How many of the world's most iconic colors do you know?

Painters rarely use every color they can buy. A working palette is a handful of pigments, chosen because they mix cleanly and because a limited set gives a picture unity. The plates in this piece each isolate that kind of decision: one artist’s habit of color, reduced to a few swatches you can borrow for clothes.

Some palettes are built on a single intense hue and a range of lights and darks around it. Some are almost entirely earths — ochre, umber, black, and a dull red — with one pure color saved for a small area. Others depend on a complement: a red set against a green, or a blue set against an orange, so the eye vibrates between them. A few are optical, small touches of color placed so that they mix in the viewer’s eye rather than on the cloth.

Read each plate the way you would read a painting. Notice which color is dominant, which one is only a line, and how far apart the lightest and darkest notes are. Then translate it directly: the dominant color becomes the largest garment, the line becomes the shoe or the collar, and the distance between light and dark tells you whether the outfit should be quiet or graphic.

An iconic color is one a stranger can name, or can assign to a painter, a house, or a place. Klein blue, the yellow of imperial roofs, the red of a lacquer box, the green of a malachite column, the black of ink. They became iconic by being repeated in the same form until the form and the color were the same memory.

The plates reduce each of those habits to a few swatches. Notice which color is the field and which is only a line. Translate it directly: the field becomes the largest garment, the line becomes the shoe or the collar. You do not need the costume. You need the proportion that made the color recognizable.