English Version | White Balance

07 Feb 2023
By Sara Andrade

It’s the color of light, purity, angels and brides, peace and virginity, even of the tabula rasa, that blank canvas that is the starting point for many stories, but not for this one.

It’s the color of light, purity, angels and brides, peace and virginity, even of the tabula rasa, that blank canvas that is the starting point for many stories, but not for this one. The starting point is: why do we tend to associate white with innocence? And is it really associated with innocence in all contexts? Artwork by Ai Weiwei.

Closeup of the artwork Blossom (2015), by Ai Weiwei, installed within the hospital wing inside the Alcatraz Penitentiary, contrasting the innocence and delicacy of white porcelain flowers with the weight of guilt inherent to a prison, metaphorical on the one hand, and on the other, a real contrast with the dark and dirty walls, on a more literal side. Photography: Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio.

Piece of cake, which means easy. Except if it ends up falling on a white cloth, which is a nightmare to get clean, then, all hell breaks loose. This array of cliché phrases and commonplaces seems innocent, but it’s not: it’s here because, when one thinks of white as a color reference for innocence, there is also the semantic/meanings duo to consider. The white pantone is, as a rule, associated with pure and naive notions (an assumption corroborated by the dictionary, which clarifies the noun as being synonymous with “the quality or state of being innocent; ignorant of evil; purity; simplicity, naivety; freedom from guilt”, says dictionary Priberam) and, therefore, ended up becoming not just a color, but a symbol for, a synonym of this list of words. How so? Before advertisements appeared with claims like “leave the dirty work to us” or stain removers preaching “forget stains”, it was, in fact, rather difficult to keep the white immaculate, so the herculean task of doing so ended up also becoming a metaphor for a life without blemishes, without sin, without guilt; it was to be equally immaculate (as in, innocent) - in more than one sense. The rest is word association, that is, the so called semantics: cleanliness, immaculate, pure, untouched, all adjectives that are reminiscent of the idea and meaning of innocence, like Priberam (and other similar dictionaries) says. Once this conclusion is established, it is also easy to understand the meaning of the blank canvas/page/slate, i.e., that has not yet been written/stained/profaned.

Following this train of thought, this is why the use of white is also linked to whatever connotes with cleanliness and purity (those terms associated with innocence, as established): doctors, nurses, chefs, scientists wear white; entire temples covered in white marble, priestesses in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome wore white… all as a mirror of this idea of absence of macula or as a reflection of sterilization. The Pope, for example, has worn white robes since 1566 as a symbol of sacrifice and purity, as have pilgrims from Islam and the Japanese religion Shinto, and, according to The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Celtic priests and druids did too, being that only members of the Clergy could use said pantone, fyi (except the King). Talking about a bride dressed in white is almost redundant. Funny enough, actually, as getting married in white, in the West, was something only reserved for royal weddings: aristocracy and others would most often wear their Sunday clothes, usually in darker shades for pragmatism, because the purpose was to use the wardrobe at other times and not just once - and the average life expectancy of a white dress, especially before modern detergents, was much lower than the rest of clothing items. It was Queen Victoria, in her lace dress, who ended up spreading the trend when the coverage of her marriage to Prince Albert, in 1840, spiked the attention of society, which gradually began to adopt white (first, the wealthier brides and, little by little, all social layers of society), later exponentiated by the association of the color to the virginal element, peremptory for many religions, adding as well that layer of almost divine morality and reinforcing the innocence/guilt dichotomy, usual in religious discourse. The white dove, for example, is also connoted with purity, peace and sanctification, or the immaculate spirit: symbol of the Holy Spirit in the Bible, it was later incorporated, by Christianity in Ancient Rome, in funerary art, illustrated with an olive tree branch with the word Peace next to it. But the symbolism is not just Christian: in Brazil, welcoming the new year is done wearing white, to augur a year of peace and purity, a tradition linked to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, in which the congregation wears white vests (a divine hue, the one of Oxalá) in rituals, to aid the search for spiritual purification. Religion also tends to place white as a mirror of light and black Pantones as darkness, a duality also explained by a practical example: in light we see everything - in fact, the hue itself increases it, by serving as a reflector - and it's hard to have secrets when something is illuminated, while darkness dissimulates, has mystery, deceives the eye, promoting the binomial of pure and impure. One that literature hasn’t be shy of making use, recurrently using the tone to assert the virginal component of its protagonists, namely the female ones - the most obvious and popular being the heroine described as pure and innocent and even baptized with the name Sow White. But others, more subliminal, followed suit: for example, in the novel Tess of the d'Ubervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy, the homonymous heroine is connoted with the white tone (it is the recurring pantone of her clothes) to underline these traits of kindness and purity, and when co-star Alec rapes her, Hardy describes Tess, who wears a white muslin dress, as “white as snow”. Writer Robert Graves, in turn, in his work on the grammar of poetic myth, The White Goddess (1948), argues that all Western poetry is inspired by the figure of the Triple Goddess, a female deity associated with the moon and who represents a triptych of symbols: it is the virgin, the mother and the old woman, each with its own color. The virgin's is white. Not the mother's, but curiously, the ancient Greeks associated white with breast milk (because in Greek mythology, they considered it one of the four sacred substances, along with wine, honey and rose), linking the pantone to this divine and non-desecrated side, but also suggesting the idea of beginning, birth, starting from scratch - that blank canvas, not yet stained. In Art, symbolism repeats itself: the painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), in the painting Simphony in White No. 1 - The White Girl (part of a series of works with musical titles in which he used a certain color to create a specific mood, as a composer does in their symphonies), used this delicate color a little throughout the painting to convey the idea of innocence and fragility, a symbology common to many illustrations. In post-classical historical manuscripts, paintings and tapestries, the white unicorn was a common theme as a sign of purity, chastity and grace, and the mythical animal could only be captured by a virgin (recurrently, it appeared in imagery on the lap of the Virgin Mary). This idea of an uncorrupted image relating to the white hue was also unsurprisingly used to government service. In ancient Rome, those running for public office wore white, the Latin word for the color being candidus (albus is also Latin for white, but refers to a less luminous tone) - which explains why we use the term “candidate”, nowadays, to describe someone who is running for office, as one already did at that time. Etymologically, the word derives from “candid”, which means frank and honest. Let's go back to that semantics aforementioned: frank, honest, pure, uncorrupted, true - innocent.

Yet white, deliberately or not, has not always been - or rather, is not always - a consensual color with regards to its bright and positive side. Incidentally, much of this literary corroboration of its symbolism is also a reflection of the background of its authors and consequent references. We associate the hue with the idea of innocence as a consequence of a context that, when changed, overthrows many of the premises of this article. For example, in eastern cultures, white is also linked to mourning and sadness, commonly worn in funerals - in western cultures, the custom also prevailed until the 16th century - the widows of the kings of France used to wear white until Anne of Brittany (1477-1514) came into the picture - and there are those who feel coldness and dullness in white. The passage of time has also changed connotations: it was common, for example, in Ancient Greece, to use white pigment made of lead to paint the face in the whitest possible hue, a practice that later became popular among aristocrats. In the 18th century, men and women of high society used this type of paint, as Maggie Angeloglou describes in her book A History of Makeup, to disguise all skin imperfections, evening out the complexion in the whitest white tone there is - a solution worse than the problem, since the toxicity of this kind of make-up base only worsened skin illnesses and triggered a series of other ones, such as anemia, loss of appetite, constipation, headaches, paralysis and could result in death. This consequence, known or not, was irrelevant, because the desire for status spoke louder - and to whiten one's face was to distance oneself from the people who, due to working from sunrise to sunset, had tanned tones and far from the white that the nobility could display as they made leisure, protected from the sun's rays, the task du jour. History, in a more or less subliminal way, perpetuated this idea for being advantageous to the dominant class of western societies, but the practice, today, has adopted a plot-twist: there are few who despise the healthy air that a responsible tan and summer color to the cheeks can bring to one’s face and mood. Incidentally, it’s not by chance that pale skin is associated with Death (described in the Book of Revelations as one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, riding a “pale horse”) and that ghosts are perceived as spirits on a white sheet, in popular culture. Perhaps in a kind of reference to emptiness, in the understanding of white as an “absence of color”, the tone also refers to absence, death, the end of life. In some eastern cultures, it is linked to the passage to a new life and connoted with bad luck. This also argues for the fact that, in China, contrary to what happens in the West, mourning is done in white, because it translates the removal of all colors from everyday clothing. Similarly, in India, only widows can wear white. Returning to literature, and opposing the idea of virginal and innocent heroines, there are villains who also take advantage of the negative connotation of the tone to assert their infamous character, with special emphasis on their coldness - or rather, the coldness of their heart - when they are associated with ice and snow, such as the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis, or the Snow Queen, from the homonymous work Snow Queen (1844), by Hans Christian Andersen. Similarly, this idea of absence of warmth places white as a color that can cause feelings of isolation and lack of comfort: in design and decoration, white is minimal, but a completely white space is little or not at all welcoming, mainly and even for its connotation to the sterility of a hospital, clinic or doctor's office. It is the idea of the untouched translated by “one cannot touch” – translated, in turn, in the absence of connection and human touch. 

In fact, this paraphernalia of opposite and incongruous connotations in relation to white is something inherent to the pantone itself: white is, simultaneously, no color and all colors at once. On the one hand, white exists as a pigment, so it is a pantone in itself. On the other hand, in the spectrum of light, the white that results from luminosity (from a television screen, for example) doesn’t have a specific wavelength, it is rather the sum of all colors. Just think of the rainbow and the fact that you can only see the colors of sunlight when the drops refract the sun's rays and reveal their spectrum (same happens in a prism). Here, white contains a balance, in equal measure, of all the colors of the spectrum (the so-called white balance, an adjustment of the chromatic temperature of the image carried out before photographing or recording digitally), thus representing both the positive aspect and the negative of each color. More or less like the associations we make of this white hue, which change depending on the context. For the sake of this issue subordinated to the “age of innocence”, this shade of chalk is premised to be its more or less consensual representative, but let this text serve as a disclaimer - not for the multiplicity of meanings concerning white, but for all the hues of innocence, to avoid falling into clichés, commonplaces, set phrases or preconceptions.

Translated from the original on Vogue Portugal's The Innocence Issue, published February 2023.Full story and credits on the print issue.

Sara Andrade By Sara Andrade

Relacionados


Entrevistas  

Gracie Abrams em Lisboa: "Foi libertador ser um pouco mais 'barulhenta' nesta fase da minha vida"

13 Feb 2025

Moda   Compras  

Estes são os acessórios indispensáveis para elevar os looks de inverno

13 Feb 2025

Roteiro  

5 bares para celebrar cada história de amor no dia de São Valentim

12 Feb 2025

Moda   Coleções  

A Mango Selection apresenta a sua nova coleção: eis as escolhas de Vicky Montanari

12 Feb 2025