Gallery: women in red

WHETHER OUT ON THE ICE OR ON A SKI SLOPE, IT’S HARD TO IGNORE A LADY IN RED. FRANCES AMBLER AGREES, WITH HER PICK OF WORKS THAT CAPTURE THE WINTER SPORTING SEASON

The colour red, as everyone knows, draws attention. I started my Instagram project @womeninredinart for fun last year, when I noticed that I’d unconsciously saved a disproportionate amount of artworks that featured women dressed in red. Since then, I’ve shared hundreds more through my account: women wearing red doing their hair, sleeping, shopping, painting, all united by a simple splash of red. But one of my favourite uses of the colour is when you see it against the crisp whiteness of snow and ice. This selection of women in red are all partaking in winter sports, images drawn from adverts, prints and fine art. However, it’s not just the considerable pleasure of looking at the images themselves that I enjoy – it’s also what else the image tells us. You start to notice micro-trends in fashion and in fashionable activities. Like today, the artists are drawn to what’s new and exciting, the things that define their time. In this selection, you can see how sports such as skiing and skating shift from being things done for necessity into being things done for fun. So, you get the likes of Pierre Bonnard observing the fashionable couples at the newly opened artificial ice rinks in late 19th-century Paris; or Tatler showing the new, then somewhat shocking, trend of trousers for women, on the ski slopes in the 1920s. Although we might think of winter sports as timeless and unchanging, these images show they are anything but – although it seems there will always be space for a woman in red.