Kassia St. Clair: Author + Cultural Historian

Colouring the Everyday: Kassia St. Clair

The world gets a little more colourful when Kassia St. Clair writes. Whether she’s exploring the origins of saffron yellow, ‘dumb’ blondes or the political symbolism of luxurious purples, her work unveils the hidden histories behind everyday aesthetics. Colours, patterns, and trends each carry a distinct identity and cultural momentum that spills into the present day.  With the release of her latest book on Liberty, the iconic British design house and department store, St. Clair continues her pursuit to spotlight the often-forgotten layers of cultural and social history, reminding us not to take design for granted.

We are surrounded by colour, from statement clothing to advertised objects, but it wasn’t always this way. A few centuries ago, most people wore muted greys and browns dyed with earth tones. If their clothing featured colour, it often came from natural sources. Brighter hues were often reserved for the wealthy, who could afford rich purples, reds, rare blues, and yellows, as the dyes were expensive and labor-intensive to produce. Kassia St. Clair brought these explorations in colour into focus through her 2016 book, The Secret Lives of Colour. Taking readers on a chromatic journey, presenting narratives behind seventy-five shades through lyrical snippets. For example, Rosalie Duthé, a celebrated courtesan in 18th-century France, who was sent to a convent to avoid male, leering attention but left to be with a wealthy British financier. After spending his fortune, she became a dancer, courtesan, and nude model. She was the first recorded ‘dumb blonde’ in history.

The follow up publication The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (2018), stitched together tales of textiles from ancient burial shrouds to space suits. We find the emotional dimensions of material culture, how the things we wear and use tell stories about power and progress. Liberty promises a similar tapestry of insight. Rather than simply recounting the store’s evolution, St. Clair delves into how Liberty became a tastemaker, shaping everything from interior design to national identity. This work also grounds the story of the brand in textile history because it is intimately linked to art movements such as Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism.

In a world increasingly focused on speed and simplification, these themes are a reminder that the past is best appreciated in all its complexity. Colour is not a static element of design but a living witness with its own evolution of personality. The reader walks away not only seeing colours differently, but feeling them differently too.

What originally drew you to the subject of colour as a historical and cultural lens?

I was drawn to colour as a subject when studying history at university: I found discussions of colours by a past society fascinating. Something of that stayed with me after I graduated and started working as a journalist and I wanted to return to it. I had the idea for a column about colours: each issue would look at a single colour and then it all snowballed from there.

What can a colour tell us about power?

Almost every subject, when you dig beneath the surface, is really about power, or at least heavily influenced by power. People are extremely sensitive to it, so it bleeds into everything. With colour specifically, it depends on the shade. Some colours - indigo, cochineal or gamboge, for example - have very imperial histories. You can't look into them without thinking about trade relationships, slavery and imperial ambitions. With others it might be more subtle. Take Puce, for example: it's high point was as the most fashionable colour in the French court in 1775. That leads you to think about the power of an elite to determine desire and commerce. And then of course there are the colours - gold, turquoise, ultramarine - whose worth has been determined in large part because of their scarcity. Having them, using them, is in itself a display of wealth and power.

What role do you think storytelling plays in helping us better understand the materials and objects around us? 

Storytelling is about commanding attention. Marshalling information, curating it, and then presenting it in the most memorable, 'sticky' way that you can for your audience. I love history, I believe it's so important to learn more about the world around us and the people who came before us, but I also believe that the pursuit of knowledge is a real gift and I love trying to make subjects as interesting as I can for people, so that they take this information away and carry it with them. For me there is no greater compliment than people telling me something that they remember from reading or listening to one of my books or hearing an interview.

You've written about the dangerous and even deadly histories of colour. Do you think we take colour for granted in the digital age?

Colour is constantly evolving. You could say that we take it for granted because we have more access to it than, say, someone living in the Middle Ages, but equally this greater access has added new layers of meaning and interpretation, and those are things that are fascinating. You could also argue that in a digital age we are more aware of and sensitive to colour than ever before because it's no longer enough for something to be brightly coloured for it to stand out. It has to do more, impart more, mean more. The ebb and flow of colour meaning is so nuanced: it keeps you on your toes.