Living coral: Pantone's 2019 colour of the year
The colour of the year comes as a huge relief. I might have predicted sewer-water grey or perhaps the livid yellow of the high-visibility vests worn by France’sgilets jaunes movement, a colour that screams distress like an Edvard Munch painting. From a Britain approaching the black hole of no deal Brexit to Malibu’s ashen burntout villas, the hues of these uncanny times must surely be disturbing. Not so, claims Pantone, the authority on colour for the design industry. Today it has announced that the colour of the year for 2019 is a kind of muted terracotta or pastel desert adobe, the sort of tempered earthen tone that might well have graced floors and walls in those Californian homes before they were devastated by November’s wildfires.
Someone has got to be feeling optimistic – and it seems to be the people met and Instagram accounts followed by Pantone, as it strove to determine the world’s chromatic mood. “It represents a feeling that’s out there in the zeitgeist,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. If so, perhaps the world is calmer and happier than we thought; or perhaps in troubled times we crave the reassurance of a colour that is warm, natural and solid.
To suggest that our entire culture can be thinking of the same colour at the same time may seem ludicrous, but Pantone does its research. “We start the year before. We travel all over the world and we talk to people,” says Eiseman. “We look at art exhibits and films and of course fashion. We see a direction ...”
There is, behind the soothing glow, an edge to this colour. Pantone has named it “living coral”, which – by association – conjures images of dead coral, killed by warming seas. “We do have to think about bleaching of coral,” she says. Yet, Eiseman believes that few will see the colour and worry: “There are many more positive reactions than negative reactions.”
Of course, Pantone is hardly going to tell the fashion industry to paint it black, unless black happened to be in that year. And years when black is in are usually good years. In the wealthy Renaissance, when men wore purple hose and pink jerkins, the rich set themselves apart by donning black. This year’s colour tells us what a mess we are in. Stunned by Trump, crushed by the lack of progress on climate change, we dream of bronze horizons, desert hideaway hotels, and unspoiled reefs where fishes happily flit. On the catwalk, similar shades have recently been embraced at Poiret, Temperley London and Elisabetta Franchi. This is
colour that promises paradise. It is a subtle, seductive blend, at once fleshy and ethereal, a colour that Pantone calls “natural” yet which, in reality, is exquisitely refined. It is a colour of escape and safety, a colour you can call home.
Only in times of panic do we crave the eternal splendour that living coral distils. According to Pantone’s research, people see sunsets in it – and what more vacant image is there than a sunset? Like Al Pacino gazing at a tacky tropical billboard as he dies in Carlito’s Way, we crave the reds and oranges of an island evening as the world chokes and burns. Perhaps this is the kind of perfected memory of Earth’s lost colours – and long-gone corals – that will sustain the last space travellers as they search for a new home in remote regions of the galaxy.
I must be in a discounted minority of Pantone’s test subjects. The more I look at this supposedly zen colour, the sadder I feel. I think strident yellow or sickly green might have been more honest and more alive.