Where did Colour go?
2 hours ago
4 min read
Look at a photograph of a street in the 1950s. Turquoise and bright red cars parked outside shops with hand-painted signs, green-and-yellow enamel advertisements, and mint-green and sunshine-yellow kitchens. Look outside today, and you will find a white car, a black car, or a grey car. At home, a grey phone, a silver laptop, a beige sofa in a white room. Somewhere along the way, we let the colour drain out of our lives. As a painter who has built his whole practice on colour, I wanted to understand why. So, where did colour go?
The world really is getting greyer
This is not just nostalgia. Researcher Cath Sleeman used computer vision to analyse photographs of more than 7,000 everyday objects in Britain’s Science Museum Group collection, dating from 1800 to today. Her preliminary conclusion was that objects have become a little greyer and a little squarer over time. Grey rose steadily while browns and yellows declined, largely as wood and brass gave way to plastic. She is careful to say her sample is not the whole world, but the trend is hard to ignore.
Cars tell the same story. By the late 1950s, pink-and-white Vauxhall and turquoise-and-cream Fords brightened the roads, inspired by Italian design studios and American showrooms. Today, according to a 2025 iSeeCars study of the American market, white, black, grey and silver account for about 80% of cars. Grey alone went from under 4% to nearly 23%. Red and green together fell from a third of the market to under a tenth.
Logos followed. Designers even have a word for it: “blanding,” the habit of replacing distinctive emblems with plain black lettering on white space. Fashion houses, banks and tech companies have flattened their identities until many look interchangeable.
Why did the colour disappear?
Several forces overlap. The first is material. Plastic, aluminium, and glass replaced painted wood and enamel, and these materials naturally lean toward grey and black.
The second is technology. Analysts have linked the rise of silver, white and grey cars to the tech industry’s influence on product design, most famously Apple’s silver and white devices. What looked modern on a phone soon looked modern on a car, a kitchen, and a shopfront.
The third is money, and perhaps fear. Silver cars hold their resale value better, and a grey interior is easier to sell or rent. A neutral product offends no one. Colour feels risky; grey feels like insurance.
The fourth is the screen. Logos must now read clearly as tiny icons on a phone, and simplification often means stripping out colour and detail. Then there is globalisation. Colour carries culture, and when brands try to belong everywhere, they end up looking as if they come from nowhere.
The colourless offices
The workplace lost its colour for similar reasons: cost, flexibility, and the belief that neutral means professional. White walls, grey carpet tiles, and grey desks let companies fit out spaces cheaply and rent them to anyone.
Yet the research points the other way. A frequently cited University of Texas study found that grey, beige and white offices brought on feelings of sadness and depression. A 2017 Mahidol University study of Thai office workers found fatigue was the dominant mood in grey and white rooms, while yellow produced the most energy. And in 2026, Savills research reported that nearly a third of UK office workers felt their workplace design actively reduced their productivity. One workspace founder described grey offices as “neurologically flat.”
In Mauritius, in the 90s, hotel rooms featured colourful prints that gave the place a wonderful energy. At the beginning of the 21st century, some hotels replaced the colourful paintings with black-and-white photography, along with decorations made of wood and colourless natural elements. Tourists found themselves in an environment close to home. We live on a tropical, colourful island but design our hotel rooms according to trends abroad.
A colourless room is not neutral. It tells us something about how much our feelings are expected to matter.
How can the Zafer style exist in such a world?
I live in Mauritius, where colour is everywhere. Our nature is an explosion of colours and tones. Though Curepipe is perhaps an exception. My town is grey, with frequent grey skies, but that gives me more reason to brighten my canvases.
When the Zafer style began to emerge in 2003, I was trying to cope with my own emotional extremes. Painting became a way to reorganise heavy, chaotic feelings into something brighter, through bold colour. In 2019, the World Health Organisation published its largest review of the arts and health, drawing on more than 3,000 studies, and concluded that the arts can help prevent ill health, support mental wellbeing and assist in managing illness. Colour is one of the most direct ways art reaches us: we feel it before we understand it.
This is why I see the Zafer style as a form of resistance. Not an angry protest, but a gentle refusal to accept that the world must be grey to be taken seriously. Every bright canvas says joy isn't childish or naïve, and our emotions deserve space that uplifts them.
Why it matters that it exists
Colour is emotion. I have nothing against simplicity, which has its own beauty. What troubles me is uniformity, the sense that everything is designed so no one will object. When I watch Mauritian students fill a page with colours, I see something being reclaimed. Choosing colour takes a little courage, and I think the world needs that courage now more than ever.
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