In October 1889, an article in London Society magazine informed readers that: “Beige is much in favor again, as a color which combines pleasantly with the fashionable tones of brown and gold.” In fact, over the past 150 years, beige has rarely ever been entirely out of fashion. It owes this happy fate to its most distinctive quality: beige is surely one of the most easy-going colors in the spectrum, soothing, mellow and always ready to show bolder, brighter hues off to their best advantage.
   
Beige, like it’s near-cousin, ecru, are loan words from French. Both were used for textiles that were raw or undyed, but while beige referred to a woolen cloth, ecru was typically used for silk. Historically, cloth left in its natural state was rather looked down upon. Dyes, which before the mid-19th century were extracted from animals or plants, varied wildly in price, meaning that the colors people wore could tell others a lot about their wealth and status. Medieval sumptuary laws, which regulated what people could spend their money on, codified this, making it explicit that the coloration of textiles was crucial to their value. While scarlets and purples, for example, were restricted to the most powerful, the very lowliest in society were required to wear muddy colors, like russet or blanket, a dull grey. Beige, then, was the absence of color, or perhaps more romantically it was the color of as-yet unfulfilled potential.
   
All colors have layered meanings. This is perhaps more literally true for beige, because of its long association with underwear. Since few people would see the clothing worn closest to the skin, there was little point in dyeing them and so most people’s clothing was the color of the raw cloth. By the mid-19th and through the 20th centuries, beige, once a non-color, had developed an erotic charge. Around 1900 – and, in part, because beige was by then the default shade for undergarments – it also became associated with youthful energy and sportswear. A 1917 article in the New York Times noted with some astonishment that jersey, “an unimportant sport material”, in “beige, biscuit, string color and three tones of grey” was being used to make frocks that were “accepted for the street, as well as for the country and also appear at afternoon teas”. An early advocate for this trend, and a woman who would do more than anyone else to cement beige’s place in the high fashion firmament, was Gabrielle Chanel. She was well aware of its history, observing that: “I take refuge in beige because it’s natural. Not dyed.” Chanel was also adept at pairing it with bolder hues: red, gold, but also black, most famously in the two-tone shoes first designed in 1957.
   
Today, beige’s position seems unassailable. It’s a useful color, a neutral. A shade that plays well with others and yet possesses its own quiet allure. Like florals for spring or white linen summer dresses, beige is a classic. It’s an invitation to slow down a little, to be kinder to ourselves, and soothingly scent our homes, accordingly.
   
Kassia St Clair is a writer, cultural historian and the author of “The Secret Lives Of Colour” (John Murray) and "The Race To The Future "(John Murray).