Catholic school-girl plaids. Indestructible hotel carpets. A zillion university emblems. Wherever one finds a dreary bureaucracy, making weak swipes at respectability, the same color palette emerges over and over. Whether you call the burgundy color maroon or—for the literary-minded or sartorially inclined—cordovan or oxblood, this brick-red shade has somehow come to epitomize officialdom. But why? Burgundy: A ChoiceSome color mysteries crack easily upon research; others resist yielding their secrets. I must confess burgundy/maroon’s origin story has me thoroughly stumped—which is itself intriguing. The color wraps so many official surfaces, it’s almost become invisible. And yet, a designer choosing burgundy for a color palette is making a charged claim—or rather, shying forcibly away from making such a claim. Burgundy is unassailable in its propriety, inarguable to those who fear color’s mercurial charms. How we got here is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in maroon-colored, crunchy bacon. Let’s start with a plausible theory: overuse. Red is perhaps the classic heavy-rotation color, allied inextricably as it is with blood and everything blood connotes: love, passion, valor, meat. The sunny uncomplicated reds of candy hardly exist in nature; organic reds run much more towards a gamut of reds tinged with bronze, blue or black. While it runs violently fluid, blood is red; but it darkens instantly to brownish-red, perhaps directly into rich brown earth with its many variations of shade. Blood, earth, nature: what themes are more resonant of patria, courage, nationhood, the highest values of valor? Wine and DirtThe term “burgundy” specifically refers to one of the biggest wine-producing regions of France, a spot of land rich with tangled vineyards and squabbled over bloodily for centuries. The original tribes of Germanic Burgundians give the color its name today. In reaching and reaching again for these universals, burgundy has gotten more than a little tarnished by overuse—and fatigued, conservative, even defensive as a result. When Pantone chose this color—which they dubbed Marsala—its 2015 Color of the Year, it screamed retrenchment, groundedness, conservatism. Or we could advance a more pragmatic theory: dirt-proofing. I recall a particular industrial carpet covering the dining room floor in a retirement home where I worked as a waiter as a teenager. A bewildering mix of paisleys with similar blobs, its chief color was a burgundy with faded yellow and teal whorls. Vaguely I recall gold braiding as part of the supposedly regal motif. Its imperviousness to soiling was legion. You could grind bright-yellow mustard into its paisley swirls, or explode an entire tiny capsule of dairy creamer onto its nubbly surface. A few well-placed twists of your boot heel, and the carpet would magically absorb your dastardly work. (We were in high school, so believe me: we killed many hours doing this.) Catholic-school uniforms are another provenance where burgundy, improbably, rules. As a liturgical color, red dominates cardinal wear (and the famously crimson Pope’s shoes). It symbolizes all the unsurprising things you might readily guess: Christ’s blood shed for humanity’s sake, the Holy Spirit (a sort of animus running through all church members, binding them into a community). It’s pretty un-arguable to good Catholics why you’d choose to clothe your students in a muted version of the blood of Christ. You can’t pick a loftier, more correct symbol to aspire to. But why muted? That’s the rub, really—and here’s where dirt-proofing likely kicks in. as the reason. The plaids in kelly-green, navy-blue or burgundy favored in school uniforms worldwide are dirt-proof in the extreme. Flattering to no one, they’re equalizing as intended. Also, it’s exhausting to wear blood-red every single day. Momentary passions get tempered for everyday use – muted, backgrounded, rendered symbolically reverent while graciously ignorable. Or maybe it’s the plaid that makes all these burgundies an invisibly officious blur. I went looking online for burgundy uniforms, school or otherwise, and found quite a few rakish alternatives —like these Indian schoolgirls above or Tibetan monks below. With its warm-yellow undertones, burgundy favors the non-European portion of the world’s complexions—that is to say, the vast majority of people. Despite everything we know about color, it still stubbornly contains secrets. And that’s exactly why I find the topic fascinating. The “true” facts of color symbolism are grounded in reality, but equally dependent on cultural connotations, folklore, popular theories, and everyday uses accreting around the shade. Burgundy has become official, and every new appropriation of the color affirms that use. Why? We can only guess. The post How Did Burgundy Become the Color of Officialdom? appeared first on Print Magazine. via Tumblr How Did Burgundy Become the Color of Officialdom?
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I grew up drinking Orange Crush and hearing my mom tell stories of how it used to come in a distinct brown Crush bottle, supposedly to protect the flavor. But by the time I was a kid, those days were long gone, and their bottles were clear. I was also aware that Orange Crush was made in my hometown, Evanston, Illinois—or at least it had a plant in town. A Crush Bottle DiscoveryOne day when I was about 12 years old, I was riding my Schwinn Sting-Ray down Asbury Avenue, and I noticed that a house in the neighborhood was being demolished. I pulled over by the garage (which looked like it was about to fall over on its own) and looked through one of the windows. There was no car and nothing much interesting to look at, except for four or five open cardboard boxes. I walked in to get a better look. The boxes were filled with pop bottles, and my first thought was to take them to the grocery store for the two-cent deposits. But as I looked closer, I noticed that these bottles didn’t look like the ones I was used to seeing. Here were brown Orange Crush bottles just like my mom had told me about. These were old! I had leafed through enough old issues of Life and The Saturday Evening Post to know that the majority of the bottles appeared to be from the 1930s and ’40s. I asked one of the guys responsible for the demolition if I could have the bottles. “If you can cart ’em outta there, you can have ’em,” he told me. “We were gonna dump’ em.” (Lots of ems.) Besides the Crush bottles, there were Royal Crown Cola, Nesbitt, 7Up, Pepsi, Squirt, Nehi, Vernor’s, Hires, Green River, Canada Dry, Dr. Pepper, and, of course, Coke. A Fizzy FormulaThis piece concentrates specifically on the Orange Crush bottles. The first 11 bottles in the photos below came from the garage. The others I’ve picked up through the years. Like many early soft-drink beverages, Orange Crush was created by a chemist, Neil C. Ward, and was originally called “Ward’s Orange Crush”. When Ward cofounded the company in 1911 with Clayton J. Howell, actual orange pulp was part of the original formula. (It was used through to 1930 but eventually dropped from the mixture.) The Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group now owns the Crush line of beverages. The Artist and the OrangeEvanston, Illinois, served as one of Crush International’s headquarters in the 1960s. I often rode my bike past the building, which was in the west of the city, in an industrial area on Main Street. One day I decided to go inside. The first thing I saw was a couple of vintage advertisements on the wall. I took a closer look and realized that they were original illustrations done in an orange-black, two-tone technique. I recognized the artist’s name immediately—Norman Rockwell. They were from the same period as his early Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations. I’ve often wondered who was lucky enough to take possession of those after the company relocated. Evidently, the Crush work (there were flavors in addition to orange) was the only advertising commission that Rockwell ever signed a contract for. Here are the bottles…The post Vintage Orange Crush Soda Bottles Take a Ribbing appeared first on Print Magazine. via Tumblr Vintage Orange Crush Soda Bottles Take a Ribbing |
Charles Gorton
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