A desire for everything red

During a recent benefit for Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, an unknown stole the show from all the celebrities: a Yorkie named Lily, prancing and posing in jazzy red boots. She was modeling a new line of canine footwear, Lilyboots, designed by her owner Lara Alameddine, who must have known that to grab attention in a mob, pastel wouldn’t do. Red is the only color with true star power.

Signs of a red resurgence are popping up all over -- in stores, in catalogs, in ads and, most visibly, on the road. Red Mini Coopers, red VWs, red Jeeps, red Corvettes are suddenly cheering up the highways as they break rank with the endless sea of black, white and gray vehicles barely distinguishable from the asphalt.

Red has a dazzling life force. After years of the beiging-down of our lives, we crave its warmth, its passion, its vibrancy, its humor. It adds spice and dash to the most mundane object -- a toaster or a watering can. Even the smallest red object enlivens a room. Red walls embolden it. Style icon Diana Vreeland painted her living room Dante’s Inferno red, and got a lot of attention for it.

David Hicks, one of the foremost interior designers of the last century, was famous for mixing red with orange and pink in the ‘50s, to great effect. Vreeland and Hicks used red like a neutral, but a neutral with razzmatazz, a neutral with daring.

Red says: Look at me. Just wear a pair of Smith & Hawken’s red garden clogs, and see for yourself. You might not compete with little Lily, but you will get noticed.

-- Barbara King