Are we in a 'color recession'?
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What is a “color recession” and why are neutrals dominating our environment?
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What is a potentially unpopular opinion that you hold about color?
Gray can be really beautiful. There's some really wonderful grays out there.
I have to agree. I would say maybe the same thing in the inverse, which is that too much color can be really ugly. Don't get mad in the comments, but...
Wow. Okay. Okay. Maybe my controversial color opinion is that I love millennial pink.
One
day when I finally get to have like my old lady sitting room, you know, it's like a room in many houses or apartments that like pretty much like your mom onto your grandma is the only person who's allowed to go into. Like my mom's has a white carpet. I can't personally go in there even
though I'm almost
40. Mine will be completely awash in millennial pink. But Amogh, you know, I kind of agree with you there. I'm not naturally a color person. I think the only reason why there's color in my home is because of my husband. Like before I met him, I was a black and white girly. I mean, it made my laundry so easy. It's like literally two piles. That's it. I've only warmed up to color in the past like 10 years or so. But as I have become more comfortable with it, I've noticed, and a lot of other people have noticed, that a lot of our world looks kind of gray. Not the trees, the grass, or the sky, but the cars and the buildings and houses. And the decor and appliances in them. It is Neutrals City. And it's been like that for a while now.
One of my guests today, assistant editor at The Atlantic, Amogh Dimri, he calls this the color recession. And there are a lot of reasons, both structural and cultural, why color is leeching out of some of our most important and most expensive possessions. But I also wanted to get a little deeper into the role that color plays in our lives today and why some of us might be afraid of it. So I am joined today by Amogh. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And Katie Kelleher. She's a writer and editor who's written a lot about color, some of which is in her book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things. Welcome Katie.
Thank you for having me.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
Okay, so first, Amogh, what made you kind of go into a research rabbit hole about color? Like, how did you come to notice the breadth of the color recession?
You know, I was visiting some family in the Bay Area in San Francisco in January, and we were driving up to the city. They live a little south of the city. And as you sort of emerge on the highway and see the city for the first time, it looks like this, like, beautiful, pointless portrait of a city. Like, every house is dotted with a different color. You see blue next to green next to purple. I don't think I'd ever seen a purple house anywhere except San Francisco. And the whole thing got me thinking, one, why does San Francisco look like this? And two, why doesn't my home city of New York or, frankly, any other American city I've ever been to look like this? And that sort of threw me down this rabbit hole of how...
American cities actually used to be quite colorful. And slowly over the last couple of decades, you know, a culture of risk aversion has made that impossible. And San Francisco, a city that even today is more colorful than its counterparts, is also becoming grayer and grayer each year.
The world that we're describing, this desaturated world that we're describing, it didn't used to be this way. Like the mid-century was quite colorful, both in the fashions and in the choices people made in their houses.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is a “color recession” and why are neutrals dominating our environment?
0:00–8:29
2
How did Amogh Dimri discover the nationwide shift toward gray and neutral tones?
8:29–14:44
3
Why did the auto industry move from vibrant paints to gray and black?
14:44–18:45
4
How do landlords, flippers, and rental markets reinforce neutral color choices?
18:45–24:43
5
What historical and class‑based forces have shaped our attitudes toward color?
24:43–26:22
6
Why does color still thrive on social media while disappearing from homes and cars?
26:22–28:02