Gold & Beige

Gold and beige creates the Coco Chanel Rue Cambon combination — because Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel (1883–1971, the most influential fashion designer of the 20th century by the near-universal consensus of fashion historians, founder of the House of Chanel at 31 rue Cambon, Paris 1er, in 1910) specifically chose beige as her most characteristic and most personally identified neutral — not because it was conventionally luxurious, but precisely because it was anti-conventional in the early 20th-century context of the most extravagantly coloured Edwardian and early 20th-century fashion palette. Chanel's use of beige against gold (the warm gold of the CC interlocking-C logo, the warm gold chain of the 2.55 bag, and the warm gold hardware of the most celebrated Chanel designs) creates the gold-and-beige warm-cool as the most specifically Parisian couture and the most personally Chanel-branded warm-cool in 20th-century fashion.

The Chanel No. 5 bottle design (1921, the first perfume created by a couture house bearing the couturier's own name, designed by the Russian-French glassmaker Théophile Marius Baccarat or alternatively by Chanel herself in the most commonly told version — the rectangular bottle with the chamfered corners, in clear glass with a beige label and gold lettering — creating the gold-and-beige warm-cool as the most commercially successful single fragrance bottle design in the history of the perfume industry, with approximately one bottle of Chanel No. 5 sold every 30 seconds worldwide since its launch) creates the gold-and-beige warm-cool at the most commercially globally successful and the most individually personally branded fragrance design scale.

The Italian Sandstone and Archaeological fieldwork tradition — the specific warm gold of the Italian limestone and travertine stone (the travertine of the Colosseum's original exterior, of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in EUR, Rome, and of the most characteristic Italian Baroque and Renaissance building facades) against the beige of the archaeologically exposed tufa and the most specifically Italian sun-bleached stone creates the gold-and-beige warm-cool at the most geographically Italian and the most archaeologically ancient stone architecture scale.