Making purple rain money for paint
Zeitgeist is Shade of Grey or Arctic Melt: anything but violet
● The future is “ultra violet”. Or, at least, that is what the Pantone Color Institute has decreed: it is the organisation’s colour of 2018.
The concept of nominating a colour every year “connected with the zeitgeist” was dreamt up by the New Jersey-based manufacturers in 1999, and it has proved to be a jolly good wheeze.
The decision is reached by a secret committee of advisers and consultants “who forecast global colour trends”, and is intended to help brands and businesses “leverage the power, psychology and emotion of colour” in their design strategy. It also helps to shift paint.
Quite how colour can be used to “leverage power” or as a “strategic asset” (which the institute also claims) is unclear. But one assumes the colour of the year is designed to encourage corporate bodies and institutions away from decorative schemes in Death Grey or Boardroom Bland, in favour of jazzier, bolder colours.
Why not bathe your staff in Psychotic Cerulean or Migraine Yellow instead? Because colour is, you know, mood-enhancing and symbolic.
According to Pantone, ultra violet “symbolises experimentation and nonconformity, spurring individuals to imagine their unique mark on the world, and push boundaries through creative outlets”. It should not, of course, be confused with the eerily similar shade Blue Iris, which took the title in 2008.
Since the announcement last week, I’ve received a blizzard of e-mails from public relations companies promoting products in appropriately purple shades. Even Queen Elizabeth II is in on it. Shortly after the committee revealed its choice, she was photographed at a naval ceremony in Portsmouth wearing a vivid ultra-violet coat and hat.
But the Pantone choices are so arbitrary as to be meaningless. Sometimes they even seem cruel. Last year’s selection, Greenery — symbolising “new beginnings” — was announced with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House and his subsequent withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. The year went on to see some of the most violent storms yet recorded and a terrifying California wildfire; it was many things, but green it was not.
Surely, if these people had copped on the zeitgeist, they would have made the colour of 2017 Bully Boy Blue or Netflix Red.
Now we have ultra violet, which seems equally out of touch. It’s the colour of 1970s, hippie-tinged psychedelia. Quite apart from anything else, I hate it. It’s supposed to be deep and mystical — the Pantone people like its “cosmic” overtones — but it makes me think of wizards and wacky shed-dwelling craftspeople and the type of people with gnarly toenails who congregate at sunrise to take part in ancient ceremonies involving runic stones.
Colours do have power. There’s some2014 thing quite magical about seeing a group of sports fans massed on the terraces in their tribal stripes. And one only needed to see the sea of fuchsia pussycat hats at the Women’s Marches all over the world in January to witness the collective power of a single hue.
But the colour of the zeitgeist? It’s probably Space Gray or Aerospace Aluminium — the colours of the iPhone 8. Fashion offers even fewer clues: for spring, the catwalks were a shimmer of silver and sequin, which suggests we’re either off to live on Mars, or hitting the disco.
The only colour that has really emerged as a phenomenon this year is Millennial Pink, a Barbie-lite shade which has become shorthand for a sort of snowflakey femininity, and owes its origins to Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
With this in mind, I’ve had a think about an alternative option that might suffice as a more fitting shade for the future. Maybe Arctic Melt, an ice-cap blue recalling the majesty of a fast-eroding glacier, or Coral Wash, a dazzling white as seen in the last, highly depressing episode of the nature documentary Blue Planet 2. Or what about Lonely, a contemplative shade of grey befitting the UK’s attempt to negotiate its bloody awful Brexit.
Too grim? I offer you Armageddon Sunset; it’s a yellow-white bright, perfect for day rooms, which symbolises power, strength, warmth — and the certainty of human extinction. — © The Financial Times
It spurs individuals to imagine their unique mark on the world Pantone Color Institute US-based paint manufacturer