Secret history of color: blue

Plus our guest curators’ favorite blue picks💙

Homer didn’t have a word for it. Yves Klein invented his own shade of it. Vermeer died broke in devotion to it. Blue is the rarest color in nature. And we’ve spent centuries trying to capture it. Today, we’re diving into its secret history (!)…from the accidental discovery of Prussian Blue to Phoebe Philo’s Yves Klein moment at 2017 Celine.

Every art lover can remember their first formative show - mine was because of the color blue. When I was in high school, my little midwestern self visited my cool older cousin in NYC and lives were changed - I ate food on “small plates,” took pics on a rooftop, and had my first whiff of Palo Santo (this was 2014 Greenpoint after all). But the real revelation? When I went to the MoMa to see Matisse’s Blue Nudes. I’ve been obsessed with that color ever since. Today, we’re doing a deep dive into my first love.

My blue-board. If I could have, I wanted to major in color. There are jobs! When I was at J.Crew, there was a color library with a color librarian. In lieu of both a color degree or a live-in librarian, I have just committed myself on a life-long research project on color - collecting the most special unusual and little-known facts about certain shades & their origin stories.

WHEN DID BLUE BECOME EVERYONE’S FAVORITE COLOR?

My love of blue isn’t exactly unique. Last week, T Magazine asked, “Why Are We So Obsessed With Blue?” Elsa Peretti’s blue-clad bedroom at Can Noves has been all over my IG feed. Silky cerulean fabric swatches are already pinned to the Alex Mill 2026 design boards. But our adoration for the hue is actually pretty recent—blue is one of the most elusive colors in history.

Blue everywhere around the Alex Mill office. We are lucky! It wasn’t always this way! For most of history, it was the rarest and most expensive color to make. It wasn’t even named until the 1st century (tysm Roman Empire). Before that? Crickets - the Greeks didn’t even bother. Homer famously didn’t have a name for it (in the Odyessy, he called the sea “wine-dark”).

Historically, blue was almost a myth. It’s the least occurring color in nature (you can’t exactly scoop it from the sky) and for most of human history…it wasn’t even there. It was the last major color to be named in language – after black/white, red, yellow, green - because people couldn’t describe what they’d barely seen. And once we figured out how to make it?! Prepare to go broke. Blue was so expensive that it was reserved for the royal and the divine.

It took centuries for it to go from rare and unnamed to one of the most ~iconic~ colors of today. I’m breaking it down into the three paint pigments (and famous works) that changed everything: Ultramarine, Prussian Blue, and IKB.

Joan Miró’s This Is The Color Of My Dreams (1924-1927). Rather fitting for our next section - blue used to be so expensive that it quite literally was a dream.

1. ULTRAMARINE BLUE: more costly than gold

If you were a Renaissance painter, ultramarine was your wildest dream - and biggest financial mistake. Michelangelo couldn’t afford it. Rafael reserved it for his final coat. Vermeer refused to paint without it - and proceeded to put his family into debt.

Back it up: Ultramarine was the first luxury pigment. Egyptians had been mining lapis lazuli since 5000s BCE - but it wasn’t until the 6th century AD that the Byzantines made it into paint. The process was excruciating & secretive - and therefore costly - involving grinding the stone into dust, soaking it and kneading it into a paste. Add in the travel costs to transport it?! We’ve racked up a bill.

Ultramarine in Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1662-1665). Look at her little outfit! How pretty. “Ultramarine” literally means “beyond the sea” in Latin -it’s above all other blues. Get this - artists would write lapis lazuli clauses into their contracts - requiring patrons to reserve part of the funds to buy pigment from Venice (the nearest, cheapest stop off the Silk Road).

By the time it made its way on the Silk Road & into the hands of Renaissance painters, it literally cost more than gold. A couple key works (with some pretty great backstories) that use it.

Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-1541)

Look at the blue painted in the background of The Last Judgement vs the blue used for the holy Mother Mary’s robes. Can you spot a difference? Rose fact🌹Before ultramarine came onto the scene, Mary’s robes were mostly neutral or pinkish. Our association with her & divine blue robes = all thanks to ultra.

Since ultramarine was so expensive, it was reserved for big budget gigs - the church, royalty, & our girl Mother Mary’s robes. When Michelangelo was painting The Last Judgement, he ran out. Patrons couldn’t cough up the funds (Renaissance men dealing with surprise bills - they’re just like us). So, he settled for a cheaper blue - you can see above how Mary’s blue is a little more dull than the ultramarine background.

Close up on The Last Judgement’s ultramarine background. I could drink this shade. Michelangelo was committed to it too. Rumor has it, he left Mary’s robes in The Entombment blank rather than compromise with a lower-quality pigment. It’s left unfinished in London’s National Gallery. The drama!

Johannes Vermeer’s The Milk Maid (1657-1658)

Once I heard Vermeer’s paintings described as “tiny jewel boxes” and haven’t stopped thinking about that since. His work is incredibly small-scale with fantastic details. The Milkmaid is one of my favorite paintings. BTW Vermeer was working all while having 15 kids. How did he have the time?

Jan Vermeer painted about 35 paintings and almost every. single. one. uses ultramarine blue. Was Vermeer rich?! Connects to royalty?! No! He loved the pigment so much that he refused to paint without it - so much so that when he died he left his family in large debts.

Details💙My favorite part of Vermeer’s use of ultramarine is…well…how much he used it. Based on how much the pigment costs, you’d think it would be reserved for the star of the show - but no. Ultramarine shows up in the most minutia of details. The underpinnings of a woman’s clothes, an ordinary tablecloth, a slip of a shadow. It wasn’t even reserved for blue-colored objects - he mixed it into green foliage, black tiles, ivory vases. You have to respect his commitment. The man had morals! They were just…blue.

2. PRUSSIAN BLUE: an accident that changed art

If not for a little lab spill in 1704, blue might not be our favorite color.

Back it up: before Prussian blue, blue was a luxury. Rare! Sacred! But in the early 18th century, a German lab maker trying to mix a batch of red paint accidentally added potash containing animal blood. The result was a deep, moody, reddish blue - enter Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment. (Also maybe the most profitable mistake ever made?).

Prussian blue research from my apartment. See how it is a little less pure, a little more red than ultramarine? I ofc had to google which Crayola crayon shade was closest to Prussian Blue and get this - the now famous “midnight blue” crayon used to be called “Prussian blue” until teachers protested to have it changed in 1958. Why? Because the Kingdom of Prussia ended in 1947 and apparently it was no longer relevant to the children. Lollll. Top priority!

Unlike ultramarine, Prussian didn’t require secret recipes or luxury gemstones. It was cheap. And it was for the people - and the people wanted their blue. Van Gogh’s night skies, Picasso’s Blue Period, Hokusai’s Great Wave - none of them would have been possible without it.

It was the first blue shade to be put in mass production. It made its way into stamps, wallpaper, the uniform of the Prussian army (hence the name). Get ready - Prussian Blue is about to be everywhere.

The first known painting using Prussian Blue - Pieter van der Werff’s Entombment of Christ (1709 - right after German lab accident). Artists tried other alternate blue pigments in the past but they were water soluble and faded. This was the first synthetic pigment that stuck around.

Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1831)

Next time you think The Great Wave, think Prussian Blue. It’s a wave so iconic, Apple made it the wave emoji🌊 This is the most famous print from Hokusai’s series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. He originally made thousands of prints - thanks to woodblock printing & an affordable blue pigment. 100-150 survive today.

The Great Wave! OK here’s the backstory - and it’s juicy. The print shouldn’t have existed. During Japan’s Sakoku period (1600s–1800s), the country cut off almost all foreign trade. But a few sneaky Dutch traders found a loophole, smuggling in high-value goods that changed Japan forever - including Prussian Blue. A century after it was first invented - Japan had a blue revolution.

Enter Hokusai. By the time he made The Great Wave, he was in his seventies and decades into his Mt. Fuji obsession. He’d used blue before, but only cheap indigo that faded fast. Prussian Blue changed everything - it was rich, durable, & finally gave his prints real depth (a.k.a. why The Great Wave still looks as blue today as it did back then).

Hokusai’s Prussian blue in detail. The woodblock printing technique used here was basically the origin of mass media — a story for another day.

Picasso’s The Blue Period (1901-1904)

Picasso’s Blue Period followed his best friend Carles Casagemas's death - everything turned dark - think starving artists, mothers, beggars. For work so haunting, it still feels strangely beautiful, no? It’s a great example of the democratization of blue - it went from being as holy as the Virgin Mary to being as ordinary as Picasso’s starving artists.

Meanwhile in Spain, our boy Picasso was going through it. His Blue Period (1901-1904) was in crisis mode, painting almost entirely in shades of blue. What was he using? Prussian Blue of course. A pigment invented by accident - smuggled into continents - and now painting some of the most famous works of modern art.

Picasso’s 1902 Pierreuses au Bar. The TLDR on Prussian Blue - it lead to a blue revolution. Maybe some of my favorite blue paintings today wouldn’t have happened without it - Joan Mitchell’s 1973 Les Bluets or Helen Frankenthaler’s 1976 Blue Bellows.

3. YVES KLEIN BLUE: the man who became a color

Yves Klein (1928-1962) loved blue so much that he devoted his (very short) life to it - and will forever be synonymous with the shade he invented.

Back it up: “IKB” (International Klein Blue) is Klein’s signature ultramarine - you can now see it everywhere from The Met to a 2017 collab with Celine. As the story goes - Klein became obsessed with the color after a night spent staring at the French Mediterranean sky - then dedicated himself to creating that exact perfect shade.

He worked with Picasso’s paintmaker to develop the formula. Soon after Klein debuted the shade at his first solo show in Milan - 11 canvases called “monochromes” - each painted in nothing but his new striking shade of blue.

Yves Klein with his signature blue. He completed most of his work in 8 years and died shortly after he patented IKB in 1961. The cause of death? Probs his favorite color. All those harsh chemicals he inhaled = fatal heart attack.

Yves Klein’s career was defined by radical, almost magical grand gestures - where blue became a spectacle. And guys - he was so crazy.

For his first solo show (1957), he released 1,001 blue balloons into the streets of Paris. He invited 3,000 guests to an exhibition called The Void, only for them to arrive at an entirely empty gallery (LOL. That is lol). And when Yves got married? On top of his wife’s head = a single blue crown.

Some of his most famous work👇

Yves Klein’s Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch (1960)

Klein became tired of paintbrushes and decided to use the human body instead. In 1960, Klein hosted a show in Paris - where he directed 3 nude models covered with blue paint to press their bodies onto a canvas. During the show, a symphony played a single note for 20 minutes - followed by 20 minutes of silence. What I would do to have witnessed!

1960 show - you can watch a video here! Klein looked dapper in a suit & tie as he instructed nude female models a.k.a. his “living brushes.” The show is obviously controversial - Yves having strange control over female bodies. At the same time, I love the women that decided to do it. It was 1960 - definitely not the typical housewife activity. What do you guys think? Pro or against?

Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch - considered some of the most daring works of modern art. The Tate, MoMa and Musée National d'Art Moderne all have one in their collections.

While I was researching this piece, I asked Somsack what his favorite blue work is - he texted me this photo of Phoebe’s Celine x Yves Klein collab from 2017. “It’s in my closet” he said. What?!?! It’s true - he brought the dress to our latest stills shoot and we snapped a few pics (for a future SomStack - stay tuned).

Knowing Yves Klein Blue puts you in a little IYKYK club - you will start spotting it everywhere. This viral blue bathroom is all over TikTok (& just popped up in my friend Katie Stone’s newsletter). My favorite inspo Instagram account posted this archival photo. I still see this 2017 Celine collab everywhere (more on that below). What other IKB references am I missing? Drop in comments.

Guest Curators’ Best Of Blues💙

I texted some of my most stylish, design-minded friends for their favorite blue picks of the moment…

Kelsey Keith - Creative Director of Herman Miller & author of my absolute favorite design newsletter Ground Condition

“The best blue is underfoot—who cares what other furniture you have when you're walking on a pure hit of Klein blue indigo woven into gorgeous hand-loomed rugs? Txt.ure Shop is in Mexico City, and they offer three different rug types in that blue.”

Imagine that Yves Klein blue underfoot! Walking on a dream. Kelsey’s picks: Option 1, Option 2, and Option 3”

Erika Verunik - author of Long Live, fellow Midwesterner, and overall long-legged godsend

“This blue moment from I screenshotted from fashion week. It’s a shade I almost forgot about. Most blue velvet I see is quite light or navy.”

COLLEEN ALLEN Fall/Winter 2025 - anyone have crushed blue velvet shopping picks?!

Jalil Johnson - author of Consider Yourself Cultured, my everyday style icon, and profound expert in the fisherman aesthetic

“New York Movie by Edward Hopper. It’s one of my favorite paintings because I feel so drawn to the usher in the fantastic blue uniform who is maybe in a state of melancholy or maybe it’s a sense of wonder while at the movies. I also quite like the blue Alex Mill windbreaker that just launched”

(He’s talking above David btw. I love him too.)

Hopper’s 1939 painting. Hey, I’d wear that outfit now.

Somsack Sikhounmuong - Creative Director of Alex Mill, author of SomStack & my boss lol

“The 2017 Celine x Yves Klein dress hanging in my closet. The backstory goes - I remember seeing it on the Phoebe Philo runway. It was obviously a really special piece. Strange. Something I’d never seen before. I went to the store and the shop guy told me - oh FYI Raf Simmons just called - they bought it.

So I thought - if it’s good enough for Raf, it’s a good enough investment for me. So I bought it too. I love this behind-the-scenes photo of it being made.”

The IKB Celine dress in the flesh, coming soon to a Somstack near you.

OK everyone! That’s a wrap on blue. What other interesting strange unusual art topics are you interested in learning about? Drop in comments below or find me on Insta @rfranderson 💙

Next time you see blue, think of how hard it was to get - it went from being rare! Rebellious! Fought over! - to the color of your favorite sweater. But isn’t that still a little magic after all?