The rise and fall of the Orangey People (again).

A very old post reposted...

Today is a sunny day, a day when the vainglorious strut their funky stuff. Amongst the vainglorious are a group of women and men who indulge in a form of body art that stereotypically hails from Essex, those who, strangely, spray their body in a orange hue that reminds you of a colour you would find on a paint chart. The Picts and the Scots used to cover themselves in Woad, we in modern times, cover ourselves in Burnt Sienna. In Shakespeare, Mark Anthony let slip the dogs of war, now we let slip dogs that would fit into a handbag. We seem to have slipped, or sleepwalked into a time seemingly dominated by the worship of celebrity and how ‘perfect’ we should look. Carly Simon’s words from her song could be an anthem for the vain and yes the vain would probably think the song was about them.

Andy Warhol famously said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes". In Elizabethan times we could have a nine day wonder, longer perhaps because we did not have the interconnected and pervasive media that we have now. In the Internet age who knows how long our infamy could last? It is very likely that our banality might live on on the internet. Forgotten perhaps but still there, broken down into packets of information, ones and zeroes, floating around in a digital 'alphabet soup.'

Our digital lives seek to escape from the hurly burley of our modern lives. We all in one way or another lead a far more complex life than our forebears. Ironically it is the technology that we seek to ‘escape with’, that is the cause of our insecurity and a feeling of worthlessness perhaps?

Our society through our pervasive media systems place almost impossible goals with regards to how you should look and how you should be. Our lives have become ‘orangey’ because of the pressure placed upon us by both advertisers and social media. We are, through the media, given an almost impossible ‘body image’ to aspire to. Being ‘orangey’ is a symptom of that pressure, and who knows what fad or fancy will become ‘the new orange’. I’m hoping that woad will make a comeback.