8
Jonathan Faiers
In the film Gone to Earth, British filmmaking partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s deliriously beautiful 1950 vision of English paganism versus religious conformity, actress Jennifer Jones plays a liberated gypsy girl named Hazel. She first casts her spell over the repressed Baptist minister played by Cyril Cusack while singing “Harps in Heaven,” an ethereal and bewitching song, accompanied by her father playing the harp. Costume designers Julia Squire and Ivy Baker created Hazel’s dress for this sequence in a typical mid-twentieth-century cinematic approximation of late-nineteenth-century dress. But what is the most striking feature of the garment is its shocking shade of yellow, made all the more conspicuous by being contrasted against the dazzling Technicolor azure sky and somber tones of the audience, in particular Cusack’s priestly black, who is entranced by her performance. In this sequence her yellow costume is understood as shocking, but somehow it is also otherworldly, exotic, sexual, bewitching, and repulsive, in short – wrong.
This roll call of contradictory chromatic characteristics is typical of the geographically specific marginalization, and more recent commercial migration, of yellow in the West from being regarded as the color of disgrace and of degeneracy into the shade of fashionable conformism, a dilution of yellow’s reputation from shameful to chic. How color is regarded historically and culturally is as much a constantly fluid and evolving process as it is fixed and unwavering, its meaning and perception a result of global, economic, and cultural shifts. As French medievalist Michel Pastoureau has so eloquently pointed out: “Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Indeed, for the historian—as for the sociologist and the anthropologist—color is a social phenomenon. It is society that ‘makes’ color, defines it, gives it its meaning, constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not” (Pastoureau 2001: 10).
Yellow in the West, and particularly its representation in art and popular culture, has long shared an affinity, if not an exact correlation, with red. Popular cinema, for example, is littered with scarlet women, dangerous reds and satanic reds. Red’s reputation as a sexually provocative, even promiscuous, color, when worn by women at least, is so entrenched in the Western psyche that it can even signal its shamelessness in black and white, a topic explored in detail in the chapter “Seeing Red” in my own Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (Faiers 2013). The bloodiness and therefore implicit deadliness of red is as potent in the colorless world of early film, as it is in lurid Technicolor. But for all of red’s shocking, fictional potential, when it comes to its use in fashion, it has also enjoyed a long-established reputation as a stylish color choice. Noticeable, yes, and requiring a certain bravura to wear it well, perhaps, but coming with a chromatic pedigree bestowed on it by its royal, military, and clerical associations. These additional associations mean that even in mainstream film red no longer occupies the oppositional space it once relished.
Yellow, however, is a different matter and as Hank Williams, the celebrated country and Western star, sang in his 1952 hit Settin’ the Woods on Fire:
You’re my gal and I’m your feller
Dress up in your frock of yeller
I’ll look swell but you’ll look sweller
Settin’ the woods on fire.1
Williams’s lyric suggests that, like Hazel’s dress in Gone to Earth, yellow has both an affinity with nature, for example yellow sunshine, but also an accompanying elemental potential for harm that matches red’s easily understood incendiary power, and according to Settin’ the Woods on Fire can burn with a more sulpherous and lasting heat than the fieriest of reds. More recently, yellow has taken on the cinematic mantle as the “shade of shame” once occupied by red (Faiers 2013). Therefore, the color selected for the protagonist’s disastrous appearance at the law society dinner, in Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason (2004 dir. Beeban Kidron), is an unflattering shade of golden yellow, while American actor, comedian, director, and game show host Cedric the Entertainer, in the 2005 remake of The Honeymooners (dir. John Schulz), employs a discourse of yellow ignominy to describe his appearance in a borrowed suit at a fund-raising event, protesting: “What do you mean, let it go! I’m stood here lookin’ like a bottle of dish washing liquid, a summer squash, a stick of butter, somebody’s cracked teeth and you want me to let it go.”
So if we understand that yellow has supplanted red’s position as the color of cinematic shame, its more recent journey to the center of fashionable approval from the margins of sartorial acceptability demands equal consideration and an understanding of the color’s specific negative associations which, although more particular, have meant that yellow has suffered a much more lasting chromatic quarantine than red’s more generalized avoidance.
Yellow clothing in the West is burdened with a symbolic weight as a result of its historic accumulation of fear, mistrust, and ignorance of the unknown—a color synonymous with the “other.” As John Gage, author of Color and Culture, suggests: “Yellow has had a bad press in modern times and is now thought to be the least popular color” (Gage 1995: 63) and while yellow’s fortunes have recently changed, as this text will endeavor to show, since Gage made his observation in 1993, historically, at least in the West, yellow’s disrepute is undeniable.
There is much visual evidence to reinforce the symbolic interpretation of the color yellow. For example, early Christian examples of xanthophobia, or fear of the color yellow, have been given artistic expression in the numerous examples depicting Judas Iscariot dressed in yellow betraying Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane with a treacherous kiss, the most famous perhaps being The Kiss of Judas included in the cycle of frescoes by the early Renaissance master Giotto in The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (1304–1306), where Judas envelops Christ in his perfidious yellow cloak.
A similar art historical stereotyping of marginalized yellow can be found in the numerous depictions of Judas seated at the edge of the Last Supper in yellowed isolation wreathed in a combination of avarice, guilt, and envy. Holbein the younger’s painting The Last Supper of 1524–1525, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, is perhaps one of the most remarkable of these, with a red headed, yellow clad (a double condemnation perhaps given the entrenched mistrust of red and ginger hair in Western culture), hunched, and hooked nosed Judas, seated on the left (as always the position associated with the entrance of evil) contrasted against the deep beatific blue of the sorrowfully knowing Christ. A somewhat more saccharine, yet nonetheless condemning version can be found in Phillip de Champagne’s baroque version of the Last Supper from 1648, which seats Judas cloaked in yellow on the left, clutching his purse containing the thirty pieces of silver (Plate 8.1).
While there is no biblical evidence of Judas’ fondness for yellow (the gospels are curiously achromous), it is easy to see how the growing tide of anti-Semitism staining Europe from the medieval period onwards conflated the increasing number of sumptuary and other vesitmentary laws with the personification of biblical treachery, avarice, and ignominy in the figure of the yellow-clad Judas Iscariot. These laws condemned Europe’s Jews to wear yellow hats, belts, scraps of cloth and badges, typically in the shape of a yellow ring or circle. Further research needs to be undertaken concerning the synchronicity between the emergence of the yellow dressed Judas in Western art and the earliest Judaic vestimentary regulations, but however exact the chronology, or why yellow was chosen as the color used to ostracize a specific ethnic group, this alliance between an adopted chromatic symbolism and institutionalized racism meant that yellow would be consigned to the outer reaches of the Western color palette (with a notable exception which will be addressed further on). This remained largely the case until the twentieth century, when despite the efforts of the Nazis’ ideological predilection for classificatory annihilation and the re-demonization of yellow in the concentration camps with Jewish victims identified by a yellow star, the color gradually emerges from its position of disrepute to reach its fashionably ascendant status today (Figure 8.1).
Figure 8.1 Yellow star, which Jews were forced to wear in occupied Holland during the Second World War. © Photo: REX/Shutterstock.
By the sixteenth century “heretics” of all creeds found themselves forced to wear yellow, as were those who refused to renounce their beliefs when brought before the Spanish inquisition and were forced to dress in yellow capes for example. In tandem with the depictions of Judas Iscariot clad in customary shameful yellow, another significant New Testament figure, Saint Peter, is similarly often depicted wearing yellow. Initially this might seem a contradiction to the color’s expected usage as the sign of disgrace. However, when we consider that alongside St. Peter’s receiving of the keys of the kingdom of heaven and his popular characterization as the first Pope, he is, of course, the disciple that thrice denied Christ following his arrest. This factor suggests that his golden yellow robes are as much symbolic of lies and denial as they are the raiment of celestial glory. At a period when yellow was increasingly becoming invisible in Western art it is entirely fitting that a painter as individual and unclassifiable as El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, 1541–1614) should favor yellow so strongly in his works, including at least six variations on the theme of the Penitent St Peter, caught at the very moment following his denial of Christ and in every version shown wearing a vivid, almost luminous yellow mantle.
While yellow continued its uneven journey in the West into chromatic opprobrium, finding new subjects on the way to cloak in tonal infamy, China maintained a fundamental and deep-rooted cultural regard for the color. An Imperial and spiritual shade, yellow in China is the color of happiness, glory and wisdom. It is also the color of the fifth zone in the Chinese compass—the center—or Middle Kingdom, where the Emperor resides at the exact center of the world bathed in yellow celestial light. Only members of the imperial household were permitted to wear yellow, while distinguished visitors were honored with a yellow, as opposed to red, carpet. Equally indicative of yellow’s symbolic, but in this case ominous, power is the fact that those who had wronged the emperor were given a yellow scarf, a golden vestimentary signal, one might even say textile command, for them to commit suicide.
By the late seventeenth and on into the eighteenth century with the establishment of trading relationships between China and Europe, the West enjoyed a brief period during which it basked in the newly fashionable rays of a yellow sun. Simulating China’s ancient reverence for the color, European yellow became, briefly, the color of power, wealth, and style for much of the eighteenth century reflecting the Western desire for Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea. The influx of imported Chinese goods, including lacquer ware, silks, and porcelain all of a distinctly vibrant yellow, bathed the fashionable elite of the period in a reflected Oriental glory and provided the catalyst for European Chinoiserie. Yellow covered stylish walls, backs, and canvases alike and the color is perhaps the shade most associated with the refined taste for the exotic that typifies the era.
Allied to this fashionable eighteenth-century yellow craze was the appearance in Europe, due to increased colonial and mercantile expansion, of a series of new yellow dyes made from imported foreign plant material which alongside simultaneous scientific advances produced some of the first synthetic yellow pigments. Fustic obtained from the Maclura tinctoria or Dyer’s Mulberry tree found in many parts of South America and Quercitron produced from the bark of the Eastern Black Oak indigenous to many parts of North America, both of which produce brilliant yellows when used with the correct mordants to fix the dye, were indicative of this period of intense trade and expansion. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the discovery of these new dyes from abroad alongside the manufacture of synthetic pigments and dyes, which quickly replaced the traditional yellows made from arsenic, cow urine and other costly substances such as saffron.
This combination of cultural, mercantile, and scientific interest around the color yellow understandably led not only to the demand for the imported yellow artifacts mentioned previously, but an intensification of the color in fashionable clothing, many examples of which still survive in all their dazzling yellowness today. This sartorial brilliance understandably provided irresistible chromatic subject matter for the most celebrated painters of the period such as Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the latter’s whose painting La Liseuse of 1772 depicts a young girl reading wearing a vivid yellow gown and is typical of the era’s xanthophilia, or obsession with the color yellow.
This season in the sun was relatively brief and with the dawn of a new century and the unstoppable advance of Western empire building, and aggressive trading practices, yellow returned to its former status in the West as the hue of hatred. China, and a generalized construction of the Orient, replaced the Jews as the object of Western chromatic sullying. This was fueled by events such as the Opium Wars in the first half of the nineteenth century and a series of so-called unequal treaties (the term applied to any number of treaties signed between Western powers, Quing dynasty China and the late Tokugawa shogunate in Japan following unsuccessful military encounters), culminating in the Boxer Rebellion at the close of the century. The accelerating Sinophobia (or anti-Chinese sentiment) throughout the nineteenth century meant that popular discourse developed a sulfurous efflorescence of racial stereotyping. Terms such as the “yellow peril” and “yellow terror” used to describe the largely imaginary threat to European and North American economic and cultural stability by Chinese immigration came into popular usage.
The Chinese association with opium added to the demonization of the color, with the color taking on additional hues of depravity, decadence, and dependence, rendering those who fell under opium’s spell jaundiced and infected, suffering from a narcotic yellow fever, a condition similar to that which artist and writer David Batchelor describes in his illuminating work Chromophobia as “falling into color,” entering an altered, colored state (Batchelor 2000). The anti-hero of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray satisfied his addiction by visiting the opium dens of late nineteenth-century London which were illuminated by a “… moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it” (Wilde 1971: 140).
Less racially specific but equally negative expressions such as “yellow bellies” and “yellow streaks” gained currency in literature as general derogatory terms denoting cowardice, thus evoking the color’s long history of negative associations in the West. This was, of course, the exact opposite of the noble and courageous characteristics traditionally bestowed on the color in China—a typical example of linguistic colonialism and its processes of cultural appropriation and distortion. These verbal shifts and additions characterized the oscillating fortunes of yellow in the West from the color of fashion to the color of fear.
When not linked directly to Sinophobic racial stereotyping, yellow in the nineteenth century becomes increasingly identified as the color of the outsider and wearing yellow, especially, signified at best non-conformity, and more often decadence, degenerescence, and evil. James Tissot, the painter of later nineteenth-century sartorial societal coding, for example, repeatedly used yellow to clothe the female protagonists in his tableaux of fashionable social transgression. Paintings such as The Ball of 1880, for example, depicts the arrival at a dance of a young, too young, woman dressed in vivid yellow on the arm of her elderly companion, which of course might be her father but can also be understood as her lover. Her color choice here transforms her into the kept woman in yellow, wearing the shade of shame. While Tissot’s earlier work Chrysanthemums painted in 1875 has as its subject a woman more poorly dressed than that of the young girl in The Ball, but still clad in vivid yellow shawl and bonnet. She is seen stooping, or crouching amid a crop of white, gold, and startling yellow chrysanthemums reminiscent once again of Bachelor’s “fall into color” both literally and perhaps morally, with the added frisson of exotic danger suggested by that most Oriental of blossoms the chrysanthemum, the imperial symbol of Japan.
Charles Dickens, the great Victorian social commentator, reserved a special place for yellow in his literature. His novels are full of yellowing decay and inhumanity, such as this example from Nicolas Nickleby: “… his nose and chin were sharp and prominent, his jaws had fallen inward from loss of teeth, his face was shriveled and yellow, save where the cheeks were streaked with the color of a dry winter apple …” (Dickens 1913: 461) describing the repulsive miser Arthur Gride. Similarly this passage from Great Expectations where Pip describes Miss Haversham’s faded bridal tableaux uses an equally doom laden understanding of yellow: “But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes” (Dickens 2008: 53). Or Miss Haversham’s own description of herself as: “I am yellow skin and bone” (Dickens 2008: 79).
Naturally as with all vestimentary proscriptions, the very act of declaring a color as unacceptable, antisocial, and unsuitable makes it irresistible to those who consider themselves outside of conventional society, and oblivious to orthodoxy’s strictures. Yellow’s popular perception as the color of shame, perversity, and an artistic sensibility so refined as to be “unhealthy,” meant that toward the close of the nineteenth century the color entered into an epistemic contract (as did the color green) with what would latterly become known as the Aesthetic Movement, simultaneously linked to and identifying yellow as a color beyond the pale. Yellow is the color of the volume Lord Henry Wooten sends to Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s novel to console him after the suicide of his lover. As Dorian starts reading, we are informed that the yellow book: “was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed” (Wilde 1971: 101).
The book in Wilde’s story with its yellow cover is generally understood as a reference to J.K. Huysman’s symbolist masterpiece À Rebours (translated as Against Nature) published some seven years earlier in 1884. When originally sold in Paris À Rebours would have been wrapped in yellow paper both hiding and signaling its scandalous contents (a dazzling forebear to the later plain brown paper covers used to hide pornographic literature). À Rebours tells the tale of the ultra-refined aesthete the Duc des Esseintes and is full of chromatic decadence including a catalogue of sickly and febrile yellows.
John Lane’s notorious Yellow Book, the quarterly literary journal which scandalized conventional late Victorian society, and which initially featured Aubrey Beardsley’s shockingly erotic black and white fantasies on its lurid yellow covers, became the handbook for aspiring decadents, reinforcing yellow as the livery of languor. Perhaps second only to lilies was the sunflower’s dazzling yellows which reigned supreme as the floral emblem of an aesthetic sensibility and became the yellow object of derision in the popular culture of the time including cartoons and comic operas. Here the color was deployed in thinly disguised attacks on a new victim of shameful yellow to join the list of Jews, Heretics, and Chinese: that of the homosexual, who in popular media of the time was equated on the same level as the insane or the criminal (Plate 8.2). So Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience (first performed in 1881) which mocked the Aesthetic Movement, featured the “fleshly poet” Bunthorne holding his sunflowers while the operetta’s cutting critique of the Grosvenor Gallery established on Bond Street, London, in 1877 and home of British aesthetic painting, contains the famous taunting lines “greenery yallery Grosvenor Gallery.”
Crossing the Atlantic to America, “yellow journalism” was coined as the term describing a new style of popular sensationalist reporting, named after the early cartoon character Mickey Dugan or The Yellow Kid (so named because he was drawn wearing an oversized yellow nightshirt) who appeared initially in the New York World and subsequently in the New York Journal—American in the 1890s. Both newspapers were notorious for prioritizing dramatic, sometimes fictional, “news” stories which was an approach to news journalism that, of course, persists today and has migrated to the proliferation of sensational televised media broadcasting. It was not just the American press that became stained with yellow’s negative connotations. One of the most startling works of literature produced in this period was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel first published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper, drenched with a decidedly European yellow decadence with its story of the disturbing and nightmarish fantasies conjured up in the mind of a woman kept prisoner in a yellow papered room: “It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! … The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell” (Gilman 2010: 38).
Returning to yellow’s re-emergence in contemporary fashion, it is surprising that even in the twentieth century when most strictures concerning correct color choices had long since been dispensed with, it is still a color that occurs comparatively infrequently. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the few fashion designers who seems to have had more than a passing fancy for yellow was that supreme individualist and master of both historical and symbolical vestimentary references, Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972). Throughout his career he seems to have had a specific fondness for yellow, which accompanied his signature ecclesiastical blacks, ironic pinks, and virginal whites. Balenciaga even made a direct reference to yellow’s previous period of Western fashionability, the eighteenth century, by naming one of his many yellow designs “Watteau”. For a designer noted for his strong personal religious belief (Balenciaga was a devout Catholic all of his life and was deeply influenced as a young man by the clerical clothes he saw being worn every day in his native Spain), perhaps yellow with its complex and contradictory Catholic resonances as both the color of renewal and rebirth as well as the color branding the heretic and gentile provided a fitting reference for Balenciaga to conduct his elegant explorations into the relationships between couture, history, and spirituality.
Balenciaga aside, yellow enjoyed momentary periods of glory in the fashion spotlight, but to understand its most recent revival we need to revisit its more positive associations in Eastern, particularly Chinese, culture. It is surely not coincidental that as China becomes increasingly important as a major consumer of Western fashion, especially luxury fashion, that yellow is deployed with escalating regularity by a number of prominent Western designers. Once the crude Sinophiliac tendencies of designers pandering to this new market, who produced collections dripping with heavy-handed, and in some instances frankly racist, Orientalism, had run their course, China’s importance to the survival of many Western luxury fashion brands was understood, ushering in a more measured response to this new commercial opportunity. As has so often been the case historically, color has been fundamental in forging alliances and relationships between cultures as much as it has been a source of division, and so it is with yellow’s recent altered regard among Western fashion designers. Undoubtedly the inclusion of yellow with the usual palette of neutrals, pastels, blues, and occasional reds could only have increased the appeal of Western fashion to new consumers from East Asia.
It is now widely accepted that popular culture, especially mainstream cinema, constructs a discourse between fashion and textiles, each influencing the other. How yellow in film has shifted the Western public’s perception of the color is an example of this process. Alongside yellow’s possible replacement of red as the color of shame and the outsider, other key cinematic yellow moments have prepared the way for the color’s reappraisal. Among the numerous possibilities is the character of Cher, the wealthy and socially admired high school student in Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995), who wears a striking yellow plaid outfit which created discernible sartorial shockwaves since its first appearance, and subsequently was regularly cited as a visual referent in a number of other productions, including music videos as a sort of sartorial shorthand for the typical American preppy high school look. Uma Thurman, as the avenging bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (Vol. 1) of 2003, has similarly emphasized yellow’s liberating and defiant history by wearing a yellow jumpsuit which was a symbol of her emancipation; a factor she seemed well aware of appearing in 2014 at the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the film’s release in Cannes dressed in a decidedly more feminine, but as blindingly yellow, Versace gown.
Even more emphatic is yellow’s recasting as the color of safety and ironically possibly delusion (shades of its association with opium perhaps) in M. Night Shamalayan’s unsettling 2004 film The Village, in which the protagonist played by Joaquin Phoenix wears protective yellow; “the good color” when daring to leave the confines of his isolated community, a community where yellow provides a form of chromatic talisman against harm, while red is seen as the sign of the devil and in the list of commandments featured on posters advertising the film is warned against in the following terms: “Let the bad color not be seen. It attracts them.”
Whether or not these and other cinematic yellows combined with the rise in importance of China as fashionable consumers have effected a vestimentary shift, the spring 2013 collections saw a number of prominent designers using yellow in their collections. Widely different in conception and potential clientele, these included Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, Versace, Prada and Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, and it could be argued this sudden cathexis of yellow on some of the most fashionable runways has had a considerable impact on succeeding ready-to-wear and couture collections which have seen a dramatic rise in the number of designers using the color yellow since that season. Yellow now makes regular appearances on the runways of London, New York, Paris, and Milan, and if not comprising a major part of a collection is included as almost obligatory for at least one outfit among the more customary brights.
Similarly, it is not just on high end runways that yellow is now to be found. Celebrities have realized its show stopping potential, and this has led to the dramatic increase of the color on the racks and hangers of high street retailers, where formerly yellow would have been considered far too great an economic risk by buyers. Perhaps no greater proof of yellow’s new found respectability, and it could be argued, its new found mediocrity was its patronage by the newest member of the British royal family, Kate Middleton (Plate 8.3). Her championing of yellow was most famously reported with her appearance at a number of occasions during 2014 in a bright yellow dress designed by the “queen of color blocking” (often yellow), Roksanda Ilincic. Ilincic is quoted as saying, “My colors are bright and my shapes are sculptural, but there is also a desire not to stand out in a loud way but rather in a different way” (Sunday Times Style Magazine June 2014). What that “way” is, the reader is not told, but Ilincic’s appraisal of color reflects the sartorial U-turn that characterizes yellow’s passage from the unlimited, otherworldliness of Dorothy’s yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz, to the security and acceptability of the “middle of the road”; a journey from shame to chic.
Notes
1 Extract of song lyrics from Settin’ the Woods on Fire (performed by Hank Williams, written by Ed Nelson, SR. and Fred Rose. Published by © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC).
References
Batchelor, D. (2000), Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books.
Dickens, C. (1913), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman & Hall.
Dickens, C. (2008), Great Expectation, London: Vintage Books.
Faiers, J. (2013), Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Gage, J. (1995), Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London: Thames and Hudson.
Gilman, C. P. (2010), The Yellow Wallpaper and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook, Bates Dock (ed.), Pennsylvania: Penn State Press.
Huysmans, J.-K. (2003), Against Nature (A Rebours), London: Penguin
Interview with Roksanda Ilincic Sunday Times Style Magazine, June 1, 2014.
Pastoureau, M. (2001), Blue: The History of a Color, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilde, O. (1971), “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. 18–167. London: Collins.