I don't remember why I got curious about this, but earlier this evening I looked up the word colorway to find out where it came from. Why did the folks in the sneaker industry invent this odd word?
They didn't. According to the OED, the earliest use is 1941 in the Guardian. Another source places its origin in the textile industry in the late 19th century. And the Google Ngram viewer has instances starting in 1844. Here's the first century of colorway (as always, click to embiggen):
There a sudden outburst in 1844 in the US, followed by very rare and sporadic usage through 1940—also mostly in the US. Here's the second century:
Common usage doesn't start until 1952, followed by a steady rise and then a huge spike in the US in 2003—presumably the result of its adoption by the sneaker industry.
Anyway, colorway just means a particular combination of two or more colors, but I can't find an explanation of where it came from. The best guess seems to be that it's a shortening of "a way of using color," but I'm not sure I find that very convincing. But I don't have any better ideas.
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behold the glory of unicode
I worked at Nike as an I/T contractor and can say that your definition is exactly how they used the term.
It has becime a popular "term of art" in the apparel industry because "combination of colors" quickly becomes cumbersome and tedious in sentence structure.
To be exact, a colorway is a combinations of color assignments for different components of a garment, shoe, or accessory.
For example, you may have a ski jacket with three colorways - blue, red, green.
The blue colorway spec might be:
Main fabric: blue
Zippers: red
trim: black
There will also usually be a Pantone pallet for the style or collection defining the exact meaning of "blue" for this style.
Colorway is obviously a much more complex thing than just a color.
Colorways were used throughout the apparel industry at least as far back as 2000 when I got involved in the industry and since the term thenb was ubiquitous I am sure it was being used decades earlier.
Why is this a "Reply"? It seems more like a separate comment. It's a very useful one and quite interssting, but how does it relate to what I said, which is more about the need to create a single word which stands in for a phrase which is cumbersome to write or speak?
Colorway has been used by designers for as long as I can remember; I take it to be similar to the colors an artists select for a pallete to use in a given painting.
I might dye yarn in colorways, dye fabrics for a quilt in the coloways planned for the quilt. I spent the summer making dyer's color wheels, to demonstrate color theory using red (madder), yellow (goldenrod or weld), and blue (indigo) dyes as my a primary-color colorway. This same palette is often used to decorate children's bedrooms, and decorating is the other niche where the term colorway is party of the lexicon.
In fine art, colorways were often designed (or avoided, too) based on the chemical reactions different pigments have to each other. I am making a colorway of botanical watercolor paints that take advantage of the reactions between mordants and tannins and plant pigments used by dyers to make variations of a color on fabric, but for applying to cotton watercolor paper, instead.
It's jargon from the design industry, analogous to a pallete of colors in art, and from what I can tell, of great interest to web-site designers and catalog layout specialists, too. As an artist, I do not recall it not being part of the jargon of my craft.
That is so cool! Many thanks for sharing your expertise.
I agree with ScentOfViolets -- thanks for the explanation!
Kevin may be way out of his field of expertise here. He may also be confusing etymology and word history with a meme. Also pretty spotty research. Merriam-Webster Collegiate, a typical "house source" in publishing, has a first date of 1952, and MW online's examples of use all date from 2024. That's not typical, since MW doesn't mean necessarily to have current rather than common examples as best guides to current usage.
My guess is that, entirely by coincidence, someone adopted a nonce word that fit his/her need in the 19th c. and sounded good, but never caught on. And then it began to have a niche use in the fashion industry in the 1950s without necessarily reaching the rest of us. And now it's suddenly enough of a meme for unrelated reasons that Kevin felt interested in pursuing it, even if the rest of us haven't quite caught up. Go figure.
"There a sudden outburst in 1844 in the US"
Sounds like a word Emily Dickinson would use.
And now can we move on to cat blogging?
Just stumbled on this,
Is My Blue Your Blue?
https://ismy.blue/
I did it twice, first time I got 171, the second time 165. It seems to mean that my understanding of what is blue is more expansive than average.
I got 175. But does the test take into account your monitor's color profile? If not I would take these results with more than a grain of salt.
Good point! I did it last night in dark room on my desktop monitor, so I just tried it again on my android tablet in the daylight and got 170.
For the chart nerds reading, there is a fairly interesting short analysis of how well the data is charted on My Blue Your Blue? at https://leancrew.com/all-this/2024/09/am-i-blue/
Personally I think My Blue Your Blue? has a problem with ignoring the margin of error. Which makes me wonder if women with the variant OPN1LW gene would have less variance between different iterations of the test. And it would be interesting to see if the hexochromatic women also had a smaller distribution curve on the graph. Obviously to a certain extent they would have to because that group would likely exclude people at the extremes, but it would be interesting to see their variance in applying labels to the colors. I suspect that the ability to distinguish one color from another is only loosely correlated with the buckets we assign those colors to, but I would also not be surprised if I was wrong. And then you would also need to control for native language as well as that seems to greatly affect how we translate light frequencies to words even after we learn a new language.
I find I have a really hard time being forced to classify shades of turquoise as either green or blue.
At least half of them looked like they could be either one to me.
At the end it where it says 'turquoise looks blue to you', I swear the color in the box displayed looks green to me. I think it's the contrast against the white background, where in the test it's an almost full screen against my dark themed browser.
Blue is a broader color in Japan. It includes what a lot of westerners would call green. e.g. Green traffic lights in Japan look blue to many foreigners. The Japanese don't draw the same distinction.
I was watching some anime, and the characters were dissing someone's choice of green wall paint. I was sure I had heard them use the word "green". It turns out I had. Japanese borrowed the German word for green for the greener shades of blue.
There are cultural differences as well with regard to color classification. My Korean wife used to call the "go" traffic light the "blue light."
There is something about how Asians understand white as having a subtle hint of blue to it.
It's the same in Japanese as well.
It's jargon, and as such, should be avoided.
This isn't jargon. And it is actually in use for a specific, industry related meaning.
Suppose a patterned fabric, a garment with a pattern combining different elements, and the like.
The same pattern may be executed in different colour combinations. Each of those combinations is a colorway (or, where I am, colourway).
The word usefully and conveniently expresses that there is an identical pattern but a different combination of colours used in executing it. Quilters, dressmakers, and others use the word for that reason.
Naturally it only emerges with industrial production in which patterns are repeated across a large run, and executed identically but in different combinations of colours.
Apparently, in yarns, "colorway" perhaps means something slightly different:
"
Colorways: It is common for hand dyers to refer to their various color offerings as “colorways.” A colorway is simply the result of using a particular combination of recipes and techniques to apply color to the yarn.
"
Apparently, a single solid color can be a "colorway" with yarn. Here, it seems the word might be derived from "the way the color is produced".
I'm really disappointed with the OED. I thought it was better than that. First it misses the 1840s references, and then it misses the whole yarn culture.
You're presuming the yarn is a solid color; it's painted in a number of colors, hence the use of the term 'colorway.'
Google ngrams has a reference dated 1833:
UNITED STATES v. MACDANIEL, 32 U.S. 1 (1833)