Profondo Rosso

I love how Toni Schlesinger's NYO column just...dissolves:

What “big man topples” is to news, red is to fashion—most famously Diana Vreeland’s Park Avenue apartment, which she told Billy Baldwin to furnish like “a garden in hell,” and now the red walls and doors and “convenience stairs,” as spokeswoman Abbe Serphos put it, of the Renzo Piano’s new headquarters for The New York Times, which look as though they are painted with cheerful tomatoes. “We refer to it as ‘sunset red,’” Ms. Serphos said, in what one hopes is not some sort of subconscious prophecy about the newspaper industry.

The red will never be quite still or all there in one way, like the events of the days: The light will change, the light affecting the color will change the color, one’s mood will change, the moods of all The New York Times reporters will change ….

In any case, thinking about red in spring is upsetting. Red is theatrical, artificial, an opera costume, the blood of medieval illuminated manuscripts, love, love later on when it is no longer love but something more dangerous, not the hopeful colors of spring flowers, lilacs in Paris or violets on a 1950’s hat with green leaves and perfect green grapes.