Cerulean Blue

The Icons is a series of articles about history's most significant luxury products. Those pursuing a career in the luxury industry will find benefit in understanding the rich histories and curious details behind their creation.

Fashion's Most Iconic Hue

No colour has the fashion provenance to match that of cerulean blue. Born in the world of Fine Art, by no less than the Impressionist virtuoso Renoir, and popularized by the generational talent Meryl Streep, cerulean is fashion's most symbolic colour.

Renoir's La Parisienne

The first confirmed instance of cerulean blue paint in a major artwork comes from 1872. French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir used it as the primary colour in his work “La Parisienne,” to craft his subject's spectacular dress.

Cerulean's first use was in depicting luxury fashion!

After Renoir's successful use, the colour became beloved by other impressionists as well as landscape painters. As it was made using tin and cobalt, which are rather expensive metals, cerulean blue has always been one of the more expensive pigments a painter could select.

The Devil Wears Prada

In June 2006, the fashion industries most vivid depiction hit the big screen with The Devil Wears Prada. With a stacked cast including a Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway (who was not yet the huge star she would become), Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, Emily Blunt, and Adrian Grenier the movie was a big hit.

The most pivotal scene in the movie hinges on the protagonist's cerulean blue sweater.

Meryl Streep's character, Miranda Priestly, delivers this full-throated defence the fashion industry:

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually CERULEAN.

And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs.

And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact… you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of “stuff.”

United Nations

When the United Nations was formed at the end of World War II, they adopted cerulean blue for their emblem. The designer Oliver Lundquist stated that he chose the color because it was “the opposite of red, the color of war.”

Etymology

The word “cerulean” is derived from the Latin word caeruleus, “dark blue, blue, or blue-green”, which in turn probably derives from caerulum, diminutive of caelum, “heaven, sky”.

Cerulean was also referred to as coeurleum, cerulium, bleu céleste (celestial blue).