I admit I'm not exactly a prime source on fashion. Somewhere on the internet right now there are pictures of me in a straw hat and plaid shirt, which makes me look like a grape farmer in a bad tourism video. While my shoes are very nice, they were selected by a nice lady in a store rather than my own personal preference, and I tend to wear black pants primarily because I don't have to worry about them matching my shirt. All good reasons to ignore everything I'm about to say about fashion, but there are things that even people who know nothing about style, class and similar subjects can accurately observe.
The thing that is confusing me today, as it pertains to fashion, is why chartreuse and olive green have again become acceptable colors to make things in. I first noticed this a few months ago, when I bought some glasses which were made of a particularly '70s shade of green. I bought them not for their beauty, but because I couldn't believe that there were actually new glasses made in that color - they were also very cheap, which made such an impulse purchase possible. I figured they were an anomaly, a manufacturing accident someone smartly decided to market to people prone to buying things for dubious reasons. Not a serious drinking solution, in other words.
So, imagine my surprise when Honda chose to launch its European Civic - a major money maker for the company and the product that guides the way for the rest of the line - in another distinctly '70s shade of olive green. My parents once owned a car in that exact same color, but it was from 1978. This is a 2012 model and supposed to be on the ragged edge of compact hatchbacks.
This immediately became worrying, so I looked for other indications that the awful greens of the '70s were returning. Turns out one of the big "in" colors currently gracing runways at the worldwide fashion week events is chartreuse. And for men, according to Reuters at least, olive green is something edgy and hip. This is a bad thing, men of the world, do not listen to them. I know, I might look like a grape farmer, but I'm wise enough to know that no good comes of olive.
Of course, right now many places in the world are either in the middle of a recession or concerned that one could arrive at any moment. Last time these colors gained a following there was also a recession. I'm not sure what it is about economic downturns that drives people to embracing a color that is completely awful, but for some reason we do. Since it appears as though all the green appliances from the seventies have been removed from our homes and placed in landfills and the green cars in scrap heaps, we have forgotten that this isn't a good look.
Well, we need to take a stand against all the companies who have jumped on the awful green bandwagon. If a car is painted in olive, buy a different one - dealers do usually have a wide selection. When buying clothes, buy the color that doesn't remind one of the 1970s. When painting your house, pick hues that aren't from the groovy disco collection. In short, now that we have recognized that olive and chartreuse are renewed threats to our eyes, we must stop them before they take over our lives and are again things so unfashionable we can't give them away.
