There is a question that is often asked, almost with a smug smile: “White? But that’s not a color!”. Yet, one only needs to look around — in churches, hospitals, detergent advertisements, wedding dresses — to understand that no color occupies as much space in our collective imagination as this one, which pretends to be nothing. For our ancestors, white was one of the three fundamental colors of the chromatic universe, along with red and black. On the walls of Paleolithic caves, whitish clays and minerals were used to draw animals.
In the Middle Ages, illuminators added lead white to their parchments. There was no doubt about it: white existed, had substance, and had weight. It was the invention of paper — and later printing — that upset this balance. When the blank sheet became the neutral support upon which words flowed, white lost its materiality and became a background, emptiness, nothingness. Even today, our vocabulary bears the marks of it: blank page, white night, to go blank. The oldest color has become synonymous with nothing.
Almost everywhere in the world, white evokes the idea of purity. It is no coincidence: few other colors can be so uniform, so free from visible imperfections. Fresh snow transforms the landscape into a perfect monochromatic surface, and over the centuries, that perfection has become a metaphor for innocence. This association has shaped concrete practices.
For centuries, all fabrics in contact with the body had to be white: not only for hygienic reasons — white showed dirt, and it could be boiled without being ruined — but because, in the Middle Ages, a shirt that was not white was considered almost an act of obscenity. Far worse than appearing naked.
And then there is the wedding dress. The tradition of the white wedding dress is surprisingly recent: for centuries, brides wore red. Only with the establishment of Christian marriage as a bourgeois institution between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did white become the color of claimed virginity, of innocence to be displayed. A code that still persists today, even when it has lost its literal meaning. White is also light — and light has always been divine. In monotheistic traditions, God is perceived as white light. Angels dress in white. With the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Virgin also adopted white as her signature color. Even monarchs, whose authority derived from divine power, adopted the white banner to distinguish themselves from the multicolored masses of the armies.
But white also has a disturbing face. It is the color of ghosts, specters, and bearers of bad news. From Roman antiquity to modern comics — where it is unthinkable for a ghost to appear in any other color — the white of the afterlife has remained unchanged. It is no coincidence: in deep symbolism, white is also the color of death. In Asia and parts of Africa, it is the color of mourning. The newborn and the old, the cradle and the shroud: white marks both thresholds of life.
The most modern paradox of white is this tendency of never to be enough. Detergent advertisements do not promise white: they promise super-white. The freezer compartment of the refrigerator is designed in light blue to evoke something even colder, even purer. Shades beyond white itself are pursued.
In the Middle Ages, it was gold that fulfilled this function: gold reflected divine light even more intensely than simple white. Today, ice blue has taken its place in the imagination of absolute cleanliness. Ultimately, the search for purity has never stopped: it has only changed color.
