Dooziest hues kick the beautiful game up a notch

I didn't know of the word "chromophiliac" until last Sunday, when, with a gasp of delight (for a writer-wordmonger can never know too many words and is always restlessly collecting new ones, like a male bower bird collecting blue objects) it leapt out at me from my desktop's screen. I was reading a swish new online essay about the French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922).

This year has brought the centenary of the death of Proust, the author of the wondrous seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), and so he is being much thought of and written about by his admirers.

"Proust, a natural-born chromophiliac," Christopher Prendergast writes "was sympathetic to John Ruskin's claim that 'colour is the most sacred element of all visible things'."

And from there Prendergast goes on to show how for vast stretches of the vast (3200 pages) of Remembrance of Things Past there is scarcely a page without Proust giving thrilled descriptions of vibrant colours his narrator characters are noticing and being thrilled by.

So, for example, those narrators often enthuse over mauve, noticing asparagus "stippled in mauve and azure", the "mauve tufts" of lilac blossoms and the "mauve silk" of a woman's scarf. One narrator is bewitched by the "round mauve eyes" of the seductive Princesse de Nassau.

A chromophiliac, then, (and you may be one yourself, dear reader) is someone who loves and notices colours and who cares about the uses and misuses of them in the natural and man-made world.

My own chromophilia is adding to the delight I am taking while superglued to coverage of the World Cup. One feels sure that Proust with us today would be similarly thrilled by some of the colours of the kits of the teams (and the tournament began with more than 64 kits on display, each team required to have both a "home" and an "away" ensemble).

In that same spirit, contemporary chromophiliacs galore have posted online their own passionate assessments and rankings of the kits. See for example Planet Football's highly-opinionated Ranking every country's 2022 World Cup kits from worst to best.

These sorts of things are important to chromophiliacs and so lots of us find ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, watching matches and barracking for the teams we find the loveliest to look at.

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Hence watching the Spain vs Germany match, one instinctively sided with Spain in its colourful and comely home strip of "team-power red" and gold rather than with Germany in its colourless, cheerless, dour away ensemble of black and white.

One feels sure Proust, too, if he is watching from Heaven's terraces, is doing this during this World Cup. So, for instance, in Remembrance there is lots of enthusing over "gold yellow" and so we can be sure Proust at Qatar is, like me in my discerning chromophilia, barracking for the Netherlands with its home shirts of a glossily golden-orange-yellow based on the colours of a lion's mane.

My favourite strip of the tournament (very popular too with lots of the chromophiliacs who have made their passionate lists of the best and the worst) is Saudi Arabia's eerily attractive away strip of vibrant Saudi green in a jagged, mosaic pattern.

How we chromophiliacs barracked for the strikingly pretty Saudis in their sensational opening-round defeat of unremarkably blue-and-white-striped Argentina!

But it is hard not to passionately support Argentina when it plays in its away strip of a kind of purple-blue decorated with "flames" of lovely shades of bluey mauve and pinkish lilac.

Life is unfair and teams' looks don't count for enough and so lovely-looking Saudi Arabia has no chance of winning the World Cup.

Brazil, though, does have a strong chance and a Brazil victory would delight refined, Proust-like chromophiliacs.

Irrespective of whether Brazil wins the World Cup by the mere technicality of scoring the most goals, it is already a champion, a pigmentation king.

Its home shirt of a palely lemony yellow that goes aesthetically perfectly with the strip's azure shorts in which Proust and I think we see also some tints of the flawless cobalt blue of this morning's (Wednesday's) cloudlessly perfect Canberra sky.

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