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We're all a little off-colour | comment

Why has colour faded from our world?

A week or so ago I noted that every car on the road was silver, black or white. There are very few cars of colour. A generation back, people bought orange, blue, green cars. The roads are duller. I've realised that the same thing has happened to men's suits. Men wearing suits wear black, grey and occasionally deep navy suits.

That's it. You can barely buy a brown suit. No tan. No light blues. No greens. And like the car fleet, this wasn't always the case, particularly in the '70s and '80s. Then, men would happily wear a big flared pale blue suit with lapels you could park a Monaro on. They would team this with a pastel green body shirt and a floral tie.

And this was not just the fashionable few. This is what car dealers, real estate agents, school teachers wore. This was the look of blokes on the stock exchange floor. I didn't wear a lot of suits at the time, but I owned a basil green suit that was not considered outlandish. There is nothing like it on a rack in the menswear department today.

Why has colour faded from our world? Whatever happened to neon? Look at a photo or footage of William St leading up to the Cross in the 1950s and there are bright flashing signs on every building. A corner fish shop used to have a neon.

The technology of neon itself may have dated and have its problems, but why haven't we replaced it with contemporary arrangements of LEDs and fibre optics, for example? Why did we light up the night so garishly at one time and then stop?

We've made our world less colourful. Once we would have jumped out of a canary yellow Torana, wearing a deep tan suit and gone into a nightclub with a giant flashing green and blue sign. Now we don't. What happened?