Word: colorism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Meeting participants "come in with gadgets and toys, strange things like mirrors, records, their own color palettes and mood boards," says David Shah, a Holland-based publisher of color and textile magazines who runs the Pantone gatherings. "I've seen people get hysterical with each other over the minutest difference in hue, something where nobody's going to know the difference." He adds, "Color's a complicated business...
Even antipurple people have gotten sucked in by the color's zeitgeistiness. "I always hated purple, and I hated people who were into purple," says Manhattan-based designer Thakoon Panichgul, a favorite of Michelle Obama's who in December will launch a collection at Target. "But it has an element of angst that I gravitated to this season...
...Color has long functioned as a cultural mood ring. There was the rainbow cacophony that defined the free-love, footloose '60s and the avocados and vegetal yellows of the '70s, which style experts attribute to environmental empathy spawned by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Precisely how these trends catch on has always been hazy; the trail of bread crumbs is typically detectable only in hindsight. But there's big business in forecasting the color of the moment. A DuPont survey found that 39% of prospective car buyers would buy a completely different brand if unable to obtain their color preference...
Twice a year, Pantone holds a closed-door, highly secretive meeting in Europe, where the world's top cultural anthropologists, color psychologists--yes, such an occupation exists--and designers from the fashion, automotive and other industries share their highly attuned thoughts on color. Their semiannual consensus, one palette for spring and one for fall, is sold in bound copies by the hundreds for $750 a pop to companies ranging from Pottery Barn and KitchenAid to Ford...
...purple may be one of the most complicated colors. It traces its roots back to kings and cardinals, in the days when thousands of mollusks had to be crushed to make a single drop of purple dye, a process only those with servants could afford. Douglas Lloyd of Lloyd & Co., the New York City design firm that recently created a violet-hued ad campaign for Estée Lauder's fragrance Sensuous, says he chose the color for its "royal connotations, a richness that conjures the idea of religion and incense." But, he says...