Season Four: A Sea of Blues and Greens

Joan in true blue, heating up leftovers for Greg

Hello! I’m a new blogger here, mainly interested in writing about design, fashion and color on the show. In a post on the fashions of the current season over on the AMC Blogs page, much is made of the color blue and its prevalence in Season Four’s costume design palette. Brief mention is made of a navy blue dress with white militaryesque detail worn by Joan, and the suggestion is that she is the “drill sergeant of a very glamorous marine corps.” I think the military reference is powerfully interwoven into this season’s themes and design, and the third episode “The Good News” elaborates upon it further.

I’m happy to see a greater focus on Joan, who I thought might slip away when she left Sterling Cooper to marry her handsome drip of a doctor. The episode begins with Joan in her doctor’s office, dressed in a white hospital gown and seated on an olive  green cushion. Olive is a frequent color choice for Joan: earthy but slightly otherworldly. Green in costume design has multiple meanings depending on its shade or tone: but it frequently connotes someone with alien or outsider status (which is one reason it always stands out when characters wear it and why it’s used fairly infrequently).  Green means Joan is in charge, and her self-assured conversation with the doctor about her fertility shows us she is confident and in control. Joan’s bright blue dress and slip hang on the hook on the door: the deep turquoise tones serve as a reminder of her husband’s imminent departure overseas, which hangs over the couple like a swaying anchor on a rope. The green cushion also suggests Joan is staying on terra firma, despite her doctor’s suggestion that she travel to be with Greg.

Don is still loving those grey suits (as are most of the higher-ups at SCD&P, except Harry who enjoys wearing a tobacco-brown sportcoat), and secretary Allison wears deep teal, very similar to what she wore on that fateful Christmas Party night. It’s a moody color: stormy and emotional, but also unromantic, and not terribly sexual. The relationship with Don will probably not go where she might like it to.

When Don arrives at Anna’s place in California, she’s in a pale peasant blouse and graphic print earth-toned skirt, with swingy beads. Her living room wall is a hospital tone of seafoam green, which needs painting: certainly a harbinger of what we learn about her health. Her sister Patty is in a floral print dress with Peter Pan collar: feminine, old-fashioned, the default matriarch. Her daughter and Anna’s nice Stephanie is in a youthful white shirt and green halter top, sporty but what will soon come to be called “unisex.”

Joan heads home, wrapped in a harvest gold wool wraparound coat. Gold is earthy, and can connote wealth or happiness, but yellow is also the color of fear, and a color symbolic of Asian culture: another harbinger of the war. Greg argues with her about his lack of holiday time off, and then his indefinite time of departure for Vietnam.

At the bar they drag Don to, Stephanie stays in white while Anna has changed to a black outfit with a white pattern (suggesting her secret is safe with her niece). Don wears a checked jacket with ivory background, sporty but somewhat stodgy by California standards: he is still more a visitor than a native here. Don drives Stephanie home in a red convertible, that classic badge of the lonely mid-life crisis, then and now. He sits on the sofa all night after hearing the news about Anna, wearing a grey-blue shirt and dark grey pants. In the morning, he decides to paint Anna’s pale blue-green wall, and strips down to his white t-shirt and boxers to do it. Anna is again in black and white in the morning, balanced between light and dark.

Joan shows up in a black dress at work, a dramatic foil to the red roses Layne has delivered to her, in a confused attempt to apologize for his earlier sexist remarks. While Joan is reading the card enclosed with the flowers. Peggy enters in a moss green and grey checked dress. Though Peggy’s outfits and hairstyle have become more sophisticated recently, this dress reminded me a bit of the old Peggy: somewhat dowdy, certainly unglamorous next to Jane’s classic black with gold jewelry. Peggy’s hesitant comments about buying a dress for New year’s Eve are assumed by Joan to indicate she’s “going out with the girls,” but Peggy’s insistence she is going out with her boyfriend is lost on Joan, who has bigger fish to fry.

Don in again in his grey suit, ready to leave Anna’s. She is painting a black flower on wall and asks Don to sign his name. She wears a pastel-striped dress in shades of green, yellow and pink: quintessential California colors. The light is the room is sunny but pale; Don looks haunted as he walks out the door.

After Joan and Greg’s fight, she is seen making him a special dinner to apologize. It’s Hawaiian, she she serves it in a teal silk Asian-inspired dress, compete with pink plastic lei necklace (Greg’s lei is baby blue: these colors hint that the baby issue is far from resolved). Clearly, the Asian themes here again remind us of Greg’s forthcoming service in Vietnam. When Joan cuts her hand, he unrolls what looks for all the world like a field doctor’s first aid kit, with tools wrapped in cloth, and tends to her wound with expert gentleness. She cries.

Don runs into Layne at the office New Year’s Eve, and invites him along to an evening out with some lady friends. The dolled-up dates both wear shimmering olive green gowns: classy, but alienating. No passionate red, true blue or mature black: these ladies mean business.

The final scene has the big guns of SCD&P meeting at the offices for the year’s first business meeting: Joan is at the head of the table in royal purple. A color suggesting royalty, wealth, and power; but also associated with the occult and the supernatural, and with the exotic. A loaded image, and one with intriguing implications as this volatile season moves ahead.