Colour blocking was invented by Christopher Pike

I’ve been watching this colour blocking trend with interest, from afar, safe in my grey, white, black, navy, neutral palette.  It’s been bugging me that the whole trend was reminding me of something. And then I picked up Remember Me by Christopher Pike so I could reread it for the twentieth time the other day and realised what it was – colour blocking is the preferred fashion choice for the female (and sometimes the male) characters in Christopher Pike’s books!

If you haven’t read any Christopher Pike these books were the Vampire Diaries and Twilight of their day. I was reading them in the 90s but he was first published in 1985. His early books were the best; always featuring gory horror, backstabbing bitches, murder, a character named Ann and (in my opinion) a thinly disguised self portrait of Pike as a male character who was skinny with dark hair, good looking in an non-traditional way, intelligent, relatively popular and no good with the ladies. They also featured untouchable cheerleaders who wandered about wearing loose bright tops teamed with bright pants or shorts, from which their long tanned legs extended.  As a teenager I devoured them and I still enjoy revisiting them. My faves were the Final Friends Series, the Last Vampire and Remember Me. Anyway back to colour blocking.

In Remember Me Shari describes her outfit:

“She did have great taste in clothes, however. I was forever borrowing outfits from her. The yellow blouse and green trousers I wore to Beth’s party actually belonged to Jo.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around this back in the day. Green and gold are the national colours of Australia and when I first read this book all I could think of was bad polyester Australian Commonwealth Games uniforms and wattle trees.  I couldn’t translate that to an actual outfit, and this is the only example I’ve seen that I think is remotely ok:

Australian style colour blocking. Photo from lookbook.nu

The yellow and green combo must be a favourite because he it pulled it out again for the character of Jessica several times in the Final Friends Series.

In The Party Jessica wears “bright yellow trousers and silky green blouse”, in The Graduation a yellow blouse and a green skirt (I guess Jessie has better legs than Shari) and in The Dance a bright yellow dress to homecoming.  That is one bright wardrobe.

Nicole Richie makes a yellow dress look more than acceptable. Photo from http://www.yournextdress.com

Back to Remember Me and I had even more trouble with this ensemble: “…but Jo was wearing orange trousers and an orange blouse. It was incredible. Who would wear orange to a best friend’s funeral?”

Incredible indeed, Mr Pike. (Oh, BTW, this was not a spoiler, of course there’s a funeral! It’s a Christopher Pike book called ‘Remember Me’. There’s a really funny recap over at the blog Like Pike if you care to know more.)

I still don’t know if I’m sold on this one, but except for the weird pouching around the crotch Jessica Biel is making it work. Photo from http://blog.fahionism.ca

The modern equivalents of these outfits might be super stylish, but I shudder to think was what going on in the 80s when Mr Pike was dreaming up the original outfits. I think they were probably as horrifying as the description of how Shari smashed her skull on the concrete. Christopher Pike – twisted mind and fashion genius.