Wordwatch: Taupe
Ever since the Bauhaus in Germany abolished colour as decadent and fussy back in the 1920s, architects and designers who think of themselves as progressive have favoured grey and its variants as the only acceptable accompaniment to black and white. A few years ago, a popular interior decorator published a promotional booklet suggesting colours to enhance your home and listed “taupe” and “beige” as enlivening possibilities. The only bright colour in her brochure was the scarlet of her fingernails.
“Taupe”, which has only entered our dictionaries in recent decades, is French for “mole” and is used over here to denote the brownish-grey colour of a mole’s skin. (It has nothing, by the way, to do with “Moleskine”, which is an Italian proprietary brand.) The word “grey” has connotations so drab and unattractive (except perhaps in the context of a particular brand of cheap fiction) that a French word is preferable. “Beige”, too, is French, originally the name of a woollen fabric and, from that, has acquired the adjectival meaning “greyish”. Chambers tells us that more recently, it has come to mean “buff with a slight suffusion of pink”. In any case, it has now acquired some of the pejorative associations that inevitably come with the neutral and the dull.
I now learn (from the Daily Mail, taken up recently in Private Eye’s “Pseud’s Corner”) that the popular decorator I mentioned is known as the “Queen of Taupe”, and that – thrills – she is “approaching beige quite differently now”. This counts in her world as original thinking. Even though the Bauhaus happened a hundred years ago, it still commands respect not merely as an interesting historical style but as the only acceptable standard of design. And the sheer dread of colour has spread from designers to the public at large.
The plague of the greys is particularly devastating in the medium in which the Bauhaus specialised: architecture. Sadly nowadays, it is no longer a feature only of “modern” buildings. For instance, the picturesque “Queen Anne” style, red-brick with white woodwork, revived in the 1880s and often to be seen in our smarter suburbs, is subjected to Bauhaus good taste, the windows repainted grey, or perhaps taupe, making an aesthetic nonsense of what are frequently very distinguished and delightful buildings.
That’s at the upper end of the architectural market. More worrying, I think, is the invasion of grey into buildings we use all the time, in towns and villages countrywide, and expect to be cheerful. Buildings that almost by definition mustn’t be grey: our public houses. I know these are suffering catastrophic decline, but they remain important to our way of life, and the most successful are reinventing themselves as a new genre: the gastropub.
This admirable development, which revives old establishments and caters for a newly food-conscious and abstemious population, derives much of its appeal from the combination of modern eating with ancient, or at least traditional, settings. It’s therefore understandable that owners, anxious to signal their modernity, employ designers like our “Queen of Taupe” who will refurbish their interiors and exteriors as smartly as possible. But how traditional can a setting be when it is “done over” to look “modern”? What sort of a pub sign is a semi-abstract design in severe black and white?
In this context, modernity isn’t a question of period. It’s a matter of aesthetic judgment. Why a style initiated a century ago is considered “modern” today is puzzling. For my part, I find it very tedious: why should we live in settings like factories? And when we go out to enjoy ourselves over a meal, why should our surroundings resemble those of a prison?
Shortly after the bleak greyness of the War years, schools were often painted in carefully matched but cheerful colours – salmon pink, scarlet, sky blue, yellow – which were thought suitable for stimulating and encouraging children undergoing education. What happened to that excellent notion? Don’t we need stimulating and encouraging too?
Perhaps the Taupe Queen’s fingernails should get more of a look in.