Seasonal Color Analysis and the Minimalist Movement

So, nerd confession time: I like to play stupid games on my iPhone, and one of them is Archie: Riverdale Rescue, in which you play along with storylines featuring Archie and his friends. I was playing last night, and I had a new mission. Ginger, a character who moved to Riverdale after I stopped reading the comics, had recently gone to New York and gotten analyzed, and was now giving Betty her clothes in colors that weren’t in her season. They even used the correct terminology, like “draped.”

Of course, as someone who has been obsessed with color analysis as of late, this was very nerdily exciting to me. I even took some screenshots–although I didn’t get one about draping, sadly:
photo 1

photo 2

Seasonal color analysis was most popular in the 80s, when Color Me Beautiful was popular. I don’t recall ever hearing much about it in the 90s or 2000s. But it seems to me the seasonal color analysis is ripe for a renaissance. There are already plenty of sites and communities dedicated to it, and there are tons of websites focused on things like capsules and wardrobe minimalism. Minimalism is a big trend in general, and who doesn’t love a tiny house?

Andrew-Gabriella-Morrison-tiny-hOMe-9-537x339
(Source)

If you’re working with minimal posessions, capsule wardrobes, and less storage space, it makes total sense that you’d want to make sure that every piece of clothing you owned was ideal, and that it was the perfect color and cut for you. So things like color analysis and Kibbe, which go a long way to making sure you don’t end up buying things that don’t work for you and just sit in your closet, are a perfect fit for this whole movement.

Now, Archie has always seemed to me to be taking place in both the present and the past; they may be using the Internet and the storylines tend to reflect the mores of the time, but Archie still drives a jalopy that would look perfectly at home in 1939, the year the comics came out, and the comics in general look like they can be taking place at any time over the past 75 years. So this reference to color analysis, with a book title very similar to Color Me Beautiful, could just be a callback to the past. But I think in the context of 2014, color analysis is ripe for a revival, and it could very well be that the person who wrote this little mission is lurking on the same color forums we are, and is currently deciding between Bright Spring and Bright Winter.

Now, if seasonal color analysis shows up in a mission in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, then we’ll know that it’s returned to the zeitgeist.

Have you seen any mentions of color analysis in pop culture lately?

5 Comments on Seasonal Color Analysis and the Minimalist Movement

  1. ithinklikeme
    August 11, 2014 at 8:21 pm

    This is so funny, b/c my own obsession with PCAS was prompted by a Pop Culture reference. A character on a TV show said “Here’s a tip: You’re a winter; stop wearing Olive.” I laughed and it reminded me I’d always been curious to know what my colors were. I’ve been headed down the rabbit hole henceforth…

    Reply
    • stylesyntax
      August 12, 2014 at 1:58 pm

      I actually learned about in a Baby-Sitters Club book and have had it in the back of my mind ever since.

      Reply
      • Tordis
        August 16, 2014 at 9:43 pm

        Haha! Great! Same here. I heard about it in my favourite video game as a child (monkey island 3, not sure if the voodoo priestess mentioned it in the english version, too), but it wasn’t curious about it at that age.

        Reply
          • stylesyntax
            August 17, 2014 at 12:40 pm

            Haha, it was truly everywhere! Even voodoo priestesses were into it!

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