One of the things that inspires me now is the infinite range of colors. For me, color is as significant as music. And when I think about music the vocabulary is so huge: Indian music, Mexican music, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Beethoven, Bach — I mean it’s infinite.
What there is to notice is so extensive. It has really to do with your mood, to what extent you are open or to what extent you have the patience for it. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by what there is to notice. The ability to notice color is a kind of muscle; exercise that muscle and you will see far more colors than you ever believed existed. There are lots of things that wake you up to take notice. For example, if you order vanilla ice cream in a cafe you may not notice its color, but there are many colors of vanilla ice cream. Just to go out in the street is sometimes amazing. There’s always a dog or a cat whose color you’ve never seen before, or somebody has thrown away a tin and it’s shining in the sun. Color is everywhere and the question only is how much you notice it.
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Look at the street — buildings don’t change color very much; they do a bit because of the light obviously. But the clothes people wear are affected by fashion. Maybe in metropolitan cities more than in provincial cities — I don’t know. But if I go into Regent Street in London, I may notice that the color of the street has changed because of the fashion, the clothes people are buying. I imagine that last year more people were wearing black than five years ago, when they were probably wearing more grey and blue.
It’s very important for designers to push the capacity to notice, to see more than they thought possible. And this is certainly true with color. It’s also very important to push your ability to put yourself in the shoes of other people. Like any form of exercise, the more you do it, the stronger you get. Your clients may not be good at noticing, but you should notice on their behalf. There are millions of ways we can improve life for each other, but you can only start to use your imagination if you are a good noticer.
Here’s an example that happened to me recently — a new and very, very elegant restaurant called the Delaunay opened in London. For a week the restaurant was open only for friends, and all sorts of people came and gave the owner their opinions. He asked me for my opinion. And I said, I’m concerned about your tablecloths because they are linen. Linen has a texture and because of this texture there are millions of little grey holes. And because of the texture of the fabric, there are thousands of little shadows.
The effect of that is that the light from above shining on the tablecloths does not reflect up to the people. So the people do not look bright; with the light coming from above, they look tired. They don’t have light from below to make them look awake — which is why most tablecloths are made of cotton. The point of a tablecloth is to be a nice thing to look at but also to reflect light onto people’s faces. So if you make it out of linen it does not work. My friend said, Oh god, I just spent $20,000 on my tables! And he did not change the tablecloths.
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If you ask an English company to send you their paint colors, they probably will have three whites. And if you ask a Japanese company to send you their paint colors, they will probably have a hundred whites. But even that’s not enough! For example, if I’m working with designers and they are looking in a Pantone book for a green, I will say, Look, go out with a watercolor box into Regents Park because you will find a million greens. And Pantone has only 10.
