Sex, anger, lust, danger: the semiotics of scarlet

A streak of red never goes out of fashion

By Matthew Sweet

Red is trouble. Sometimes too much trouble. Look at what it’s doing to these pages; this paragraph. Flooding them with the promiscuity of its associations: blood, desire, danger, anger, love, good luck, failure, frustration, fight, flight, fault. We might beg for it to stop, but we’d need red to make the sign. And what would be the point? When we speak of the power of its varieties – scarlet, crimson, claret, carmine – we’re evoking something that culture deploys but cannot quite control. Purple was stolen from sea snails and coded into imperial power. Horticulture domesticated greenness. Orange is the preposterous colour of lost causes and boiled sweets. But red is untameable. On the road, in the arena, in the bedroom, on the battlefield, at high and holy Mass, it arouses us. Engages our hot and despicable animal brains. Cuts to the chase.

A Young Woman and Her Little Boy Bronzino c.1540
This boy looks like he’s invented photo-bombing centuries too soon, but that’s because he’s Bronzino’s afterthought, inserted late in the composition process. Imagine the canvas without his distracting presence, and it becomes a portrait of a dress with a Medici deposited somewhere inside. The red hue blazes her status. This is the European 1540s, when the watery carmine of madder-rose extract acquired an eye-popping rival – cochineal, the dust of Mesoamerican bugs. It was used in paint too – and so valuable that, like this boy, it was added only at the very end.

Bonnet de liberté
The shape is ancient. Slaves freed by Rome had their heads shaved and crowned with a conical hat in honour of the goddess of liberty. But the sans-culottes chose the colour and wore it to storm the Bastille. Like all smart Paris fashions, these hats travelled – American Republicans and abolitionists marched in them; the sculptor Hiram Powers tried to put one on the Statue of Liberty. Today’s French insurgents prefer yellow vests. A less powerful choice, perhaps, than the red teardrops that formed a tide that drowned the monarchy.

Emperor Shenzong of Song reigned 1067-85
A red thread runs through the cultural history of China, one that stitches the symbolism of Taoism (in which it codes for the element of fire), birthday customs (red eggs are given at children’s parties) and the relentlessly consistent colour scheme of the Communist Party. Unless it’s a mysterious vapour seen in the sky – as happened in 1101, when it was held to signify an imminent barbarian raid – the colour is associated with luck and warding off evil. The red longpao of Emperor Shenzong of Song, sixth emperor of his dynasty, turns him into a beacon of good fortune. (Caveat: his executioner also wore red.)

Portrait of Louis XIV (detail) Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701
Who wears red high heels today? (Google Images has a few ideas about that, some of them NSFW.) Who wore red high heels in pre-revolutionary France? Totter forward absolutist Sun King Louis XIV who, as part of his campaign to pacify the aristocracy, declared that only those in royal favour could climb into them. The symbolism of talons rouges was unsubtle. The shoes were expensive. They elevated the wearer. And their soles were red, too, as if they were already stamping on someone’s face.

The Red Shoes
We can tell this story with three women, three kinds of magic. In the Oz books, Dorothy’s slippers are white. Technicolour demanded something stronger and more fitting for footwear prised from the corpse of a Wicked Witch. Hans Christian Andersen’s Karen brings her own wickedness: she wears red shoes to church and they then become an instrument of torture. When Michael Powell put the story on screen in ballet form it became a fable about the demonic power of art. “Why do you want to dance?” asks the impresario. “Why do you want to live?” the dancer replies.

Clerical red 2005
Rome and Byzantium ruled that purple was the exclusive colour of imperial power. Then, in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks. The Ottoman Empire was the principal source of purple dye. No self-respecting pope was going to maintain the symbol of his authority by enriching the enemy: in 1467, Paul II issued a decree that put cardinals in a hot shade of scarlet derived from a parasite that preyed on Mediterranean oak trees. Economic warfare? Semiotic, too. European kings wore red. One style decision, two papal power moves.

Red Riding Hood
What was she called, before she put on the garment that supplied her name? And why no horse to wear it on, Red Riding Hood would have asked? She was an inquisitive girl. But we know from our earliest childhood that this is a story that shouldn’t be questioned. The answers are too bloody to share with someone you’re tucking up in bed. Red is violated virginity. She’s rebirth. She’s from a long line of indigestible women, who went into the forest and survived. That wolf didn’t stand a chance.

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell 1953
Gentlemen prefer blondes. But how do they like them wrapped? In red, according to a 2010 study from Potsdam University, which brought female volunteers to the lab and correlated their sartorial choices with their expectations about the hotness of the researcher. In many primate species, females display red when nearing ovulation – as many embarrassed zoo-going parents will know. Are scarlet sequinned frocks and little red cocktail dresses callbacks to the ripe pudenda of some ancestral hominid? Like the existence of gentlemen, it’s only a hypothesis.

The Red Balloon 1956
When Eisenstein hoisted the red flag for “Battleship Potemkin” someone had to paint its progress through 108 frames of the movie. Once colour became cinema’s custom it was easier for film-makers to exploit red’s urgent claim on our attention. Albert Lamorisse’s little French fantasy loosened a red balloon of optimism over war-damaged Paris. Little figures in bright-red coats skittered through the frame of “Don’t Look Now” and “Schindler’s List”, but in “Marnie” Hitchcock turned the entire screen red, remaking the world as a visionary wound.

Rouge Baiser René Gruau, 1927
Love doesn’t always endure. Neither does lipstick. Red traces on the collar; red smears on someone else’s mouth. These are sometimes marks of shame and regret. In 1927 René Gruau, a commercial artist, created this image of Sadean sophistication for Rouge Baiser, a kissproof crimson lipstick formulated by a chemist called Paul Baudecroux. Propylene glycol was the active ingredient. Too active. Its first users found they couldn’t remove it. The recipe was revised but the image endured – a symbol of the kind of desire that’s so intense it cannot be gazed upon.

ILLUSTRATIONS VELWYN YOSSY

Images: National Gallery of Art, Bridgeman, RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Gérard Blot, Magnum Photos, Camera Press, Rex, Shutterstock

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