For the freedom of color

Do you know the feeling of buying clothes in one color and then, when you get home, you realize that it’s completely different from the one you bought in the store?

What for the manufacturers is a headache, for the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius is a more than positive, exceptional quality of the colors. Vitra’s color director is a strong advocate of metamerism, or the appearance of having one color identical to another under specific circumstances that disappears when the light, the angle of vision or even the observer changes.

The freedom of color has centered the professional career of this designer, who has exposed her research on the behavior of color according to light at the London Museum.

Colors always the same or fickle?

Unstable pigments that manifest themselves freely in the same object according to whether the morning, midday or evening sun is projected onto them. It is a plea against the industry that imposes fixed colors and standards in the face of fear of consumer deception. In the presentation of “Breathing Colors” (2017) Jongerius said “as a designer I call on plastics, varnishes and paints to use pigments that provide intense colors that are allowed to breathe with changing light.”

Hella Jongerius: “Our world suffers from color anorexia. My mission is to change that.”

With her words and her research, this 56-year-old designer wants to confront the chromatic indoctrination that, according to the designer, limits society’s education about color. In the last decade her research and designs have focused on giving freedom to colors and showing them to consumers. But Hella Jongerius is aware that big changes always come little by little and says “I haven’t become a designer just to do nice things”.

Images:

www.jongeriuslab.com