Swedish colours

Once, I asked a local from Stockholm why, having such a dark winter, citizens tend to dress neutral, dark or even with little vibrant colours. To me this felt something contradictory, or at least, counterproductive in terms of psycological impact. After some minutes, as he never thought about this before, he replied: “I guess it has to do with how Swedes perceive colours. We live surrounded by nature, from which we perceive them. Ours clothes reflect the way we commonly see them in landscape. These are the colours that result more familiar to our eyes”.

After that wise thought, I understood that Sweden and its colours are strictly conditioned by daylight. While living there, and by experiencing the great contrasts between seasons, I could find similarities between clothes, furniture, interiors and nature. In winter, everything tends to be less saturated, grey colour is the most predominant, shadows become blue and the little amount of sunlight dies everything in yellow. On the contrary, during summer, green comes alive, blue becomes electric, and even customes tend to add flower patterns.

In my last two months of quarantine in Stockholm (May-June 2020), I became a common parks and woods visitor. There I found some chromaticity that, after all, resulted to be more familiar to me.