This is a quick writeup about a half-forgotten urban legend I heard, just because it wasn't trivial for me to find information about it on the internet.
YAPC::Europe is a series of yearly perl conferences. An auction was held on these conferences to decide the color of the official shirt of the next conference. This was already a thing in 2001, though it's unclear to me if only the organizers wear those shirts or they're sold to any attendee.
In the 2004 conference, BooK decided to bid for “fishnet” as the shirt color. He referes to this as “the famous ‘fishnet incident’” in his homenode. This may have been backed up by other people in the French perl monger community, and the bid may have been for orange fishnet specifically. (Update: archive.org has a copy of the blog entry pointed from BooK's homenode “Fishnet -- It's all my fault”. That one gives some more info, and it mentions “blue hair dye” as a “saner” color that he could have went chosen.)
As a compromise, the organizers wore black fishnets over an orange shirt in YAPC::Europe 2005.
I didn't come up with the slogan “fishnet is not a color”, I must have heard it somewhere, but I can't find any references to it on the internet.
