Judith van Vliet: Welcome back to the Color Authority. Today I'm going to be talking to Keith Recker. He's a writer, editor, entrance, and color forecaster. He has a 20 year client list, including global influencers such as Pancake, Anton WGSN, Stylist, Color Association of the United States and many more. To his work in color, he brings 35 years of adventurous insightful, multicultural experience, immediate content creation, marketing and licensing, merchandising, and global artisan business development. He's currently editor in chief of Table magazine, and he's also author of three books on color. And we are going to be talking in particular on his new book, Deep Color the Shapes That Shape Our Souls. Good morning, Keith. And welcome to the Color Authority. How are you this morning?
Keith Recker: I'm very well. Happy to be talking to you.
Judith van Vliet: Yes, I'm excited to have you here on the podcast. And obviously, I have a zillion questions like always because there's so much stuff that I wanted to ask you. But the first question, as always, is, Keith, what is color to you?
Keith Recker: Well, for me, color has always been a story, a poem, an epic, a saga, a narrative, a song. For me, it's always something that pushes me right into some deep story that I can't help but think about. It sort of takes over my mind, and it has done that for a very long time.
Judith van Vliet: Yeah, because how did color enter your life and how does it evolve your daily life still today?
Keith Recker: My mom was an artist, so there were always paints around, and I think some ingestion, maybe not of the paint itself I'm still alive, but of the game of color came to me, I think, through her. And also I came of age, really. I came into consciousness in the sixties when the riot of color was really something, right? The car colors, the fashion colors, the graphics, people even exploring television as a graphic medium for the first time because of color TV coming. So there was always this background noise of color going on in my mind. But I remember I'm a writer by training and by trade, and I've always wanted to be a writer. I remember at a certain moment, reading in high school, maybe not 100% willingly, but reading in high school worked by Nathaniel Hawthorne. And I was reading a story called Rapuccini's Daughter. And in this story, a visitor to Venice is in his rented rooms, and he looks down into the neighbor's garden, and he sees the most beautiful girl in purple from head to toe. And in my mind, it read his magenta that Hawthorne's birthday and specify what shade of purple, really. And it comes to be in the story that she has been raised by an alchemist, and her father has given her increasing doses of deadly poison since she was a child. And at the point where this man sees her and, of course, falls in love with her, she is 100% poisoned. She has become the essence of what she has been fed all her life. And there she is, resplendent in weird, strange, eccentric, exotic purple. And I remember at that moment thinking the color is the message. And it changed my thinking about color, and it's remained with me rather constantly since.
Judith van Vliet: Yes. What a sad story, though, being poisoned by your own family.
Keith Recker: Think of the metaphor, right? That love is the drug and he can't help himself. He cannot be kept from this beautiful woman to whom he's attracted, even with the information that he gets about what's become of her.
Judith van Vliet: You are Anita writer. I have read both of your books, and I was excited. And I told you also before, you have a very different skill then. I mean, I've read a lot of color books over, obviously, the past years in my career, but yours bring a new way of talking about color. It is the flow that you use. It is the wording. It's very poetic indeed. And do you really explain at a whole other level what power color really holds on us, on society, on humans? Why do you think indeed, color, however, is so complex? Because it is complex. I mean, I keep having conversations with so many people, and every time there's a new thing that I learn.
Keith Recker: It's so complex, I think, in part because it is one of the main tools that we humans have to engage with the world, receive information, to transmit information. It's a tremendous, tremendous tool that we use to categorize what's coming our way. Pantone Color Institute has a couple of statistics that they frequently use, that the decision to purchase is 95% based on visual information, and that 85% is color alone. And when you think of the assumptions that we receive based on the colors used in design and packaging, in imagery itself, since we're massive in gestures of imagery these days, the image has really taken the place of text. In many ways, I think it's so complex because we are complex. And if we are using it as one of our main tools to categorize reality, to make decisions on what a thing is and what a thing is not, of course it's going to start to take on all of the complexities of us.
Judith van Vliet: We are complex indeed.
Keith Recker: We are complex, contradictory, delightful and frustrating and terrible and wonderful in pretty much equal measure, aren't we?
Judith van Vliet: So you truly think that color can transform somebody and somebody's life and somebody's day, somebody's, anything at that moment?
Keith Recker: I do. I think that there's a certain amount of there are certain colors, I think, that act as supplements that charge us with sort of a vitamin dose or a burst of electricity, and we welcome that because quite often we need to be taken out of where we are and elevated to another place. I think there are other ways in which color settles us down, that if we're too much at that electric level. We need to be grounded. We need to be taken back to something that soothes it satisfies in a different way. So I do think color moves us around, and we permit it to. We permit it to. When we're in the presence of something sort of dark and mossy and quiet and damp, we let ourselves go there. When we're in the presence of these neons which are so thrilling and invigorating and maybe tiring, but that's for another facet of our conversation. We let ourselves be taken there because we're willing, because we need to go. In most cases, it's the ways in which color is used to convince and persuade the ways in which color is used as a rhetorical device that I think concern me sometimes, right? Just like a half truth. A color used to convince you of something that isn't true, I think probably deserves further explanation, actually. That's really the genesis of this book, Deep Color, which is coming out in just a few days, which I'm very excited about. I was invited to give a series of lectures at my daughter's high school as a part of their media literacy unit. So the whole structure of this particular unit in their English class was to take a step back. Look at a story. Look at the words being used. Look at the title. Look at the framing. Look at the sources. Look at the person delivering the story and even media organization delivering the story so that you could take a half a breath and say. Okay. This is what I am being asked to believe. This is the person asking me to believe it. These are the facts that are being presented. Is all of this adding up to something that I should give power to? In my mind, color serves those same compelling purposes as words within visual communication. Is someone trying to convince me that their process and product and intentions deserve the color green? Well, we see a lot of that, don't we?
Judith van Vliet: Certainly today, yes.
Keith Recker: Is someone promising that their goods and services are precious and valuable by using gold? Is someone basically holding up themselves as an inexorable inevitable authority about the thing at hand by portraying their imagery in all gleaming. Refined.
Judith van Vliet: color escapism. As you said. Which is what you talked about before. It was color lifting you up or bringing you to a place to just actually maybe a type of mindfulness just in that moment. You're being absorbed by color and you're just calming down. But then there is indeed the marketing of color, which some people know how to play the game very well. And then there's those that I mean, we're living in an era of truths, right? Or we'll find out what the truth is. You're trying through your book with Deep Color to bring out a little bit more of that truth. Right. Or to at least try for the reader that they themselves can understand what is the true reason behind a certain car and whether indeed a product that is used on is truly saying what they revealed to be.
Keith Recker: Exactly. Yeah. I start the book with a quote from Claude Levy Strauss, a very famous and I think sensitive and kind of wonderful 20th century philosopher who in an interview about trying to explain his work, he said that myths operate in men's minds without their knowing it. And I think that is something if it's stories about Orpheus and eurydice, okay, great. Let them operate in my mind without me really fully understanding it. Maybe. But I think if it's in the context of marketing and merchandising and persuasion, right. It's political advertisements. Whatever form of visual persuasion comes our way, we do deserve the chance to take a little step back to say, okay, great. You are using a decaying, dead shade of green to paint your political adversary with a certain message. Do I buy into that because my emotional reaction to green because of my emotional reaction to green? Or do I buy into it because it's true? Instead of giving ourselves over to some of this persuasion and rhetoric, we deserve a half a chance to take a step back and look at how it's being used.
Judith van Vliet: I think it still happens a lot when people will have color perceptions and they tend to think to know what a certain color means. So we're all guilty in following that advertising, the marketing campaign. I think it still happens a lot. I think there's still a lot of misuse, right, of not saying the wrong color. But let's say that people are being pushed into a certain direction by playing into their indirect myth, as you call it, of what they think of color really means and stands for.
Keith Recker: This is what we have all been trained to do in the design industry, right? Whether you're laying out graphics or making videos or making product or looking at what might be next and successful, we are all using color to tell our stories for a reason. And I think we need, as consumers and as creators, we need to look for some deeper truths and make sure that we're really saying what should be said, what needs to be said, what can be said, as opposed to spinning fables and stories, right? Making traps. Let's not spin traps with color. Let's tell beautiful, desirable, fulfilling nourishing stories.
Judith van Vliet: I think that's hard for as well the consumer and the designers and the marketers that are people that are on one end and the others, on the other hand, to truly make to use color for its true purpose, I think that is still tough. But I think that is one of your missions, right, with the book Deep Color?
Keith Recker: It is. Hey, one would be crazy to pretend that one is going to change any industry with one book. But I think if some of us actually do invite the more complex conversation. The subtle shifts that can happen are really very meaningful. And that's all I'm hoping for people to be aware of the tools they're using and to really go for the best possible use of them.
Judith van Vliet: Yeah. Talking about the multiple perceptions of color, because there are so many. I mean, if you just talk about the color yellow, it has so many different meanings. And then we're not even talking about culture yet. Obviously education as well. What are the very common misconceptions that you see for particular colors throughout your career that still have not changed?
Keith Recker: Oh, boy. One of the things I have been thinking a lot about lately is a concern that our industry has become over reliant on the concept of trends and trending colors. We both love thinking about it. We both love observing what's unfolding and blossoming in front of us. And the Internet is the most amazing tool to gather those blossoms and to try to make sense of them. It's very compelling. I love it. But I've begun to be super concerned that this overFOLLOWING of trends in color has brought about a certain amount of repetition and lack of originality and monotony. Right. So great. We have PP Pink. I love it. It's absolutely fantastic. I like it in small doses, of course, but it's really gorgeous. And I find it very compelling. At the same time, that story is already being told so abundantly. What other stories could we be telling? How else can we give our customers the nourishment that they crave? Because if we all gang on to the same things in roughly the same time frames, or worse yet, in a follow up time frame, so that we're sort of big and late, we're late, we're fifth and 6th on the scene, I think that is guaranteeing diminishing returns. I think it makes customers very skeptical. I think there's a certain kind of emotional exhaustion that happens. I also think that we evolved as hunter gatherers, 2010, 15 million years ago, where evolutionarily, we are equipped with what we need to discern, change, movement and variation. And if it's all too much the same, we are not drawn to it, we are not interested in it. It is not meaningful or even necessarily good for us. So how can our industry step up to embrace the notion of not sameness, not uniformity, not copying, and really be a little more nuanced, a little more interesting, a little more original, unique in the end? Yes, absolutely.
Judith van Vliet: With a lot of brands, I mean, there's a lot of companies, obviously, maybe they don't have in house designers and they don't have the budget, so they very quickly go for those colors of the year or the colors of the month. So there's a point there, but without looking at their products, whether such color would really be applicable. And that's where obviously, things hugely go wrong.
Keith Recker: If we're always telling a story to our customer, then we would need to question once in a while whether the color of the month, the color of the year, the color of the day, whether that's actually relevant to the customer and what the customer is needing, wanting from us. And it's a, quote, kind of reland give them what they don't even know they want yet. Right. It's also taking our responsibility because we're all in an industry that requires planning. Nothing we do today hits anyone tomorrow. It's four, five, six months, a year, two years, not being over reliant on things that are happening now, but rather peering around the corner at the needs, the psychosocial emotional needs that are going to be appearing based on where events are going, based on where thought is going, based on what will be tired out in the marketplace by the time our products hit the shelves? Given our planning cycle, how can we feel our way into always being relevant, always being nourishing, always being satisfying within the time frames that we are responsible for?
Judith van Vliet: And those time frames are changing. I think those are the agents are changing. Do you feel that the perspectives that people have, or the perception that people have on color evolved over time? Or are they different with different generations, you feel? Or is it similar?
Keith Recker: That's a good question. I think there's a certain way we humans are very contradictory, right? So we can say two completely polar opposites and have them both be relevant within the time in which we're speaking. There's a way in which change, of course, has speeded up because we have the Internet, we have all this exposure to things from, quote, unquote everywhere. And we digest those images to some degree more quickly than maybe we used to. So, yes, change happens quickly. Things come to the fore of our consciousness perhaps more quickly because of how in touch we can be. But the exhaustion behind ingesting all those images also generates a craving for no change. And I joked with a friend of mine on video. You can find it online. But lack of newness is the new newness, right? To a certain extent, a level of stability, a level of gradual, tender evolution is needed in a lot of the products that we touch, that we wear, that we engage with in order for our nerves not to be completely jangled by everything we use. The last thing anybody needs, Judith, is a tricky toaster. We just want the toaster to be a toaster. It's okay if it's work. Exactly. Don't make it work. Make it breakfast. So I think that that metaphor can be extended. Yes, we love the change. We love the quick rolling in of the waves. It's super exciting. It's super great. And yet too much of that does mean we just need some things to be what they are and to support us rather than telling us. So you have this, I think, growing need for things to move more slowly and to be tender and realer versus the quick churn of all the big events and all the big trends and all the big fashions and all the flash. They're both great, but we need each in its measure.
Judith van Vliet: Talking about toasters and let's say, misuse of color. Do you have some great examples of those? I mean, I can imagine a toaster in neon orange, maybe in the morning is not what you're looking for. And also orange. We all know it increases appetite. So maybe to be avoided if on a diet.
Keith Recker: You'Re right, no orange refrigerators. Right.
Judith van Vliet: What are misuses that you come across that just freak you out?
Keith Recker: Well, it's interesting when I say misuse, I would say occasionally I have become very conscious of the what's the right word? I say this very respectfully. I've become very conscious of the manipulation of some uses of color. So, for example, there was an iteration of the iPhone a couple of years ago, and all the advertising was gleaming black with super close ups of the phone and the gentle reflections of John Ivy's beautiful curves. And all of a sudden, I'm looking at the advertisement thinking, it's very well produced, it's very well designed, it's great in the series. Right. It wasn't just one image. It was a whole series of things. And I realized that it looked just like Darth Vader. The gleaming, polished curves, the super professional way in which everything was modeled and made. And I thought, wow, these ads are asking me to accept this device as the be all and all most authoritative, need never be questioned solution to my problems. That's what they want. I think that is what they want. But, you know, that's an overreach. That's an overreach. It was beautiful. I have no complaints about any of it, except I have to say that's an overreach. Why do you want your customers to be bludgeoned into accepting you as the ultimate authority, when in fact, now this is a bit of a criticism and a little bit cynical, when in fact, the customer service will not step up to be the ultimate customer service, the performance of the phone will not step up to be the ultimate performance of the phone, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So this is promising an experience that I will not have and no one will. So there's a way in which I think we can overuse and over rely and really push. Who was it who said, there's no such thing as a wrong color? There's just a color used in the wrong way. There's no such thing as a bad color. There's no misuse of color unless you don't live up to your promises.
Judith van Vliet: Exactly. Well, there's quite a few out there.
Keith Recker: We were mentioning green, right, in one of our initial conversations, rewashing mainly. Yes, green washing. There's a certain amount of sincere, earthy green and cardboard color that's out there promising you a responsible, consuming experience, and they may or may not be delivering that.
Judith van Vliet: We both live in color. It is our life. It surrounds us. We love it. But I wondered, in your investigation, in your research, if it ever made you sad either. A connotation perception story?
Keith Recker: Yeah, that's a good question. We go through a period of the year here. I live in western Pennsylvania, which is nothing but gloom. January, February, and March. If you see the sun, you run outside and worship it as if you were returning to pagan times. And in the course of that period where we don't get much sunshine, seeing too much gray and black and seeing too much dark blue, all of which are in my favorite, my top echelon of color choices, it really can reinforce a certain amount of lack of movement and lack of lightness. Yes, they can make me sad. But then again, on the other end of the spectrum, we can value those colors for their correctness, for their timelessness. We can value those colors for the degree to which they let us be a bit invisible. Right? So I think it's very circumstantial, and I think because we're so much in it, Judith, it's hard sometimes to label colors in a negative way because I see both sides of the coin. There is a way to look at it.
Judith van Vliet: We know that there's no such thing as personal choice, at least especially not when you're working on client projects. I mean, there's no such thing.
Keith Recker: That's really true. And you have to protect, I think, yourself and your client from there being such a thing. Right. You really do need to maintain a certain amount of objectivity. I would say, too, that there's a way in which just to flip the coin, there's a way in which red has come to make me a bit sad. Yes, I think there's a way in which red has come to celebrate, which is, I think, why pink? Why PP pink is on this platform. I think red has been misused as a statement of domination and bigness and vehemence that we're very skeptical about right now. I think we're in a cycle where we mistrust super big institutions, we mistrust authority to the degree that red's fire is not as pure as we want. And so I honestly think that we've switched over to this neon pink, which I wrote an article for Pantone website about protest pink and how this hot pink was being used around the world as a symbol not of regime change, right? Not of swapping out a king for a dictator, but of fundamental change in perspective and thinking. And wow, did we not see that blossom in past years all over the world cod pink. The women's protests in Mexico, the women's marches in 2017 with a hot pink ***** hat ***** ride in Russia wearing those pink ball of clavas. I think we are in a moment where the hot pink, again, doesn't read like the choice between the king and a dictator. It doesn't vault the individual. It wants a certain cause. It wants a certain desire for forward movement, desired for the energy to make the forward movement. It's not the color of kings, it's the color of now. So I'm all for it. I think it's absolutely great. I love it. Absolutely love it to pieces. I've been thinking about it for all this time, for eleven years, if not more.
Judith van Vliet: To select it for color palettes and obviously for products. I think color indeed used especially for protests and change. That's what truly interests me. I did this podcast with somebody just last year, indeed on the color green, also being used in Argentina against the Antiabortion, which again, how did we know this was going to be so current again this year? Because this was Argentina. And I'm not saying that okay, well, it's normal because it's Argentina. It's not normal anywhere. But it's how we come back full circle and whether it's the United States, whether it's also discussions in Europe, it is just how power influences protests, cause, but also politics. It is quite a story story also that you don't pull back from talking about. I know.
Keith Recker: Yeah, it's true, right? It's true. As I was moving through the chapters in this book, it became really evident to me that shying away from controversial topics was a cop out. So I do talk about race. I do talk about the this is an example. The use of yellow as a label of apostasy, as a label of you don't belong, you have transgressed our fundamental rules, which has, of course, super dire results in World War II with the golden star used by the Nazis to label Jews. There are many ways that color has been used to marginalize and separate. Right. If we use color as a tool for categorization, these things are sweet, these things are spicy, these things are savory, these things are herbal and just use flavor terms. We do use it in a social.
Judith van Vliet: Context is the same .. yellow, brown.
Keith Recker: Black, white, yellow, brown, red. I mean, that these are things that we have used for a few centuries now. But I would say on the upbeat side, only for a few centuries. The use of black and white to define types of people as polar opposites is only a couple of centuries old. And it's time that that stops. Right. It's an inaccurate and over exaggerated way of using color also because it's the wrong way.
Judith van Vliet: And I mean, I read that in your book because the meaning of black and white is very different from how, let's say, these populations are these minorities in some countries and less than others are being actually treated.
Keith Recker: Yeah, it's really profoundly, yes. The chapters on black and white history of chattel slavery and the ways in which economics was the fuel to create the tremendous system of race based discrimination and colonialism that we are still living hopefully at the end of, but we're still living. It was all greed driven. So why wouldn't we want to undo institutions and rules that are only formed because of greed? They have no other reason for having come into being but greed, period. Full stop. And on the chapter on white, I have a little section about white washing because the symbolism of white as something that's kind of clean, simple and pure. OK, great. But not everything that claims the white robe is any of those things. So we have I talked about some great historic figures like Mrs. Pankhurst of the suffragette movement in England, deciding that white would be their color because they felt that the use of too much color would relegate them to the margin, they'd be considered as eccentrics, and that white was a very dignified color. And also it was seen that choosing white would enable all women to show up at a march dressed in white because, quote unquote, everybody had something white to wear, whether it was an apron or a dress or a blouse, right? So it was an attempt to make the movement open to all. But then you also have what we talked about Gandhi and the use of Cody and simplicity and white and all that's great. But then I also talk about the Ku Klux Klan here in the US. And how this use it's an adaptation. Did you know that this robe was an adaptation designed by a costume designer in Hollywood who had been to Europe and saw the processions of the penitent during Easter week with the white robes and the point of white caps? Very medieval, this costumer took this back and designed robes for this terrible movie called Birth of a Nation, which was very influential in terms of being an early movie hit. So this designed garment becomes the emblem of a heinous movement and lightweight.
Judith van Vliet: And think about it.
Keith Recker: Yeah, it is crazy. It is crazy as a matter that this was so successful that they had a mail order catalog to better scale and distribute these outfits. So just because you grab the color white does not mean you're entitled to its symbolism. So anyway, this is part of the reason to write the book. Just because something wears the robe doesn't mean it deserves the credit.
Judith van Vliet: And I think when we look at we have elections coming up here in Italy and it is a total mess, as usual. I think it's quite a mess everywhere in the world currently. And I know in the US. It's not doing too well. And I know in the US. Currently, red or blue, and it's always been like that. But red and blue is really like people just literally walk away from one or the other just because of what political meaning it has and how purple never really achieved what it was supposed to achieve. In politics. How can we change that? That's so intrinsic to a political system. How can you change that?
Keith Recker: Well, interestingly, this problem is only 22 years old.
Judith van Vliet: True, it's a young problem.
Keith Recker: It's still a young problem. There's still hope for us. This red and blue division happened entirely by accident prior to the 2000 presidential election here both political parties owned red, white and blue equally. This is the colors and they both were purporting to be American parties. So they both use red, white and blue in a back room at CNN in Atlanta and run up to the 2020 election. The first electronic data driven magic boards, if you will, of the country, state by state, county by county, precinct by precinct were being designed and ready for broadcast. A tech in the back room had to make a decision who got red and who got blue because white was not a particularly successful graphic color for TV. So Republicans got red upending quite 100 and 5200 years of tradition that red is associated with liberal causes in Europe, right? Communism, the French, barricades that whole thing and the Democrats got blue which up ends centuries of tradition that blue is the steady stable color of labor of the Tories in England and so on and so forth.
Judith van Vliet: Quite the ultimate.
Keith Recker: Here we are, we've flipped the model and yeah, I honestly think that this idea that there are red states and blue states has only increased the polarization. The notion that you are one thing or the other thing has only made it more possible for people to dig in and be less nuanced, to be less understanding of the issues and rather migrating just to the brands that they feel they've affiliated themselves to.
Judith van Vliet: So that's how unfortunately, color can also damage society.
Keith Recker: It's in this process, I mean there's plenty of other things at work, right, to create this polarization. We could talk about media and how its standards have changed, etc. Etc. But I mean color is a tool here I think, rather than necessarily a cause.
Judith van Vliet: Funny also I read your article about the Barbie movie, I think everybody's talking about Barbie corps and it was funny how nobody has ever seen it yet because it's not there yet, it's not out yet but everybody jumped on it. Oh, there we go again with the pink and it's Barbie and even my inner feminist started like thinking about it at already having my own thoughts about it. Tell us a little bit about what you said in an article. So how people should avoid to jump on this prior to actually seeing things.
Keith Recker: The reason that I'm suggesting that we should avoid this gut reaction which you admit to having two, I had it too for a second as well when I first saw the pictures. I think it's a remnant of misogyny. The pink elicits a certain amount of internalized the reaction against it. I've internalized misogyny. Pink was not a gendered color until World War II. There's plenty of evidence that across Europe, across the United States, other places in the world, that blue was just as likely to be a little girl's color because of the Virgin Mary, and red was just as pink was just as likely to be a little boy's color because of red and power and vehemence and all that sort of thing. So they often crisscrossed. There was no recipe. World War II comes along, and so many women, for the first time, entered the workforce, left the home paying job because it was needed. So many men were off fighting. Women were off fighting, too, but so many men were off fighting that women were needed in the workplace when the war dissolves and men start to migrate home, and women as well. But when men start to migrate home, somebody needs to figure out a way for the women to give up these jobs, because that's the way it was. And sweet petal pink is used as an enticement to get people back into the home, to make it a little more fun, to make the transition easy, that the kitchen is a place for recreation, not daily drudgery, etc. So you have pink appliances and pink dinnerware. And it was successful. It's sold there is some statistic about 20% to 25% of bathrooms installed in the late forty s and fifty s were all pink. Pink tile, pink fixtures, et cetera. It was successful. It was so successful that you see things like Dodge. The Car brand had an all pink car called La FAM that had a lipstick, purse and cosmetics case that matched the car that lodged in a nifty little pocket in the back of one of the seats.
Judith van Vliet: Ahead of their game.
Keith Recker: Oh, completely ahead of their game. Maybe the pink was a little gross, to be really honest, Judith, but they were ahead of their game. So, do you remember the 1957 film Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey HEParD? There's this fantastic production number called Think Pink. K. Thompson is a magazine editor named Maggie Prescott, and she sings this song thing, Pink, about how one person has decreed that this will be the only legitimate color, period, full stop. It was a parody of what had happened. By the time you hit 1957, we had peak pink, and we were on the downside. But it definitely points out how ridiculous it was. So when you feminize pink as color, it certainly carries with it now the limitations of women's roles at that time. And in fact, you see pink slide out of favor in the it's not really a great thing. It doesn't really come back much for a while. So when we see pink and we use our reaction to pink as a way to marginalize something, I think we have to slow down. Am I doing this because I've been trained to see pink in a certain way? What are the facts. And we don't know the facts yet about the Barbie movie. And we've had a lot of history since then that says that pink is a serious color of protest. So in the book, I talk about how in the AIDS crisis, punk pink, hot pink is used by a graphic designer named Avram Finkelstein to reappropriate the **** pink triangle used to label gay men. He turns it right side up. So the triangle points up, he puts it in this vehement pink color, and he creates this poster that says silence equals death, which is encouraging not just gay men, but all of society to speak openly about the crisis in front of them. This gives rise a little bit later to a slightly softer pink that's used to draw attention to breast cancer research by Evelyn Lotter and a friend of hers who started that little pink ribbon campaign. Really changing the public dialogue about women stepping up and taking responsibility for their health, having the vocabulary to talk about it, asking the questions, asking for the services and treatments and making a lot of progress. And then we move into some of the hot pink uses that we talked about before, right, which represent forward motion and really not just substituting a dictator for a king or vice versa, but moving thought forward. So today we have the Barbie movie. Okay, great. We have the Barbie movie. It's neither good nor bad till we see it, first of all. And Greta Gerwig does have some feminist cred. Maybe it will work out that the movie has something valid to say and maybe it won't, but I think we need to see I don't jump on.
Judith van Vliet: It right away like most of us always had. We always have a color opinion. I mean, you just said that you became member of color marketing group. Well, welcome because the color opinion because, boy, you ever come to a meeting of hours? I mean, I know you've done trend forecasting with other groups as well, but it's intense, right?
Keith Recker: It's intense. Well, one last thing about the Barbie movie before I move on. In. Looking at some stills of the movie, you see that hot pink is certainly there the color of the pink ***** hat. But you also see that this neon yellow green, which was defined by science scientists just a few years ago as the most visible color, right? People used to think it was taxi cab yellow. Now we've moved on to this wavelength of neon yellow green. This color is almost as much an evidence in the costuming based on the stills that have been released, as the hot pink. The thing that fascinates me is that these are two of the primary protest colors of our time. The Gile Zhou neon yellow, neon yellow green, and the hot pink of the ***** hat. How is it that the symbol of the populist right and the symbol of the vehement left have come to lodge themselves in equal proportions in the costuming of the Barbie movie. I've begun to wonder whether maybe after 30, 40, 50 years of arguing over the same issues, maybe we're ready to kind of consign these colors and these debates to the junkie of history and move on. Maybe we're trying to create some space of humor and lightness and irrelevance, if you will, so we can move on to the next stage of history. I know that my daughter is 16, and her generation, you can see it behind their eyes, are often quite puzzled that we are still having these conversations. Right? We're still having arguments about gay marriage. We're still having arguments about a woman's right to choose her own destiny. We're still arguing things. We've been arguing since the 60s. Why is that? So maybe there's some healthy, weird evolution happening here.
Judith van Vliet: I hope it is. It doesn't look like world politics are looking like I think the people movement is like that. Yesterday I was having dinner with a friend of mine, and we were talking about the word stranger. Now, the word stranger in Italy, she used for foreigner. So immigrants, it's a word that we both don't understand. She being Italian, by the way, me being Dutch. So I am obviously a stranger in this country having to still use that word and the concept that lays behind it. We were so baffled that people are still arguing about it. So I think there is a movement, indeed, already happening.
Keith Recker: Agreed. And if you think about your comment that political structures are not moving, but the people are well, the political structures are run by the people who started these arguments.
Judith van Vliet: Yeah, right.
Keith Recker: So change will happen. Change will happen. But I think this is it. How color will be used to express the next political debates is very interesting.
Judith van Vliet: But it looks like that at least now, in our near future, it is pink that is creating this change. And I think that is a great takeaway.
Keith Recker: I agree. I find it very exciting. I really do. It'll be interesting to see what barnacles gather themselves onto the ship of pink because inevitably, right, we get barnacles. But I'll be quite curious. It's also interesting to think, okay, black and white have the limitations of this polarized way of describing people have been very explored. Red and blue, those limitations, at least here in this country, have certainly been thoroughly explored. If hot pink and neon green are also perhaps being exhausted and overused, it's very curious for me to wonder what comes next.
Judith van Vliet: What's next? Yeah.
Keith Recker: I've been very drawn to the purifying effects of sunshine, right. The naturally disinfecting nature of being in the full spectrum of light. And so I'm very curious to see if we don't get a little yellow and something a little lighter and less clobbering, as we would say here. Right. Less beat you over the head, something. Yeah.
Judith van Vliet: What would you like the audience that's listening to really take away from this.
Keith Recker: Conversation, I think, because anybody listening to this podcast will be a fellow color lover. Right. I think just being aware of the rhetorical potentials of color and understanding it better, which is really the whole purpose of the book, I think makes us more powerful creators and more powerful observers because we can look a little deeper into the suggestions that what we are recommending, what we create, what we sell might be making. And for me, my whole involvement in the design world in color really comes from a sense of love that I really want to help nourish people. I really want to help create better relationships between people and the things that they touch and live with so that they could be more satisfied and happier. Ironically. Maybe not ironically, I've come to think that the more we creatives can help people be in a more successful relationship with their things, the more we can help with our problem of overconsumption and waste. Sure. If we make such beautiful, relevant and evocative things that people want to be in relationship with them for longer, we're doing something that needs to be done. We have a role to play in a successful future for all of us.
Judith van Vliet: And color has a very important role in that.
Keith Recker: Very persuasive. Really very persuasive. So the more you know, the better you know your medium, the better you can perform within it. So the book was really an attempt to dig it out and put the information and the perspectives out there.
Judith van Vliet: Thank you so much. Keith record. This has been amazing and deep color. The shades that shape our souls, it's magnificent. So I hope it's going to be a good success.
Keith Recker: Thank you.
Judith van Vliet: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Keith Wrecker. I for sure did, as you could probably hear in our conversation. So my next episode is going to be with Bethan Laura Wood, and it's going to be launched on October 4. So stay tuned for this wonderful interview and have a great rest of your day.