This article is the second in a series of interviews about dressing in monochrome. 

COLOUR IS THE FIRST THING you notice about Elizabeth Sweetheart Rosenthal. When we meet on a Saturday afternoon at her home in Brooklyn, the seventy-six-year-old is wearing algae mascara, pea overalls, and clogs spray-painted grass. They match her walls, carpet, picture frames and hair. Her iPad is tiled with sticker frogs. She serves lunch, tomatoes from her backyard garden, on a moss-coloured plate.

We ignore the obvious at first. Elizabeth and her husband Robert pull out giant rolls of watercolour paper. They are illustrations for fashion and home furnishing prints: lilies and beetles destined for suburban sofas, a toile of a L.L. Bean boot, a soft-focus Ralph Lauren polo player. On many, the colours have yet to be filled in. After the Eighties, computers began doing that kind of work much more quickly, the artists working in Elizabeth’s Midtown studio moved on to other fields and Elizabeth ‘became green.’

She is almost famous. When Elizabeth goes outside, strangers ask for photographs, but she says she is afraid to ruin the freshness of the encounters by asking them to send her copies. To them, she is The Green Lady of Brooklyn, as seen in the New York Times and the New York Post and on the blog Humans of New York, a kind of leprechaun in real life. She loves people, but isn’t much of a talker. Robert, her partner of fifty years whose grey T-shirt is the only not-green thing in my field of vision, fills in the gaps.

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Elizabeth Rosenthal: I hitchhiked to New York from Canada in 1964. My mom and dad were doctors and my father was against me becoming an artist. I was twenty-three.

Robert Rosenthal: We were both refugees from tremendous social pressure. At the time, you were either an outlaw, a hoodlum type, or you totally conformed. There was no in-between. Living in the city there were bohemians…

Elizabeth: I was a beatnik!

Robert: For a while, her parents sent the ‘Want’ ads from the local paper, like, hey, there’s all these opportunities back here. Her first job in New York was in the garment centre. When she arrived, she was looking for an apartment and someone said, you have to find a job first. She said, how do you get a job?

Elizabeth: That’s how I’ve always worked! I was carrying a pillow and my sketchbook.

Robert: New York State had an employment service. The woman asked, What can you do? She said, I can draw. At the time, there were converters in the fashion industry. They were the middle men between mill and manufacturer, and they’d design a line on spec which they’d have artists work on by hand, then sell it to a manufacturer. The company would send her down to the mills in the South, to make sure the colours came out right. There were many more prints back then. Floral hankies, scarves, accessories. Everyone was doing these cute little conversational sets. Every design had colour combinations. Now there are virtually none; the industry is three, four percent of what it was. There’s a fashion and an economic reason. Clothes are simpler, and brands aren’t willing to waste money speculating.

Elizabeth: I started my own studio thirty years ago. Sweetheart is the name now. I’m Sweetheart, that’s what everyone calls me. In the Seventies it was Sweetpea. And I brought Robert in when I started. He’d go out and do all the shopping for me for vintage swatches, which we’d redo for brands. We’re both artists, too. I do little watercolours when I go to Canada.

Robert: What we would do is literally get garbage scraps and damaged things and then mount them and present them like art. We’d go to second-hand stores, junk places. These prints were in the public domain after a certain number of years, so you could sell them as a concept and then adapt them for the customer. Ralph Lauren always bought vintage. They’d buy 1930s and 1940s rayon shirts. So let’s say you have a little island with palm trees, you’d put three trees instead of two. And if you have a flower you put five petals instead of four. Polo gave her all their dogs, all their horses.

Elizabeth: The Polo logo now, the embroidery on their shirts, is from a horse we did.

Robert: One year for their showrooms, all the shoes that came in looked too new, so they sent us hundreds of pairs. We dipped them in tea, sand-papered them, dripped paint on them. We made a prototype for a pair of jeans, and the belt-buckles were too shiny, so we’d damage them. There was one year where we were damaging things full-time.

Elizabeth: No one knows we did all that. They paid me $6,000 for that one pair of jeans. Now they reuse the old designs.

Robert: We found a niche. There was so much work we couldn’t even complete it. And then it disappeared.

Elizabeth: I haven’t always been green. I went through different stages; at first it was vintage. I wore Thirties and Forties dresses. And then I started dying things myself, all nice bright colours, not just green, but different ones, pink, purple. I wore Bakelite, antique costume jewelry.

Robert: She used to get these big straw hats in the millinery district with artificial flowers.

Elizabeth: And then it was overalls. That was after the vintage stage, when I hit fifty. I would go to Gap Kids; they had great overalls in different colours.

Robert: She had black velvet overalls for formalwear.

Elizabeth: If I like it I do it!

Robert: The green has gotten brighter over time.

Elizabeth: When I was becoming green, I used to walk our dog in the neighbourhood. And we became part of the scenery and the children really loved it. People would come up to me. That’s why I kept it going for ten years.

Robert: Then the media started. It was a local article, by a lady from the neighbourhood. And then there was a New York Magazine article, the one with Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe. And the New York Times. Everybody read that. We got calls from Australia, Taiwan, Norway.

Elizabeth: I’m embarrassed!

Robert: The other day someone asked me if I’d figured out a way to monetise this. There are people who… for example, there’s a Pink Lady in Los Angeles. She’s definitely monetising. She’s always trying to get Elizabeth to appear in her videos.

Elizabeth: I don’t want to be paid to be me. I’m not a politician. You know what’s really funny about the video people, is they didn’t really care about me at all. It’s like I’m an object or something. They couldn’t have cared what I put on, or how I was feeling, or whether I was sad. They were doing their work of art.

Robert: She wouldn’t walk the dog until we got a green leash. She signs her checks in green. My underwear is green, because—

Elizabeth: I don’t separate them.

Robert: Hers is green, and mine starts white and then it becomes sort of yellow.

Elizabeth: It’s my life. To tell you the truth, I’m really green.

Robert: Some people shot some stupid things. You know, bought all the green juice for her to drink and put her on Central Park South and left her in the cold. And people would say, ‘Can I take a selfie with you?’ And [the film crew] would come running up and say, ‘Why are you talking to this lady?’ with their microphone in the face. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s wonderful. But when she comes back from Manhattan sometimes she’s like, Oh, thank god. But then she says, I met so many lovely people.

Elizabeth: They always say, green’s my favourite colour too. But they’re wearing black. I really love people and I love their reactions. 

Robert: New York has been absolutely magical. We came in just as one scene was ending and the next was starting. When Soho became the artist’s scene, the neighbourhood was empty on the weekend. You’d hear these loud noises from a couple blocks away and you could just follow the sound to a party.

Elizabeth: My mother died a couple years ago at one hundred and four, and she had macular degeneration. But she could see in her periphery and she could always see me. We’d go walking together. She loved me being green. I’ve had a long life and have been through a lot and have my design studio and this and that. But when people see me they just see the Green Lady. That’s fine.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

This article is the first in a series of interviews about dressing in monochrome. 

ON THE FRONT OF Tezuka Architecture’s catalogue of work, the names of the firm’s principals, Takaharu and Yui, are written in contrasting colours: blue and red. Recently, I spoke to them in their home in Tokyo, Japan, via video call. It was a warm spring evening here, in New York City, and a bright morning there. As it happened, they were similarly arranged: Takaharu, on the left, in his signature cobalt, and Yui, on the right, in a cherry shirt that that looked plucked from the primary colour wheel.

Yui and Takaharu’s designs feature almost no colour. One project, the Roof House, is all sandy wood, topped with a sloping gray roof (each family member has a personal skylight, through which to ascend to the outdoor space). Their ‘Wall-less house’ has a ground story that’s entirely glass, filtering in whatever colours happen to be outside on the trees and in the sky. In their own lives however, colour is a defining characteristic. Yui wears almost exclusively red; Takaharu blue. The objects they share (car, furniture) are yellow. Their daughter, fourteen, wears yellow, too; their son, eleven, wears green.

Alice: What were some of your early relationships to colour?

Takaharu Tezuka: It started from red.

Yui Tezuka: I loved red since I was very small. It suits me. And I didn’t wear pink. I guess pink is a symbol for girls, but I didn’t like it. Eventually, I quit wearing different colours and decided to wear just red.

Takaharu: I’ll tell you more. I used to work for an office called Richard Rogers’ Partnership. Richard Rogers is the architect who designed the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s of London. At that time, Richard Rogers was wearing blue. And everybody in the office was trying to wear blue, because everyone wanted to be like him. Richard Rogers himself didn’t like that solution. So he changed the colour to shocking pink, so that nobody could follow. But still, we stayed in blue.

And then, in 1992, I got married with a lady in red all the time. So eventually it became red and blue. And so, then, when we came back to Japan we found a car. A car in yellow, the yellow Citroën Deux Chevaux. And then, we decided that everything we have in common would be yellow. So that is how it started. It became certain in 1994, when we started our business in Japan.

Eventually, we had a daughter. That was much later, in 2002. And then because everything we share is supposed to be yellow, we made her into yellow. Still now, she loves yellow. Three years later we got a son. We were supposed to make him into yellow as well, but my daughter didn’t like to lose her colour. So she said, let’s give him green. Now we’ve got four colours.

Alice: What were their reactions as they got older? Do your children ever want to change their colours?

Takaharu: I think they’re quite happy about it.

Yui: Yeah. My daughter is quite happy about it. She doesn’t want to wear or have anything except yellow now.  

Takaharu: And my son, he’s still wearing green. He doesn’t hate it. But he’s not as fond of green as my daughter is of yellow. But recently we bought a green suitcase, and he loves it.

Yui: Because my daughter is always wearing yellow, when she was in nursery school another child’s mother started to give me yellow clothes. When the mother bought yellow things to give her son, he didn’t want to wear it because it was the colour of our daughter.

Takaharu: And in class, everything yellow belongs to her. So she always gets a big portion, because many things are yellow. She gets a collection. And no one in the class wants to wear yellow, because it’s her colour.

Yui: It’s quite fun. Each of us having our own colours makes us have some kind of identity. I think it’s good. Makes our life easy and more fun.

Alice: Do you wear these colours head to toe? Or do you mix them with other colours?

Takaharu: Red, blue, red, blue, yellow, green – it doesn’t mean that everything is this colour. Underwear is white. [Laughs]. If everything is blue it becomes crazy!

Alice: Where are each of you from? I read your parents were architects.   

Yui: I grew up next to Tokyo. And my father is an architect, and I grew up in a house which my father designed. I loved that very much. So I began to have interest in architecture. I decided to become an architect when I was sixteen.

Takaharu: I also grew up in Tokyo. And my father is an architect too, but working for big companies. And on both sides, my grandfathers were architects. Mother’s side, he wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to design his headquarters, but actually Frank Lloyd Wright was too old already. So he had to ask his apprentice to design his headquarters. We are very much a designer’s family.

Alice: Do your children want to be architects?

Yui: My daughter used to say she wanted to be an architect but she decided not to become that.

Takaharu: Yes, still!

Yui: Still, yes, there’s still some interest. But now she’s saying she wants to be a graphic designer.

Takaharu: Recently, a few years ago, she won a competition for school emblem. And the emblem is printed onto all kinds of cans, bags, everything. And she says she became proud of her graphic design.

Alice: I’m curious about how you two work together. What’s that process like?

Takaharu: We actually don’t separate projects. We do everything together. And ok, I do understand the structure aspect of architecture more. And I’m very good at drawing and making models. And my wife is very good at precising the models. So I work first, make it, then she comes with the knife and she cuts to the model I designed carefully. She gets a red pen and makes corrections on my drawing. That’s what she’s very good at.

I think it’s quite important to work together. If I’m alone I can’t decide if my design is the objective. But the way we work together we can make sure this is right or not. It’s a natural feeling. And working together helps that understanding.

Alice: Does colour play a role in your designs?

Yui: We don’t use colour for our architecture because… how should I say it? The colour should be added with people.

Takaharu: We consider architecture as a kind of platform or a dish, for a nice cuisine. And if the dish is too colourful the cuisine doesn’t look good. So that’s the background. Architecture is quite the basic, natural colour.

Yui: In our lives, colour comes from us and also some things we pick like sofa and bed and accessories.

Alice: In any of the spaces you designed for others, have the people who inhabit or work in them adopted your philosophy on colour?

Takaharu: There are some families, for instance, one family who is in stripes all the time. But that’s nothing to do with us. They had that sense before they met us. So I don’t think our architecture changed their lifestyle. Our design is not to change, but to enhance their lifestyle. But maybe the stripes did become more consistent, after they met us.

Alice: Can I ask about any favourite coloured objects of yours?

Takaharu: A watch! It’s called a Swatch. I like this watch because it’s so basic.

Yui: I like dry material for T-shirts, that’s easy to clean. This shirt is my favourite. When I order, I order like, thirty or forty shirts of this.

Takaharu: For anything I like, the design must be simple. We say we’re like a dog. He’s always wearing the same thing. And in winter, our fur gets a little longer, so we’re wearing a sweater and jacket. And then we take it off, and inside is always the same as the summer.

Alice: How does a simple lifestyle impact your day-to-day routine? Or translate into other areas of your life or work more generally?

Takaharu: To separate the washing – it’s quite easy!

Yui: I don’t need to worry about what to wear every morning.

Takaharu: And the other thing is that people remember us quite easily. Even at my daughter’s school, they know me by colour. Blue father and red mother. And ok, our daughter is yellow. People want know more.

Takaharu: It’s the same thing as in this interview. People are curious.

Alice: What do you think the relationship is between clothing and architecture in general?

Takaharu: I can’t answer the question really, because architecture is a background. It’s better to be natural. But there’s one thing I can say. Architecture should be simple but at the same time it should be lively. So architecture is not black and white or red, often it’s neutral. The brown is natural. Sunlight coming in is cheerful. And in that way, it’s always written who lives there.

Yui: Our architecture has a kind of openness, to the environment. And to the people inside. All the rooms of the people inside can feel the openness to the people next to them and also to the nature.

Alice: If you didn’t wear blue or red, and you had to pick another colour which one would you pick?

Yui: If I have to quit my red? It’s quite difficult to think about. If I had to quit the red.

Alice: So you can’t think of one?

Yui: No, no.

Takaharu: Same me.

Yui: But when I don’t have the red shirt, when I feel cold, sometimes I wear blue.

Takaharu: I give her a blue sweater sometimes.