HUES YOU CAN USE

By GARRY TRUDEAU/SEATTLE

Where do we think yellow is going?" The captain of the Color Directions workshop scanned the faces of her troops intently. It was time to commit, to make sense of hundreds of amber and gold chips and swatches that lay strewn about the polished tabletop like autumn leaves on black pond ice. This was it--crunch time. Whither yellow?

Personally, I had no idea where yellow was going, but I knew where it had been. My bedroom. My foyer. And the master bath, even the guest room. In fact, a recent freshening of our apartment decor had left it awash in pale, burnished aureoles of ocher and flax and citron and other members of the yellow family, all of them, amazingly, on speaking terms. Having surrendered palette control to my spouse, who in turn capitulated to professional direction, I suddenly found myself surrounded by--and bonding with--a spectrum of hues I had always held in special contempt.

How could this be? How could anyone have anticipated that despite all the stolid urban grays I had long championed, I would come to be a yellow person? Actually, quite a few people had more or less bet their careers on it, and some of them were hunkered down in this Seattle hotel room. The participants belonged to the 1,500-member Color Marketing Group, the Virginia-based color cartel that has held a largely unknowing public under its sway for more than 30 years. It was the CMG that forecast avocado refrigerators in the late '60s and mauve motel rooms in the '70s and hunter-green automobiles in the '90s. And it was the CMG that predicted the 1996 consumer palette would be, in the words of former president Laraine Turner, "kissed by the yellow."

There have always been color crazes, historically brought on by mere availability. In the early 1800s, bright yellows were popularized by the introduction of chromate and cadmium pigments, a development that greatly affected the painting of J.M.W. Turner. Likewise, the Impressionists made generous use of the new blues and greens that emerged in their day. In this century, novelty gave way to marketing as manufacturers came to shape public tastes in color. In 1934, for instance, the American Tobacco Co. found that women wouldn't buy Lucky Strikes because the then green box clashed with their clothes. The solution: make green hot. In short order, the company set up a "color-fashion bureau," underwrote a green-themed society ball, enlisted magazine editors and bought off French couture houses. By year's end hordes of newly sensitized women started buying Lucky Strike packs as fashion accessories.

By 1962 postwar color technology had so expanded the usable universe of hues that without some sort of coordination, the public was in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by mismatched home furnishings, clashing car interiors, repellent fashion combinations--in short, a crisis of widespread bad taste. Thus was the CMG born, and ever since, a small army of colorists has congregated twice a year to bring order out of chaos. In closed caucuses, members hash out the social and political trends affecting future tastes, then produce the 15 color "directions" that will appear everywhere three years hence.

Is all this really necessary? Probably. The human eye can distinguish roughly 6 million colors, and as most of us know, not all hues are created equal, chromatically speaking. A blue can be nearly black or nearly green and still be blue. Moreover, ambient light changes everything. How many mornings have you dressed in semidarkness only to show up at work in an outfit that looks as if it was assembled in total darkness?

I found myself thinking about this as I examined the samples of yellow spread out before us. The blinds were open, and this being a typical Seattle day, the sunlight falling on the table was intermittent, and the swatches kept changing in intensity. Color is a moving target under the best of circumstances, so how, I wondered, could these color mavens function in such variable conditions? How could they ever hope to pinpoint the hues my wife or I would choose (by dint of inexorable social forces) when it came time to rethink our apartment for the 21st century? I had to keep reminding myself: These people are trained professionals.

Fortunately, they freely confess to fallibility. Indeed, such is their concern over being misperceived as color mafiosi that at conference end, a dozen CMG officers gathered in the press suite to downplay their own significance to the assembled media. That the assembled media consisted of a local reporter, a trade journalist and myself proved no deterrent to their earnest onslaught. CMG only forecasts, insisted our briefers; it doesn't dictate; the consumer is the ultimate arbiter.

By then, I was happy to concede the point. I don't want 6 million color choices. I never have. Color is not a civil liberties issue with me. Maybe it's middle age talking, but in an increasingly fractious, decentralized world, I find it oddly comforting that somebody is in charge of color. Long live the sultans of swatch.