Empowerment through Color with Lisa Maria Pippus

How can you empower yourself with color and bring out the best of yourself? Lisa Maria Pippus explains how she helps her clients in selecting the right color palette to literally shine and portrait what they want to stand for. In this podcast episode you will learn about terms like color DNA, archetypes and personal branding. 

Lisa Maria Pippus, born Canadian, living in Berlin, studied fashion in Toronto and Milan, empowers design and style professionals to speed-read their clients’ aesthetic preferences through the "Aesthetic Compass Inventory". Understanding the four aesthetic direction and their sub-types allows them to add to their bottom line. By quickly understanding the language, color, line and shape choices that make their client's hearts sing. The Aesthetic preferences Compass also empower leaders to 'be fabulously on-brand'. This means to express their truth in a powerfully authentic way. To align their personality strengths to their wardrobe so they are seen, heard and valued. 

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Transcript

Judith van Vliet: Welcome to the Color Authority podcast. This is Judith Van Vliet podcasting out of Milan, and I have an amazing interview in foresight with Lisa Maria Pippus. She's born in Canada. She lives in Berlin, Germany. She studied fashion in Toronto and Milan, and she empowers design and style professionals to speed reads their own, but also their clients aesthetic preferences through the Aesthetic Compacts inventory. By understanding the four aesthetic directions and their subtypes, this will allow them to add to their bottom line by quickly understanding language, color line, and shape choices that indeed make their clients heart sing. The aesthetic preferences compass also empowers leaders to be fabulously on brand. This means to express their truth in a powerfully, authentic way by aligning their personality strengths to the wardrobe so they are seen, heard, and valued. Good morning, Lisa. Welcome to the color authority. How are you this morning?

Lisa Maria Pippus: Oh, good morning, Judith. I am well and absolutely excited and thrilled to be here. So thank you so much for this wonderful invitation.

Judith van Vliet: You look wonderful in exactly the color, because we've met, of course, a couple of months ago, talked about colors and how certain colors really elevate your spirit and your energy. And I think we have a similar color palette because when I look at what you're wearing, which are colors of ecru, beige and sand, I think those are also my colors.

Lisa Maria Pippus: You were wearing them in Milan. You had this fabulous Eku suit, and you had gold. So, yeah, we're on a color energy wavelength.

Judith van Vliet: Yes, we definitely are. So I've been having this podcast now. I think this is my fourth season. I always ask that very same question because I'm trying to get that threat about what color is for people. And I wanted to ask you that same question. What is color to you, Lisa? Right.

Lisa Maria Pippus: I love all your questions. I want to say all of them, and they're so helpful to work through this. So I would say that color is definitely energy and communication, and color can express so many things. A really good analogy is the voice. If you leverage the power of your voice through volume and pitch and speed and pausing, you can communicate so much. If you leverage it, and if you understand color energy in terms of clothing, you can have a formal power color, an approachable color, an intimate color, an exciting color, a soft color, a dramatic color, a shining color. So it's really energy that communicates. That's how I would describe it for my work.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, for your type of work, indeed. You do something that's pretty amazing. And when I heard what you did, I've been hearing, obviously, people that do what you do, but I think you have a different take on it. So we're going to get to that. Because where your career started was in fashion, because you studied fashion in Milan and then in Toronto because you're born Canadian, but you're now living and working in Berlin. Where did your passion come from for passion? What is so important for you to have learned from that know, having studied fashion, what were important learning points for where you are today?

Lisa Maria Pippus: So I did school in Toronto and then two different schools in Milan. And Hindsight is, of course, fabulous. And I can say color has always been, for me, joy. It's always color and beautiful fabrics have always been a joy. This is something I really understand, looking back and what I learned from school. I love that you asked me that question, because I had to really think, what was the biggest take home? And it happened at Marangoni, and I came into this illustration class, and there was this young woman. She had a black pixie cut olive skin, brown eyes. She was tall and slim hipped, and she was wearing this cobalt blue cardigan, this white shirt, black cigarette pants, and black ballerinas. And I was absolutely mesmerized. And even though I'm a sewer, I went to via Paulo Sarpi, and I got myself a cheap version of this outfit. And the next morning, I was standing in Viale Montenegro, and I felt complete disease, discomfort. Complete discomfort. And I didn't know why. And connected to this is when we moved to Vancouver, and I was ten, 1112. We went to the Vancouver Fair, and they had a dream home. And this dream home had a bedroom. And it was Louis XVI. Of course, it was fake Louis XV, but it doesn't matter. From an aesthetic energy point of view, I loved this room, and this room was pale and muted and gold and lots of S curves. And you know what? It's what I'm wearing today. I didn't realize at the time that I was mesmerized. Not so much by the clothes, but the harmony with her, and that I didn't know that I didn't have that harmony. So I think that's my biggest take home, that my style was there when I was ten. Yeah, I just didn't know it.

Judith van Vliet: You were mesmerized by this woman's energy and what she was wearing. But it's a clear example of how sometimes when we look at something and we like it and we enjoy it, even when traveling, we go places, we buy souvenirs we buy textiles, we buy beautiful. Wherever we're traveling, we take them home, and then it doesn't work, or it doesn't work on us, because we love that energy. We love those colors. They're not part of who we are. Of who we are ourselves. Right. That was your biggest lesson.

Lisa Maria Pippus: That was my biggest lesson. And when I think back to because you asked me how I developed my.

Judith van Vliet: Stuff, learning from what you saw with that woman, it's not fitting to you. And then you come into this space and you just acknowledge, this is where I'm comfortable. I feel that these are also my type of colors. Is that where your journey started? To where you are today and with the methodology that you have developed.

Lisa Maria Pippus: I love all of these questions. So I have to say that in Toronto, but more with my eleven years in Milan, I developed my eye through going to art museums, fashion museums, furniture museums, looking at beautiful shops, looking at beautiful layouts, whether it's in a hotel or even how the vegetable person lays things out. So I would say I trained my eye. What was needed for my personal style was really nonviolent communication and boundary setting. Nonviolent communication really taught me to understand feelings that impact me, whether it's sort of bliss or joy or being thrilled by something or empowerment. And boundary setting courses really taught me to stay on my side of the fence. My ex husband is an artist and he had a very particular direction that he liked. And in the beginning I thought that was my direction too. His family are art historian artists. And I thought, oh, this is very clever explanation for this work of art. Maybe I like it. And it took me time to realize and stay on my side of the fence, to observe aesthetics and then decide what I like. So that really has been the journey. It's the training of the eye and then learning to stay on your side of the fence and to make choices that really touch me.

Judith van Vliet: That's not only on the color reference, of course. That is on many things. And I think when we're younger, this is the hard part. And it comes with experience, many life lessons. And this is also where you have started to help other people, right? That maybe are incredibly talented people, but they have this small, let's say, problem or issue where they're not hitting it right, they're not exactly in their energy when it comes to perhaps color combinations or their watt rope. And that is a methodology that you have developed, which I think is very interesting because, as you say, you define somebody's energy and personality strengths through communication and color reinforces what you want to stand for, right, as a person.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Absolutely. So I would say that all of the people who come to me are smart, right, talented. I'm reminded of something. There's a lovely interview with Oprah and Brene Brown. Ask Oprah your biggest fear not being enough or being too much. And this is in the end, why people come to me. There's more there, and there is a fear it's come from the family or the society or in some way from the environment, that maybe the way I want to show up is too much. It hasn't been articulated, but there's that feeling. So people come and they come with style. Of course they come with their style. But there's a sense that there's more that I would like to express, and that more that I wish to express is clearly part of your talent and purpose. And it's going to help others. So I would say the fundamental is that smart, talented people come to me because they know that they can express more of their purpose and they know that they can use color or they sense it. Maybe no is too strong a word. They sense that there is more that they can express to have more impact and influence which is about getting your gifting out in the world.

Judith van Vliet: That's very important of course because there's multiple ways to do that and there's multiple ways in how you talk and how you communicate. Obviously body language is important there. It is also how you can express yourself through color. So you define somebody that's, let's say on brand style and color palette. What do you look at in a person when you do that? So they come to you and they say something's missing, I'm not expressing things correctly perhaps or I just want to go all the way help me. Like what do you look at in a person to define their style and color palette?

Lisa Maria Pippus: So what I'm looking at or what I'm explaining to people is that this is not a diagnosis. You can go somewhere and in 2 hours have a diagnosis. You are summer and you are classic or you are spring and you are bohemian. And for some people that works. For many people it doesn't resonate. The colors don't resonate with them and they want color in a bigger context. They don't just want you can wear red and blue. They actually want to take a deep dive to express more energy, more expertise and more of their personality strengths. And that is why the first step here is with brand archetypes to get people to choose their language. Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality. And I want people to understand that they are the experts on themselves, not me. So when people choose their brand archetype language they also choose a picture to support it. And you can imagine that if somebody says credible, trustworthy and determined they're choosing other pictures than someone who says bright, fresh and inspiring or someone who says alluring upbeat and free. Because if we think about it once we look at the picture close to the word I had someone yesterday and she chose the word daring and I said do you love the word daring or do you more love the sort of gentleness of this picture? And she said no, the word daring. Then I said let's go back and choose more pictures that are daring. And then all of a sudden people begin to see. If I said to you daring, what would a daring color be as a gut response?

Judith van Vliet: A daring picture or a daring color?

Lisa Maria Pippus: Because I'm already at daring color.

Judith van Vliet: Daring color for me definitely would be red or purple.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Yes. And what would a gentle color be?

Judith van Vliet: A gentle color would be like a pastel yellow.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. This knowledge so color is a skill, but there is an inner knowing that people have when you say daring, when you say gentle, when you say intimate. As they choose these pictures, we're not even talking about fashion at this point. I always say choose pictures that aren't fashion. So they're choosing nature or rooms or whatever people understand. Oh, I know. And the point of this coaching is I could not choose your six words and I could not choose the six pictures that you would match to them.

Judith van Vliet: Right. They connect with what they're singing or what they're right.

Lisa Maria Pippus: So you and I could both have the word artistic and you would come up with a completely different picture, one that I couldn't choose for you and you couldn't choose mine. So that is why I came to see it's so important that people make all of these choices. I facilitate a process of diving deep into an intuitive aesthetic that is around lime shape and color. But only the people can make these choices for themselves. They must be empowered to be the experts on themselves. That is the goal of this.

Judith van Vliet: And I think that's what makes it different working with you, because there's a lot of standards, right? So if you're blonde, you have blue eyes, this type of skin. This is the color set that you need to work with. It's very standardized in most occasions with most people that do what you do. And I think that is something first of all, nobody wants to be standardized. And that's like a psychological thing. People all want their personalized palettes.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Their personalized absolutely.

Judith van Vliet: That's just like psychology. I mean, I remember when I was in an office where I had over, I don't even remember maybe 80,000 colors and I had 800 blues. No way my client was going to pick one of those 800 blues.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right?

Judith van Vliet: They wanted me to go to the lab and create their blue. So, I mean, that's a psychological thing. But I think that's also it's nice that you don't just copy paste a label on them. This is your archetype. This is your color set. Thank you. Goodbye. I mean, you're working with them, you're listening attentively and you're working with them, but you're letting them, in the end, decide. And I think that is a good way, because then they own it, right?

Lisa Maria Pippus: Absolutely. That's it. You hit the nail on the head. And what's so interesting here is nobody gave Frida Kahlo her colors. Her colors. Nobody gave Van Gogh his colors. Nobody gave Mondrian his colors. So what it is, is it's experience which every single human being has. Not every single human being has had a chance to articulate. You have gifted me the chance to articulate with these beautiful questions. It allows me to articulate more and more clearly. So we have this experience. We articulate it. Whether you are a singer, a painter, or an economist, it gets articulated into a song a painting, a theory, in my case, a methodology. But what's most important for me is this idea that these people articulated. And no one, no teacher, no matter how good she was in art school, could say so Frida, these are your colors. And that is the approach that I've discovered that works for me. I have been on a journey to discover myself. I don't know what is in your heart and what sparks joy for you, but you can show me. And I can facilitate this process where you show me ever more because this is what you're doing with me. You're facilitating this process by asking me all these fabulous questions and I get to more and figure out more of my ideas. You don't answer for me, but you have come up with fabulous questions.

Judith van Vliet: That's what I love about my podcast, the conversations and the people. I think it's not just me learning and the people listening, it is also the people that can invite it because the question trigger a new thinking process.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Yeah, this is absolutely what I discovered. This is really exciting. So in a way, we are doing the same work. We trigger something, then we ask something else. And as you said at the beginning, we're not 100% sure where this is going to go. I mean, we know that we're talking more about color than golf. Yeah, for sure. Right. But this freedom, this creativity that you give me to explore, this is what brings insight and depth to also to my work. So it's what I do with my clients.

Judith van Vliet: So once you've decided with your clients what archetype they are, what comes next? So once you know somebody's archetype and you've explained it perhaps to them, what is the next step in defining their style? And then of course, that color palette.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. Once they've chosen the archetypes. And sometimes this takes three coaching sessions and they go back and they look a bit more until they can really feel that's it to this point we're not looking at clothing because there's a lot of freedom in not looking at clothing. And then we move on to do style power codes. I've taken this from film messages and there are twelve style power codes that they look at because often because of the environment, people are looking at a very narrow group of colors and silhouettes because that's their environment. So they look at these twelve star power codes and it's a gut choice which four are theirs. To help them understand this, I get them to choose sofas in a room, plants, artworks that they love to have on a wall or in a room, table settings, things where people are very free. And I say to people often they will say, I'm not so sure about my staff. And I say, if I show you 100 sofas, you will say, no. Yes, no, I show you table settings. And you can say, oh, too formal. Oh, I like that with the bottle of wine and the baguette on the floor. Or oh, I like that picture of a picnic overlooking a field. So people make these choices and then all of a sudden a part of them comes out that's there, but they haven't articulated. So you might get a tent CEO come in in a black hoodie, and then all of a sudden, these are dinner plates from Marie Antoinette and sparkling table settings that look like they're at Versailles. And table settings, as the way people choose them will tell you also a direction where they want to go. So someone who's very formally dressed, but it's all about baguettes and cheese on the floor or huge roundtable with lots of people tells you also what's going to happen. So I set the categories, choose these categories, and then they choose and what you get to see is how their words so the content, their words and the pictures for their brand archetypes flow into the artwork, the flowers. Some people have very formal bouquets, very structured formal bouquets. Some people love peonies, and all the petals are dropping onto the ground and it's very asymmetrical. So people are telling stories through these choices. And they're free. This is the most important. They're free to pull up what's very.

Judith van Vliet: Often I'm still thinking on that person that came in a black hoodie. I'm thinking San Francisco, Silicon Valley right now. Obviously, I think like most people that then chooses a table setting out of I don't know what decade in that. Does that mean that they're disconnected from who they truly are? Or is that their threshold that they're not willing to yet overcome? How do you take them by the hand and get that black hoodie off so that they can then embrace technically who they really are when they get to choose in full freedom?

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right, that's it muted. That's absolutely it.

Judith van Vliet: Do trends have impact on what you do with your methodology? Color trends? Of course, yes.

Lisa Maria Pippus: And particularly going back to the black hoodie situation, I would say that to develop personal brand style, personal brand style, meaning to be aligned from the inside out and experience that for yourself rather than a diagnosis where somebody tells you so to develop personal brand style, you need three kinds of awareness. You need an awareness of what I call the aesthetic compass. Brand archetypes, the twelve brand archetypes, twelve style power codes, fabric codes, color DNA. That's an external awareness. And then you have an overview of what exists. Then you need an awareness of zeitgeist aesthetic or trend aesthetic. How is society shifting? How is this affecting aesthetics? And then you need your personal position in the aesthetic compass. And that allows you to look at these societal shifts and say, I can see this shift is happening, this aesthetic shift is happening, this mindset is changing, and this is absolutely fabulous for me. Finally, this is my time. Or you can say, and this is the boundary setting here, I love in the case of this particular person, the colors were all pinks and purples. The artwork was sunsets, sunrises, everything soft and pinky and purply. You can say, I have adopted the zeitgeist aesthetic in my company, but it's not completely mine. And this is where, when you have all three, an overview of the aesthetic compass, an understanding of the aesthetic zeitgeist, and then your position, your aesthetic position, you are really in a position to choose what is fabulous for you, what is truthful for you. And then you build the zero waste wardrobe because you don't buy for other people.

Judith van Vliet: You just mentioned colored DNA. Can you explain what that exactly means? Because you work a lot with color DNA.

Lisa Maria Pippus: When you look at Frida Kahlo let's go back to those two examples, Frida Kahlo and Van Gogh. They have a color DNA in their pictures, there is a palette and actually Caravaggio. When you look at these palettes, these palettes are the painters and the paintings. It's all one. Humans have a color palette. It's not that people come to you and you show them 1000 pinterest pictures and they say, I'd love all those sofas. No. They have a specific aesthetic direction. And this color DNA is very much connected to an overarching aesthetic DNA. In my case, I like light. I love light. I have mushroom colored hair, and I am relatively low contrast. I have, let's say, relatively low chroma. I love light values. Everything I described to you about that dream bedroom. So this is inherent in me, and it's in my skin and hair and eyes. But that's about 30%. It's too little.

Judith van Vliet: Okay.

Lisa Maria Pippus: But I also have an inner energy that comes from my experiences where I've grown up. I listened when you were speaking with Rana. She spoke about loving white and also loving white, and she was surrounded by it. So a part of what we love repeats us. This was really a revelation for me that I don't have to come in and give people color because when you give people the space and time to go inside, they will automatically connect to yes, to their body. Because this is a holistic experience. They'll connect to the body, but they'll also connect inside. If you look at, for example, the Marshall Rosenberg Feeling Inventory, I love bliss and rapture and joy and I love cream and gold and anything that, for me, evokes that. There are people who will choose security and safety and say, these are words that mean a lot to me. So all of these elements, you can't separate the color of an apple from an apple, and you can't separate the color of a grape from a grape or a pomegranate. So it's important to know that we are holistic. 30% is color of skin, hair and eyes, but it's not enough. And that is why it can happen that somebody can go and have this diagnosis and be told you're this, and it missed the boat because it doesn't understand what colors are inside that person. So people who choose bright love words like bright and fresh and fun, those words contain their color DNA. Yes, their skin, hair, and eye contain it, but also the language that they choose. So we have to be very careful about making assumptions based purely on skin, hair, and eyes of what moves a person, what sparks joy inside them, what is fabulous for them.

Judith van Vliet: And that's exactly what I already said in the beginning. Indeed, that seasonal color analysis is very fashionable right now. There's a lot of people that suddenly have become stylists that help out people with their color palettes. But it seems that these are some of the pitfalls. People are just merely looking at that 30% and they're forgetting about the 70% of who in the end, we are, which is energy and what we stand for, right.

Lisa Maria Pippus: And people are coming to experience more personal power, to be empowered, and they're coming to experience a freedom. Most people have been given a tremendous amount of advice in their life about.

Judith van Vliet: What works and what doesn't, especially when it's unasked advice. I think we, most of the time get unasked advice from so many people, which is just only confusing.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. Thank you for clarifying that, because it's not feedback that we requested exactly. It is unsolicited advice. So people come and they have been told, you cannot wear these colors together. We have the old blue and green should never be seen. And yet what happens if we go into a park and we see green trees and blue sky? So there are these ideas of what you can and cannot do. And then there are I have clients who perhaps in their family heard stories around you can't wear this or this would be too much, or if you wear this. So people who love vivid color have been told that they would be too much to imagine if that had happened to Frida Kahlo. And she couldn't use her vivid colors because she was as Brene Brown when she asked Oprah and Oprah said, fearful of being too much. But what about someone like Giorgio Morandi and all of these soft, pale colors? Imagine if someone had said to him, you are not enough. So he brought back Morandi, these beautiful, soft colors and textures. They're just phenomenal. And that told also a part of his story after the Second World War where he wanted to express peace. We look at the colors of Frida Kahlo and she was so fiercely proud of being you know, that the flowers and the colors and the skirts. How could we possibly take that away from her? And how could we know that her gifting to the world is to give us that fierce, also vulnerable beauty? What we can do is give her the space to pull it out. So when you move too quickly and someone walks into the room, you don't know their dreams, you don't know where they've been squished and what's waiting to be free. It's very difficult to say, I know you.

Judith van Vliet: I was always told that yellow was not my color because of the color of my skin. And then I did my color therapy session with Mark Wentworth, but also with another color therapy session that I did with also somebody I did a podcast with thelma they said, but you're born in yellow. You are literally born in yellow. Yellow is your color. It's what makes you radiate. It's what gives you joy and it makes you shine. So to become who you really need and want to be, you need to dress a lot more in yellow to be you and to express who you are. But I was told for 40 years that yellow was not my color.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Thank you for sharing this story, Judith, because this is the insight into color DNA. You love golden warmth. You absolutely adore golden warmth. You love places that sparkle with golden warmth. How could golden warmth not be yours yet? What's happened with all of this will tell people who they are. Is it makes you doubt, because these are experts and they say with such conviction, no yellow yet. This love of golden warmth and the sun and everything that radiates has always been yours.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, exactly.

Lisa Maria Pippus: So we must be given a space to find our truth. Nobody then given this space. And making these choices and diving into this makes wrong are, you know, some people like Miles Davis and some people don't. Some people like Iggy Pop and some people don't, and some people like Lucio Dalla and some people don't. It doesn't make any of these artists wrong. And this is important to always remember. Can I walk into a room and expect that somebody is going to understand my personality, strengths, my dreams, and translate them into colors that have been sitting in my heart since I was a little girl?

Judith van Vliet: And that's, I think, what you do, because obviously we've worked together in May during the European Conference Marketing Group, and you listen and you observe and then you speak up. And that's very much key. It's not just observing people looking at the colors and just throwing the colors at them. I mean, it's literally there's a lot more to it. And that makes you such a lovely person to be with also. But also you really want to get people, and people feel that, and I think that makes them very comfortable.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Thank you for saying that. That is absolutely my goal. And with time, I might have mentioned this story to you, but I'll repeat it for your audience. I had a client in Mexico, and one of her words was practical, and she had chosen for this a hammer and a ruler. And she contacted me. After the session. And she said, Can I change something? I said, of course. This is your journey. And she said, I hate the word practical. It's a word that has been in my family, and I have the feeling it's expected. I don't know whether it was expected or not, but she said, It's in my family, and it has value in my family. And I said, what would you like to have? And she said luxurious. But I'm a little bit nervous about choosing this word. And I said, well, as a good fairy, I give you permission to have the word luxurious, to think about the shapes and forms that are luxurious for you, about the colors that are luxurious for you. And she sent me these photos of either very sort of creamy and gold or very beautiful opulent Bordeaux red environments. And she said, I love these environments. I can't know in looking at somebody, if they come into the room, if practical is their word or luxurious oppulent. But by doing this, and often in the first session, I say, you've made a choice for today. Sit on it and think about it. Does this resonate with you deep down in your heart or not? And people will often come back and say, I cried because I just don't want this. And then this word has been sitting in the earth. There's nothing superficial about this, because this opulence and beauty is what when it's free, we pass beauty in whatever form, more rebellious form or a more passionate form, we pass it on to other people. There's that lovely saying from Chisal Mora beauty will save us. Absolutely. Yeah.

Judith van Vliet: Because it's not only about you. It's what you radiate to other people the energy that you are. And that generally makes spaces more enjoyable to be in and other people more enjoyable to be with.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. So you are doing this podcast bringing I see you sitting across from me and listening and smiling and radiating, and it's all that golden warmth, energy. And that's the gift that comes. You hop through the zoom screen over to me, and I'm like, oh, yes, I want to ask her this question. And yes, now let me think about that. And so it's always an exchange. It is always an exchange. And one of the things that made me decide to move to On I did this after school, a two month trip through Europe. I got on at Reggio Calabria with my friend, and the train starts. There are two guys had got into our compartment, and one of them opens a suitcase, and it is filled with oranges pane pugliese and with bread and with sausages. And they share this with us. So all the orange and the green, this creamy bread, the Bordeaux, they shared it with us. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I want to live in this country. But when we dress, we share. We share how relaxed we are which makes somebody else relaxed. We share how shiny we are, which can uplift someone else. We share, perhaps the structure and formality, which gives a sense of stability. We can share so much when we through our voice, through our dress, through our body language. So all of it is a chance for us to live our purpose and connect to others.

Judith van Vliet: Very true.

Lisa Maria Pippus: And nothing superficial about color or clothing.

Judith van Vliet: That's nice. And talking about large wardrobes, I'm obviously guilty. I think, like many people in this world, because of that indecisiveness from probably the last couple of years of not knowing what your colors are, what you want to stand for, this is also what you help people with. Right. So reduce that wardrobe, because you showed me how many outfits you can make with your wardrobe. I think you have 35 items in your wardrobe, none more. You can make, like, over 800 outfits with that. And I was just like, what?

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. So I would say that this is so interesting. I spoke about a book that I was reading on money, greed, and happiness at color marketing, and he talks about what happened with consumption when the GI Bill went into place in the States and how consumption was raised, how it massively increased, and how everyone was encouraged to get credit cards to consume. And what was the fallout from that pre, let's say the Second World War, there was this idea of wardrobe planning. You carefully thought, what piece do I need? And you had it made, or you searched it out. Then all of a sudden, this idea of wardrobe planning became so outdated, modern people didn't think about planning a wardrobe they bought. And it was a sign of, yes, being modern and moving forward and being.

Judith van Vliet: Able to afford it.

Lisa Maria Pippus: And being able to afford it. And also, because we could all afford it, this was something that everybody could have. And of course, we moved to fast fashion, and then we know it got even cheaper. So I would say that let me describe it like this. There's a restaurant in Milan called Lubar. Maybe you know it.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah.

Lisa Maria Pippus: And it is gray and sage green and cream. Gray, sage green and cream. That means in order to create this, they had to make a decision. They couldn't have all colors. If you look at Mondrian, he doesn't use all colors. So we're talking about a limited palette. Style in a restaurant, in a painting is a limited palette. It is a position this we've understood, I think, in painting. We've understood it. Perhaps in designing a room, you can't have all colors and all textures and all shapes. It's a decision. People do know their colors. It's inside them. They haven't articulated them. You have a very precise palette inside you. I have a very precise palette inside me. There will be some colors that you don't wish to wear. Is that true?

Judith van Vliet: I'm not very keen on brown. I used to be, but I can't really wear brown anymore. There are some reds that I don't particularly like anymore. No, I'm wearing this linen gray dress today, but it has a hint of red. Then I like it.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Right. See how specific it is? So you are a color authority. Clearly, you can be very specific. The interesting thing, though, is that when you give people language, they also can be very specific. No, I don't like this. Why do I like this red and not that red? And then you can also say, okay, this has too much of this in it, or this has too much of that. But the point is that if you're designing a room, you can't have all colors. If you are preparing a wonderful tangine you can't use all spices. So people who are at the top of their game actually are able to edit. Editing is incredibly necessary to create beauty with a specific message. So if when I'm working with people, I explain to them, if you have a wardrobe, and let's say you have three pieces, just for today's example, I'll say a jacket top and trousers. If you have jacket top and trousers, and you open your wardrobe and you have that in ten different colors and all these colors work together, we are looking at 600 outfits, because you will need this twice a year, let's say summer and winter. So 60, you will never get to wear all of those. But it requires the limited palette. It requires not being able to have everything. And I guess the question would be here, when you are working with people, maybe there are three sofas that they like, or they start with 20 colors that they like, but you can't give them all the colors and create the atmosphere that they actually want, right?

Judith van Vliet: True. Yeah. I think it's something that it's a reset. It's a tabula rasa of how we've been doing things, how we've been thinking, how we've been acting, how we've been buying. And I think with what's been happening over the last couple of weeks, it's very clear that we cannot continue this way.

Lisa Maria Pippus: It is very clear that we cannot continue this way. And we have to let go of something. So we need to borrow from places where we understand that we understand it. In food consumption, most people will go to a shop, and if they buy grapefruit and they take it home, and nobody in the family eats grapefruit, they'll say, wow, grapefruit doesn't work. I'm not buying grapefruit again. Because what you are confronted with at the end of the week is stuff in your fridge that wasn't eaten. And people feel horrible about waste. I go into closets, closets of mostly people who tell me that they don't have a great interest in. I'm doing this in quotation mark fashion. And they have overstuffed wardrobes because, unlike with food, where you've got to take it out because it's going to go bad. People don't regularly do an audit. If you take I did this when I don't know if you know, hot and cool. I mentioned it to Think tank in Berlin. So Luca was here to visit me and I had my with my 30 pieces. And I said to him, Look, Luca, this is my winter wardrobe. I said, this is an item I haven't worn at all. This is an item I haven't worn at all. This is an item I haven't worn at all. So basically, I'm down the 20 items. Most people are doing those 20 items. What's happening for people to reduce is that people buy the same thing over and over again because they don't understand color energy. They don't understand, I've bought all of this gentleness. Now I need to buy excitement because we don't feel the same every day. But if you have these ten energies, you do not need 200 garments. 200 garments is what Greenpeace said is the average number. This was collider consumed Deutschland. So that clothing consumption in Germany, Greenpeace said, is about 180 items. So if people do not understand color and color energy, what they're feeling, what they want to bring into a certain situation, what they need, do I need to bring in bliss or do I need to bring in empowerment? They will keep buying gentleness over and over again, not able to create the message they want, and then they'll go back to buying more. They're confused. The intentionality that I see in organic shops is phenomenal. I don't see people, or very rarely with a cart, I see them going around with a basket and they pick up a piece of cheese that is ten euro or whatever, and they think, Will I eat this? Will I use it? Will I really consume this? People are very conscious and intentional in organic shops, but there is this idea that, oh, it's only five euro at Primark or H&M, I'll buy it. No, not only five euro. It is unbelievable mental drain to have a T shirt in a shape and a color that does not express your energy or your expertise, your truth. So it's mental drain. It's never worn, it's not responsible. So the limited palette is, in art, effective. It is, in designing a hotel, effective, and it's the only way to do a wardrobe that's fabulous and truthful and zero waste.

Judith van Vliet: That's a perfect statement, I think, to end this podcast with that last sentence. Just said it.

Lisa Maria Pippus: All right, well, thank you. This was so much. Yeah. And thank you for these amazingly insightful questions. And you really pushed me to think. And so it's been a mutual session.

Judith van Vliet: It sure has been. Yes. And I thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge, and I definitely have some work to do this weekend.

Lisa Maria Pippus: Oh, I'm looking forward to hearing it. Thank you so much.

Judith van Vliet: I hope you enjoyed this last episode. If you are a fan of the Color Authority podcast, please let us know by reviewing and rating our show on whichever platform you're listening on. The next episode is coming out next month, and in the meantime, I'm wishing you a wonderful, colorful day.