English Version | The name of the Rose

Pink. The most ambitious color, whose name was not enough for a pigment alone, but that dared to encapsulate all the beauty, fragility, resilience and sensibility of nature. The color that conquered the queen amongst flowers. The color that gave its name to the rose.

I’ve never been into flowers. Maybe because I never dedicated that much thought to the matter, the flora’s significance and its ramifications were not exactly a structural part of my day-to-day life. Or maybe it was simply due to my lack of trust in myself to keep alive any living thing I dared to bring into my apartment. Although I had always admired them for their beauty and being proud of my preferences, in fact, having flowers around me or not seemed rather indifferent to me until, as I sat down to write this piece, and making some effort to freshen my memory on the topic, I realized that, indifferent or not, I have always lived surrounded by flowers. Because my mom would care to pick them from the garden, because sometimes I would get them as gifts, because once they dried out, they would, one way or another… stick around. Times change and so do we, and it was precisely when I moved to Paris that I surrendered to the consecrated (and very French) ritual of making sure that each week, two things are never missing at the table: la baguette, and a vase of flowers. Overwhelmed by the sacredness this particular city bestows upon flowers – and for how wrong I was that this was not yet another obvious cliché reserved to Jean-Luc Gódard or Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies -, I decided that, as a matter of principle, it was time I dug in a little deeper into the subject.

There’s a lot to be said about the correlation between each type of flower and its color, much more than what we might think at the first glance. Yellow flowers are frequently connotated with joviality and friendship; orange ones, as it is the case for tulips, lilies or dahlias, with enthusiasm and energy; blue flowers, such as hydrangeas or cornflowers, are symbols of tranquility and peace; purple flowers, such as iris, bluebells or pansy flowers, might convey a sense of admiration, tradition and royalty. Amongst others, it would be important to underline red flowers, those we identify more easily with passion, desire and courage – yes, courage, because nothing would be possible without it. Which leaves us with pink. Rose, in French. A symbol of love, innocence, softness, femininity, youth and joy. Though not carrying the same romantic charge of, let’s say, a red flower, it is often the color of tenderness by excellence, which possibly explains its wide usage in Mother’s Day bouquets or gender reveal parties where, whether with confetti or flower petals, it is up to the colors blue and pink to reveal to the impatient guests in which part of the baby section they’ll have to go buy the onesies.

Let’s start with the beginning then, by those same four letters that make up the name of the pigment that lent its name to the flower among flowers. Let’s start with roses and their fundamental role in one of the most beautiful episodes in the History of Portugal. Let’s start in the XIII century, with Isabel de Aragão, the Saint of the city of Coimbra, and what would later be known as the Miracle of Roses. Born in 1271 in Zaragoza, Spain, Isabel de Aragão would become Isabel of Portugal after her marriage with the king D. Dinis, The Farmer (1279-1325), when she was only 11 years old. Upholding constant and unshakeable faith in the Catholic Church throughout her life, Isabel arrived in Portugal surrounded by the mediatic attention of a diplomatic marriage that would bring stability to the Portuguese kingdom. Isabel lived her whole life close to those in need, helping everyone she could along the way, driven only by her faith she held so dear, ignoring all that was or was not expectable of a queen of the XIV century. This was not something that sat right with the Portuguese court! And the king himself frowned upon the close involvement of his consort with his kingdom’s most feeble subjects, to the point that he forbade her from continuing to do so. One day, while D. Isabel tried to sneak out of the palace, carrying with her pieces of bread to feed the poor, she was intercepted by the king who, already guessing she had disobeyed him, asked her what she was carrying in her arms: “They’re roses, my Lord!” Legend has it that this took place in January, and suspicious of her reply, D. Dinis asked again: “Roses in January?” And when she opened her arms, the most beautiful flowers fell to the ground from the palms of Queen Saint Isabel.

Roses have always been a symbol of love, but their dark side also associates them with war and politics – disclaimer: 35 million years of existence might produce that effect. After all, there doesn’t seem to be an antidote to the blurred lines of this (oh, so human!) love triangle just yet. Roses were an object of affection, just as much as they had the power to demonstrate it, as it is observable in the history of so many empires, such as the Roman, that undefeatable den of power, that surrendered only to the beauty of this flower. It is said that Cleopatra might have used its perfume to seduce Emperor Marco Antonio; and Nero, who is said to be fond of them also, kept the habit of making them fall from the ceiling over his guest during the banquets he organized. History has it that Alexander, the Great, was the one who brought roses back to Europe, where, so many years later, in the XVIII century, Napoleon I’s wife, Josephine Bonaparte, nurtured one of the most important collections of these flowers, helping in the establishment of their symbolic and artistic legacy. Many rituals that still hold to this day are centralized in roses, perennial in their symbology, due to how they encapsulate moments that time would not be able to eat away. Immediately we recall all the weddings, birthday celebrations, the simplest gestures of kindness… so many references that take us back to the fuzzy feeling of happiness painted in shades of pink. But roses also pave the way to our most obscure paths, those who define the anguish of our existence. And the thorns, present even in what Nature defined as the epitome of beauty, embody the duality of a flower that has the power to capture in its buds something we could identify an essence that is fundamentally… human. They don’t call it the queen amongst flowers for nothing.

To talk about flowers is to talk about women, and vice-versa. Our history is paved with moments we wrote in the pages of beauty and fashion, intertwined, with pink ink. In the 20s golden age (in obvious contrast with the 2020’s we are now living, the latter a little less golden, at least until now), make-up and cosmetics were absolutely determining and differentiating aspects in society, especially amongst women. To be able to control and manipulate one’s appearance was the exponent of modernity and an important indicator of emancipation and status. Lipstick in particular was oftentimes what set apart mothers from their daughters. “But what does that have to do with flowers?”, the dear reader must be wondering. Well, the cosmetics industry at the time (although its origin is almost as old as mankind itself) wasn’t really that developed, even less so when compared to the standards we have today, those that have made us grown used to the launch of a new make-up line (pretty much) every other day. At the time, cosmetics with a chemical base were highly scarce and beyond the means of the vast majority, which compelled women to improvise, and try to obtain beauty adjuvants from what they had around them – see where we’re going with this? Tulip and geranium petals were frequently used as rouge à levres, meaning, lipstick, or, more literally, “red on the lips”, precisely due to their strong pigments, somewhere in between pink, lilac, red, carmine and fuchsia. A woman should always strive to have soft – queue the famous rice powder, often made from arsenic – and a pinkish tone on her lips and cheeks. The goal? Softness and color, portraying what would be a blank canvas, multidimensional, incorruptible, perennially ethereal, perfumed and completed only with a flower where the lips once were.

In Fashion, flowers always had a saved spot in the world’s runways. Yves Saint Laurent was a faithful advocate, something we can observe through the inspiration he gathered from flowers’ vivid colors, the sanctuary he reserved for them in the iconic Jardin Majorelle, in Marrakech, and the countless spotlight moments he dedicated to them throughout his career. If we had to choose only one primordial example, nothing would compare to the Haute Couture Spring/ Summer of 1999 show. The collection where Yves offered the world an idyllic glimpse of his muse and old friend, Laetitia Casta, dressed in a pink roses’ ensemble as if Venus herself was walking down the runway. In an ode to the role of flowers in the creative process, Moschino gave us the human bouquets during the Spring of 2018, Virgil Abloh reinterpreted one of his harnesses in a flower-covered version with pink accents for Louis Vuitton’s menswear, in the Spring of 2020, Rodarte, which blossoms season after season in an endless role of patterns and accessories, and Raff Simons who, as if in a never-ending affair, doesn’t give up the dream of a world covered in petals, a dream he brought to life during his first Haute Couture show at Dior, in the Fall of 2012. “Flowers for Spring?” Truly ground-breaking.

On our favorite patterns, the runway shows we can’t forget, or in front of the lenses of photographers who shape them the way they do the industry that admires them, it is safe to say that Fashion would not be what it is today without flowers. And, without a shadow of a doubt, neither Fashion – nor flowers – would be the same without Irving Penn (1917-2009). The North American photographer was one of the most important collaborators with Vogue for many decades. He was the one who brought to life the most iconic (apparently) still life series, and that prophetically once said about his work with fashion magazines: “I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes.” The sentiment didn’t change when it comes to the compilation Flowers, whose first flashing click back in 1967 was inspired by a commissioned Christmas cover for Vogue US with some tulips. Amongst its many white backdrop pages, it was the color pink that filled his subjects with life, such as poppies, roses, peonies and pansy flowers, and all of them elevated Flowers to the status of unshakable evidence of the power bestowed upon photography to turn something mundane, so often imperfect, and that will inevitably shrivel away, into something infinitely beautiful. In this capsule of ephemeral beauty that is a flower, Penn portrays a complex reflection: the one of our very own “expiration date”. Each photography captures a moment in time, somewhere along the chronological line of the guaranteed expiry of its subject, whose blossoming confronts, overwhelms and, so often, devastates us. Like a love letter written petal by petal, Irving Penn opens up the doors of existentialism and asks us to believe that the temporary, volatile and fleeting beauty of this world, can be enough.

If we’re humble enough to admit it, we reach the inevitable, and almost primary, conclusion that even the apparent fragility of this vast part of nature is proof of absolute resilience. In its essence, flowers have the power to materialize everything we are, and everything we cannot say. Designed to the image of our own beginning and end, their blossoming seems to summarize all the unbearable lightness of our humanity, all the weight we can’t carry on our own. They are the banner for what it means to live – a feeling divided in between insignificance and relevancy, limitation and possibility, fragility and persistence – and when we have no words left, they demonstrate just how much Nature has the power to complete us. We could be tempted to think “we’ve never been into flowers”, but it would be a huge mistake to forget how much they were, and will continue to be, always, an integral part of our existence. Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymous, was a traveled man, a doctor, whose mainly rational, extremely analytical instincts and nature, compelled him to see the world from a rather harsh perspective, deprived of that magical anti-depressive called hope. In his Odes, Reis amply explores his distresses but, in a moment of clarity, he wrote a poem that summarizes everything that would be important to retain from all the words of this text. If you don’t trust my words, please, trust his. “I prefer roses, my love, to my country / And I love magnolias more than I do / Glory and virtue. / So long as life does not tire me out / I let life pass me by life pass me by / While I remain unchanged. / What can it matter to the one to whom / Nothing any longer matters that one wins / And another loses, so long as the dawn breaks / If each year in the Spring / Leaves show forth / That in the Fall cease to be? / As for the rest of it, those other things human beings / Attach to life, / What increase can they bring to my soul? / Nothing—save a desire for indifference / And the certain indolence / Of the fugitive hour.”

Translated from the original, published in the "Pink Issue" of Vogue Portugal.