Things Dan Likes: Celebrating the Shades of Grey

Insight

By Dan Monteith

22nd Nov 2024

There’s a macro-trend I’ve been talking to clients about for years. It’s called “The Binary Backlash” and it goes like this. In a world full of uncertainty, where many religious, economic, political and social institutions have lost credibility, people have grown increasingly cynical. Tired of liberal morality and political ‘double speak’ they have voted in their millions for populism and been persuaded to see the world in strictly ‘black & white’ terms. Republic or Democratic. Leave or Remain. Friend or foe. 100% right or 100% wrong. It’s an adversarial universe where the “grey areas” are portrayed as dull and lifeless as a November London sky.

Farrow & Ball might offer us ’50 shades of grey’, from Lamp Room to Pigeon but the populists would call them all gutlessly middle-class and mundane. Just like the theme of the said film, the colours of moral mud. Donald Trump spoke of “clearing the swamp” and I’m convinced he imagined that swamp to be a deep shade of Manor House Grey. The sitting room colour of the wishy-washy establishment.

Stay with me here. It’s not all dark.

It’s a brand thing of course. And the people who create brands love polarity and the creation of opposites and tribes. The advertising strategists who relaunched Marmite back in 1996 with the ‘Love It Or Hate’ campaign were seriously ahead of their time, smartly turning the binary findings of their consumer research into a brilliant epic drama. But magic lies between the two dimensional poles, where taste and opinion is nuanced and multi-faceted.

I hope and pray that all this binary thinking has reached its apogee with the result of the US general election. But hope isn’t enough. It needs action. So i’m joining the positive revolt against this polarising, over-simplifying zeitgeist. I’m shouting for all that’s beautifully, creatively and life-affirmingly grey. This is not just a call to embrace a grey aesthetic, but to also exercise our grey matter, to look beyond black and white thinking to something deeper in between.

Grey isn’t insubstantial, it’s concrete damn it. A polished cement floor, or the smell of the same, Concrete by Comme De Garcon. Or the less glamorous concrete landscape of Birmingham, captured by artist Ruben Colley in his ‘My Birmingham’ series. Beauty in the quietly banal. Because grey isn’t dreary, it’s moody, like a Volvo ad, featuring a misty grey electric SUV, cutting through the nordic landscape. And although a Volvo is known for its safety, grey definitely isn’t safe. Just look at Damian Goidich’s incredible smudgy portraits, or Henry Moore’s depictions of London in the Blitz.

Grey isn’t predictable its challenging, like the Barbican no less. Bravely brutal. Which makes grey not trendy but timeless, like Richard Long’s epic lines of found slate and stone. Spontaneous and yet precise. All form no colour. Because grey is rarely flat. It’s layered and textured and thought provoking. Like the cover of the contents of any album by German record label ECM. And, if you were ever in any doubt that grey is the colour of coolness, just pick up a copy of Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act’. You can judge a book by a cover and this one is an inspiring and elegant shade of silver dust.

Because grey is definitely not old and faded, it’s alive and kicking. Just like the silver fox Jeff Goldblum, the iconoclast I’d love to have as ‘Grey Brand Ambassador.’ I hear there’s even an ad agency by the name, poised and ready to help my campaign.

Move aside binary bores, it’s time to join the grey party.