White: the defining colour of the 20th century. Alternatively, the colour which, more than any other, has become synonymous with modernism. And now, as the century draws to its close, a colour returned to fashion as though heralding the dawn of the new millennium. White's merits were discovered earlier this decade by design minimalists, for whom it has become something of a symbol. In his 1996 book Minimum - which comes, of course, with a white-on-white slip cover - England's favourite minimalist architect, John Pawson, lauds the perfection of white as revealed by blanc-de-chine porcelain and the 12th-century interior of the Cistercian monastery of Le Thoronet. "The minimum," he writes, "could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction." The same definition might also be applied to white, a colour achieved when all others have been removed.

Pawson's advocacy of white follows that of many other modernist designers. During the 1920s, according to Cecil Beaton, influential decorator Syrie Maugham's "all-white drawing-room in Chelsea became a place of pilgrimage among the intelligensia". For Maugham's generation, white was a reaction to the density and confusion of colour cherished by the late Victorians and Edwardians. The most influential houses built during the early part of this century - Richard Neutra's 1927 Lovell House in Los Angeles, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye of 1929 - are panegyrics to white. So too are the more recent designs of architect Richard Meier including his Getty Museum in California.

The sleek elegance of these structures is echoed elsewhere during the course of the century - in the canvasses of Barnett Newman and Robert Ryman, for example, or the sculptures of Nicholson and Moore. And they found their response in fashion also. In Men in Black published in 1995, John Hervey makes the point that white garments "are clothes for show, and what they show is the possession of a certain status". As the owner of any all-white home can attest, this is a high-maintenance colour - which explains why the craze for Syrie Maugham's style of decoration fell from favour after just a few years. Similarly, until relatively recently white clothing was almost exclusively worn by the wealthy: the further down the social scale, the darker and duller the dress. Just as the first all-white buildings were commissioned by the wealthy, so pure white clothes tended to be the prerogative of those who could afford to pay expensive cleaning bills. This is the white man's real burden.

Many of the greatest modernists in fashion were advocates of white, in particular the Irish couturier Edward Molyneux, who opened his salon in Paris after the first World War. Characterised by their extreme simplicity and absence of unnecessary ornament, Molyneux's clothes were fashion's equivalent of minimalism. The costumes he designed for Gertrude Lawrence to wear in Noel Coward's Private Lives - in particular a steamlined, backless white satin evening dress - sum up the inter-war response to white's possibilities. Thirty years later, in the 1960s, the colour discovered a new vogue thanks to designers such as Courreges, who said of white "It is sun and laughter . . . it's a state of mind."

That state of mind relishes clarity and cleanliness, discourages detail and shuns all fuss. White needs nothing other than itself to make an impact. It is both pure and simple. Two years ago, Philippe Starck announced the future was white. That future has now arrived. White: the colour for the past century and for the present.