In defense of ‘sad beige’ in home decor

You don’t have to look hard to find people being rude about neutrals. “Sad beige” and “millennial gray” have become go-to pejoratives to describe everything from children’s playrooms to entire ways of living. During the pandemic, as searches on Etsy for beige children’s clothing rose 67 percent, Hayley DeRoche amassed hundreds of thousands of followers while skewering the trend from her handle @sadbeige. One viral video mocked a monochrome gray restroom: “It’s giving airport. It’s giving ‘live, laugh, love.’ It’s giving corporate.” In these missives, neutrals aren’t a reflection of color preference, but of a personality problem.

Neutrals disdain is not new. Paula Scher, the now 76-year-old legendary graphic designer, declared beige to be “the color of indecision.” Further back still, John Ruskin, the 19th-century British critic, wrote — ostensibly about another era but with an eye to his own, too — despairingly that his generation had been trained “to think that meal-color and ash-color are the properest colors of all; and that the most aristocratic harmonies are to be deduced out of grey mortar and creamy stucco.” Gray and brown, he concluded with a flourish, are “hues of distress, despair, and mortification.”

The term “neutrals” is a slippery one. Say it and most people will picture a palette of muted, calm, low-saturation colors, the core constituents of which include cream, beige, taupe, gray, brown and off-white, often layered one atop another. Beyond that, context comes into play. In fashion, black, navy, khaki and burgundy are considered neutrals; paint your walls to match, and it would be something of a statement. The category also subtly expands and contracts over time. Every few months, magazines or influencers will claim that some shade or other — lavender, caramel, sage, dusty pink — is the season’s “new neutral.” Some, such as khaki, do sneak into the category and persist for years or even decades, but most do not. Perhaps the surest test of a neutral is that it is easy, livable, doesn’t stand out or date quickly and pairs well with both other neutrals for a tonal scheme or as a foil to bolder shades.

If none of that sounds like a negative and you remain mystified by the mockery leveled at these unassuming tints, you’re in a comfortable majority. Neutrals are overwhelmingly the most popular, default or practical color choices and have been for well over a century. Neutral wall paints outsell jewel and primary brights by thousands of gallons. Black and camel coats remain classics, while their counterparts in grass green and candy pink are novelties. Neutrals are the colors that call to mind materials such as marble, stone, wood and linen and are associated with words such as “soothing,” “natural,” “tasteful” and “calm.” In short, the commercial and cultural power of neutrals seems unassailable.

This was not always the case. Historically speaking, people wanted to spend their money on textiles, ornamentation and pigments that were as bright and saturated as possible. In the ancient world, hues such as purple, blue and red were the most highly prized, at times worth more than gold. The raw materials — murex sea snails, lapis lazuli, cochineal insects and fine indigo — were traded over huge distances and were reserved, often by law, for the most powerful. Those without money and status were left with the dregs of the dye baths, pigments that could be readily scooped from the earth or raw materials in their natural state. The palette of poverty was one of muddy, desaturated colors that blended into the natural world. An echo of this history is actually embedded in the word beige itself, which comes from a French term for wool that had yet to be bleached and dyed.

This began changing in the second half of the 19th century. As chemists created more synthetic colorants and bright materials became more affordable, tastemakers sought out and promoted subtler, more natural tints. “Truth to materials” became a key tenet of the Arts and Crafts movement, while Aesthetes and their arch advocate Oscar Wilde promoted a palette of offbeat “art colors” that supposedly echoed those found in the natural world and were more sophisticated than the brash synthetics.

By the mid-20th century, neutrals had an established luxury pedigree. Christian Dior is believed to have announced that gray “will prevail,” at the height of his career in the 1940s. His signature tint — a warm, silvery shade called Trianon or Montaigne gray that recalled the gravel driveway of his childhood home — has been a brand signature ever since, deployed as a way of drawing the eye to fastidious details that might be missed on a garment in a showier shade. Gabrielle Chanel and her maison have been similarly enamored with beige, a love said to be inspired either by the sandy beach at Deauville in France or the plain, stretchy jersey of her lover’s sportswear. Later, Phoebe Philo, while at the helm of Chloé and Céline in the 2000s and 2010s, made flowing clothes that mixed masculine tailoring with peekaboo femininity in tonal taupe, cream, greige and beige into cool-girl staples and shifted the trajectory of the luxury industry.

Today, most agree that the future looks bright for neutrals. For every skeptic mocking sad beige and millennial gray, there is a score of others using phrases such as “quiet luxury,” “stealth wealth,” “thoughtful Scandinavian minimalism” and “Japandi style.” For Jane Boddy, a trend forecaster and member of the Pantone Color Institute, the appetite for neutrals continues to be a way of focusing on quality of materials and design, but there are other factors at play, too. She sees neutrals becoming more complex, with mellow undertones of peach, yellow, lilac or green.

Joanne Thomas, director of color at the Fashion Snoops trend forecasting agency, points out that neutrals “signal affluence through subtlety” and “photograph beautifully,” reflecting the kind of curated lifestyles that perform well on social media. They exude, in her words, “a sense of calm, simplicity and control,” something that is particularly appealing when global events feel overwhelming.

Because few would accuse today’s current events of lacking drama, it seems likely neutrals will remain a well-established cultural juggernaut. This will, of course, make them an irresistible target for anyone determined to skewer the status quo and present themselves as countercultural. Realists, however, know that neutrals are inevitable, the chromatic equivalent of death and taxes. No matter how cruel the gibes, you needn’t feel sad for beige.