A Colour Without Colour

I am in love with the prettiest shade of grey, and I call it Cloud. It is the palest shade just before white, the colour of the palest most luminescent clouds. There are really not all that many names for grey, unlike red or brown for example, and most of them are not at all complimentary: grizzly, mouse, grey-drab, Quaker, ash, greige, battleship, Payne’s grey, cadet? No thanks. That was why I had to make one up.

In fact, the name came to me when I opened up a package from the boutique Vintage Now. I had purchased a 70s shirred blouse (to replace a similar one in cream I had wantonly given away years ago) and as soon as I unfolded it, ‘cloud grey’ came to mind. Then the other weekend I found this silk blouse in a charity store in an almost identical shade. I was terribly thrilled. It is, incidentally, the exact same cut as an embroidered 40s blouse I own (down to the little gathers at the neckline and around the wrists), but it is modern, although the label has been snipped off.

Wikipedia rather poetically describes grey thus: Grey or gray is an intermediate colour between black and white, a neutral or achromatic colour, meaning literally a colour ‘without colour’. It is the colour of a cloud-covered sky, of ash and of lead. Other more complimentary analogies Roget’s Thesaurus lists are: silver, frost, oyster, pearlescent, pewter, steel, charcoal, dove-grey.

The Declaration of Love, by J F de Troy, 1731. The lovers are both wearing beautiful shades of grey. Image from ‘A History of Costume in the West’, by François Boucher (Thames & Hudson, 1987)The word ‘grey’ was first recorded in AD 700, from Middle English grai or grei, which comes from the older Anglo-Saxon graeg. The colour does not have a great reputation really, beginning with its association with peasants, monks and poverty in the Middle Ages. The hue is also associated with the military, the lower class of Parisian prostitutes (grisette), greying of hair (rarely popular), dull suits in favour with accountants and ad men, and the miserable grey days of endless winter. On the other hand, grey became a highly fashionable colour in the eighteenth century. Then it was favoured in women’s dresses and men’s coats and vests, particularly in silks and satins when the shade takes on the luminescence of silver.

And clouds always have a silver lining too. What could be lovelier?

Scroll down for more fashionable eighteenth century grey.

Countess Sophia Maria de Voss, by A Pesne, 1745. Her silver looks divine with scarlet. Image from ‘A History of Costume in the West’, by François Boucher (Thames & Hudson, 1987)Marie-Antoinette, by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783Prinzessin Amalia von Preussen, by A. Pesne, c.1740s–50sStella Tennant models modern fashion inspired by the eighteenth century, by Tim Walker