It started innocently enough, with a casual decision to gradually weed beige out of my wardrobe. What has beige done for me lately? What does it do for anyone, really? Have you ever received a compliment on a beige blouse or scarf? Later, while car shopping, I eagerly clicked on a web listing for a Plymouth Volare, an old favorite. I was crestfallen, then oddly annoyed to learn that the sedan was an indescribably innocuous shade of beige. You could compare it to the cream filling of a four-day-old bismarck. It made the car unbuyable. In the same way that tinted windows can impart a pimpish feel to certain automobiles, I realized that a beige Volare just immediately signifies “child molester.”
Whence all the beige in our world? I began to wonder. The more you look, the more there is. And the more you see, the more perplexing it becomes. Two years ago, you may recall, astronomers declared the universe to be a turquoise shade—the New York Times even ran a little Pantone-ish square of the shade on its front page—but weeks later they said sorry, we got it wrong. The real color of the universe is beige. Somehow that seems only fitting, and foreboding: Beige is as infinitely mysterious and ever-present as the universe itself. Beige is the universe.
Red is supposed to stimulate the appetite, while yellow is agitating. Certain shades of blue promote tranquility. What affect does beige have? Color theory tells us simply that beige represents practicality, conservatism, and neutrality. In other words, it has earned a reputation as the ultimate no-nonsense color. This explains how it has come to dominate in millions of square feet of corporate and institutional workspaces: copy rooms and kitchens, waiting rooms and lobbies, walls, halls, bathroom stalls… In its sheer abundance, beige collapses on itself to become stasis, obsolescence, mountains of computer monitors exported to Chinese junkyards.
Even now, despite the inroads white, gray, and black have made in the computer-equipment color palette, beige stubbornly holds sway in the average office (the sliver of candy-colored Macs is so small as to be insignificant). Post-it notes provide a small bit of solace—they’re not only useful, but yellow. But overall it’s a losing battle. Think about it. Did you ever get file folders in any other color than “manila” without specifically asking? A friend of mine just started a new job in a one-hundred-percent beige cubicle. Looking up at the white ceiling is his only form of relief, he says. No wonder half the workforce is on antidepressants and the other half hates its job. That’s the effect of an economy fueled by business-like beige.
Both in and outside the workplace, beige does dress up and try to disguise itself in more evocatively named colors—puce, taupe, cream, buff, oatmeal, biscuit, ecru, mushroom—but these many guises only reinforce its ubiquity. Tan and khaki are excluded from beige classification, however. They, like those food-oriented agents of beige, have other associations that give them some dimension. Beige, however, can only be a color. Or rather, it—not white—is the true non-color.
Beige creeps in when nobody is around to make a choice otherwise. Beige is absence: of care, of taste, of opinion. It is a void or vacuum (which further supports its recent scientific designation as the color of nothingness). Beige as “neutrality”? It’s more like beige as the intersection of mediocrity and apathy. This is why beige is simply everywhere, once you start looking, the visual residue of some weird, dull-minded neurosis, hiding in plain sight.
If you had to write the most boring book in the world, it would be hard to top the so-called Beige Book. This tome is published not once, but eight times a year by the Federal Reserve Bank—one of those all-powerful agencies that we really ought to know more about. (I, for one, simply can’t summon the interest. Maybe that’s the point.) The Beige Book itself is off-putting enough; purporting to gather “anecdotal information” from each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, its title is probably more effective that any form of obvious censorship could be. Then there’s Minneapolis’ own Federal Reserve Bank, whose designers seem to have made a point of choosing the beige-est possible shade of Kasota limestone (a favorite among institutional architects in the upper Midwest). Standing aloofly beside the Mississippi, the layers and textures of the complex deflect curiosity by radiating a willful blandness, such that a passerby’s natural impulse is to direct her attention toward the river—which is probably just the way the Fed wants it.
Often you notice beige only in the presence of some other more assertive color. The Déjà Vu Showgirls club, just down Washington Avenue, provides a welcome contrast. One could argue that it’s intentionally garish and tasteless, given what the building’s tenant is up to, and it’s certainly no architectural wonder. However, let’s all be thankful for the pink paint on its frosted-stucco façade. It could’ve been beige. After all, beige was good enough for the multitudes of upscale lofts and townhouses that have sprung up all around it in recent years, importing a suburban, monochromatic, tract-house-style atmosphere into the downtown area.
One of my most-ever hated buildings was the Vision Loss Resources rehabilitation center on Franklin and Lyndale. For years I passed it almost every day, an overwhelming monolith of windowless beige. The people using the building may be blind, but why does it follow that VLR should pretend to make this hulking monstrosity disappear for the rest of us by making it beige? Finally someone saw the light and painted it brick red. Not that it stemmed the tide. There’s a strikingly similar monument to blank beigeness at 28th Street and Nicollet, which I am told is a meatpacking plant (further evidence that beige is a perfect foil for mysterious goings-on); a tour of this particular neighborhood would be incomplete without noting the amazingly full-on beige McDonald’s, right down to the crushed-rock landscaping, a few blocks away. (McDonald’s brief flirtation with repainting its restaurants their original fire-engine red must have died out before they got to this one.)
Beige is a cover-up. In a mass-produced environment, one governed by efficiency and not aesthetics, it is the default choice to offend no one, and so it is imposed on everyone. Unlike white, it is said not to show dirt; thus the beige linoleum, carpet, blinds, walls, and appliances in apartments owned by real estate management companies. But what does the bounty of beige say about us as a nation? Political pundits yammer on about red states and blue states. (Republicans apparently having forgotten about the Red Scares, which could mean it’s now okay to call moderate conservatives pinkos.) However, given all the trouble that simmers just below the surface of our economic fantasies and melting-pot mediocrity, it seems depressingly likely that the true color of the USA is, like the universe itself, beige.
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