Phantom Colours: Alice Blue and Phantom Red: Changing Meanings of Two Fashionable Colours (1905-1930)

In Western culture, colour has long been perceived as powerful, emotional, and dangerous, despite its aesthetic qualities. During the 1920s in the United States, however, colour experienced a rehabilitation caused by the specific conditions of the decade. The rise of consumer culture brought with it new moralities and a revolution in women’s fashions, including short skirts and bobbed hair. Within this new consumer society, colour became a useful tool for producers to stimulate more demand for their goods. In order to exploit colour, its old meanings had to be tamed, but at the same time its edgy, racy side is what made it commercially successful. In this article, we analyse the effects of these conditions on how colours were defined, perceived, and used in media such as newspapers, advertisements, fan magazines, posters, films, and musical songs. In order to provide a close reading of the changing meanings attached to colours and the ways in which they were used, we will focus on two case studies, Alice Blue and Phantom Red. Fashionable in the 1920s, these two shades functioned as tie-ins to popular culture such as cinema, musicals, fashion, and make-up. In addition, both were related to films in Technicolor II, the latest innovation that permitted filming in natural colours. The name Phantom Red was based on the film Phantom of the Opera (1925), which showed the Phantom’s cloak in Technicolor II red. Alice Blue was the colour of a dress the actor Colleen Moore wore in the finale of the film Irene (1926), a fashion show in Technicolor II.1 Each colour played unique roles in the history of fashion and was subject to different, changing connotations. We will provide a cultural historical analysis of both colours, studying the ways in which they appeared, were used, and were commented upon. We introduce Roland Barthes’ semiotic theories on connotation and denotation into the domain of colour, to show that the flexibility of colour to adopt layers of meanings turns them into strong rhetorical tools. This study could not have been written without the digital availability of many sources such as newspapers and fan magazines. As a consequence, it is a good example of the changes that are occurring due to the digital revolution that has also found its way into the archives and libraries.