what does orange symbolise in clothing

basically im curious about colour conventions in japan, i was told purple is the colour of death, hence why the anime character evangelion unit 1 is purple. And red is the colour of life. is his al lies? is there a site with a list of japanese colour conventions?

if so i appreciate any help you can give in advance.

I think that regarding purlpe as a colour of death is not Japanse custom but Western one. In Japan (most of East Asian countries as well) purple means 'magestic' traditionally. So Eva-1 was coloured in purple because the story was bible oriented; not Japanese traditon oriented. I guess Mr. Anno, the creator of Eva, had a sort of prejudise that purple reminds people "death" in biblical sense; though we Japanese don't have such image traditionally.
Meanwhile young Japanese may have a image like that: purple = traditional = old = death.


I hope it will help you somehow.

in the uk purple is the royal colour

I would also be interested in what orange indicates. In China we wore orange tee shirts and got a lot of people laughing and pointing at us as we walked around.

Purple is a "Royal/majestic" color in many countries simply because of the fact that it was very expensive and difficult to produce(made from crushed lice of a very specific species, I don�Lt know the exact details). Thus none but royalty or high nobility could afford to wear which makes it a symbol of status in the very classical sense.

I cannot answer the question with orange though.

I also do not know about orange in China, but in the US, jail uniforms are often orange. (So if you go to visit someone in jail better not wear your orange t-shirt if you want to get out!)

Sometimes in China litterbugs (people caught littering) are made to sweep the roads in bright orange clothes, it's meant to deter potential litterbugs. Maybe that's why you were stared at lol. Not sure about Japan though, I'm guessing mainstream Japanese don't wear anything besides black, white, blue and grey?

For business attire the colours you mention are common, and older men will also stick to these colours for casual wear generally. Young people and women dress in all kinds of colours though, pretty much the same as in western countries.