Color of the year?
When Pantone chooses a color of the year, something I didn’t know happened until moments before writing this, they’re doing something much more complicated than simply choosing a color that they believe will suddenly pop up everywhere. While unfortunately the Pantone Color Institute is peddled at large as the McKinsey of the color consulting world(not a big world), I believe its real intention, or its desired function rather, is to be a catalyst for thought and creative play within the “color community”. They themselves describe the Color of the Year program as a way of “[engaging] the design community and color enthusiasts in a conversation around color, highlighting the relationship between color and culture”. Sweet no? Well-intentioned, erudite, and what I would like to believe is a cohort of artistic individuals who operate inside a business in an academic and intellectual capacity.
Winter 2024 Chloe runway
With the freedom and resources to play comes to requirement to act as a brand consultant of sorts, but I would like to believe these are people creating content for a well-informed, sophisticated audience. However, much like with all other good things, when found by the greedy, infantile hordes of content-hungry “influencers” this delicate and context-dependent idea was carelessly mangled and is currently being prostituted out in seconds-long parcels for consumption and further dilution. Watch as someone with nauseatingly little knowledge on a topic offers an astoundingly un-nuanced opinion that lacks even a modicum of substance beyond meeting the VERY low bar for constituting productive language. And while this may seem like a departure from my normal talk of fashion, in reality it isn’t.
As I’ve said before, and will say again, you can’t boil things like fashion down to singularities. We no longer have year-long trends, what’s here today is gone today! This is not meant to be a knock on Pantone, they never set out to give definitive, analytical(pejorative) answers to the question of what colors will trend in fashion and styling this year (so help me god don’t let me find out I’m wrong about this). They set out to ignite conversation and creative dialogue by thoughtfully presenting a color they believed represented and captured a crystallized image of culture heading into the new year.
We need to stop with trends, we need to stop taking novel ideas and beating them to death, and we need to look outside of fashion for inspiration in fashion. Look away from trends to be creative, walk away from styling hacks to style yourself, etc.. Wear whatever fucking color you want, just make sure it’s what YOU want.
