The New Black
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009by Helen Macrae
My friends, winter is well and truly upon us. You might ask what prompted me to arrive at this groundbreaking and outrageous conclusion. Was it the drop in temperature and resulting scrabble in the back of the wardrobe for those long-forgotten mittens and scarf? The trees in the Retiro shrugging off their leaves and stretching out their branches like bony fingers clutching at the sky? Or perhaps the giveaway was when all that snow unexpectedly fell from the heavens on Friday and turned the city into a winter wonderland? No, it’s because the other day I spotted my first child clad in top-to-toe beige.
I arrived in Madrid last January with my good friend H, and we were immediately struck by the amount of beige we saw on a daily basis. It was everywhere: on the streets, in our classes, on the Metro, in the bars. There were beige coats, beige trousers, beige handbags, beige hats, beige shoes…there were even beige dogs. We devised a mindless but rather entertaining game where the first person to spot something beige and shout “beige!” got a point, but we stopped when we realised the Spanish word is rather similar (errr… it’s “beige” in case you didn’t know already).
As the year marched on and winter turned into spring and then summer, the beige started to disappear. Until now I had thought it was because I was becoming assimilated into Spanish culture and had stopped noticing it. But it seems I was mistaken and there is, in fact, a direct correlation between the outside temperature and the percentage of people wearing beige. Perhaps someone should do a study on it and work out a formula or something. Of course, people do wear plenty of other colours and I know I shouldn’t generalise, but if you come to the city in winter I assure you you’ll notice the pervasiveness of this colour and its variants (cream = “summer beige”, gold = “weekend beige”). For some Madrileños, it seems that beige is not just a colour, it’s a way of life.
At this point I must put my hands up and admit that I haven’t embraced the beige yet. I don’t own anything beige-coloured as I don’t think it suits me, plus I actually find the word offensive: a good example of onomatopoeia where it sounds just as dull as the actual colour. But perhaps it’s just a matter if time. Maybe after a few years of living here I’ll know I’m properly Hispanified when I can eat pipas, make a drink last all night and skip down the street in winter dressed from head to toe in beige.








