisty.” It’s not a plum, not a color suitable for velvet or vaguely sleepy or historical. It’s a purple that says what Controversy knew before it ever Rained, a purple you’ll wish you wore years from now when we all look back on it as a defining color of the age, a color that only looked right right now and will be over before most of us ever consider it viable. A color as dangerous as high-waisted jeans because it’s just the same few degrees of pigment away from hippie smocks that those jeans are away from your mother’s comfort slacks.
Say hello, again, to purple and say goodbye.
WHAT TO DO NOW?