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What's new in summer fashion
Don't just be blue when you could be iris blue. Oh, and marigold yellow and hibiscus red too!
By David Livingstone
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We're not in Kansas anymore: fashion has turned on the technicolour. This season, Dorothy is wearing pink plastic pumps by Joe Fresh Style. Way up high, in the land of lucky sinners known as haute couture, John Galliano sent out the whole spectrum - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - at Dior.
But happy little bluebirds are no longer merely blue; they might be Pantone 18-3943. As the global authority on colour, Pantone has established a specification system that has been widely adapted in the fields of fashion, interior design and graphic design. According to Pantone's logic, irrationality is a colour trend moving in. "After the nu-austerity of grey, it's time for the absurd," they predict. Mark that on your calendar for summer 2009.
Some people might think it's crazy that trends are foretold so far into the future, but that's nothing compared to the load of nonsensical talk that goes on in the name of colour forecasting - a big business supported by the makers of all kinds of products who are willing to pay big bucks for a little guidance.
And there are several organizations that are willing to take the lead. Declaring what's hot for 2008, the Color Marketing Group - an international association of colour-design professionals - lists things that look green "no matter what colour they are," which includes undyed, unbleached off-white. Back at Pantone, they speak in riddles, citing a "modulated group of off-whites" that "represent the dense materiality of prosaic objects" and stem from a desire for "unique uniformity." Oxymoronic, moronic or what?
It could be just a coincidence that the new Ultra Sunlight Extra dishwashing liquid with soy extract seems to be the same pinkish off-white that appeared in Chanel's haute couture collection for spring, but the word "fluke" has no place in the forecaster's vocabulary. The profession makes work of guesswork, sometimes resorting to the most convoluted analysis.
In a recent issue of Textile View - a visually inventive and respected soothsaying journal out of Amsterdam - publisher David Shah discussed the fragmentation of consumer groups and identified 17 different lifestyle stages, including "Skiing, the Pursuit of Happiness Paid for By Spending the Kids' Inheritance" and "Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings (KIPPERS)." Last December, writing about the fetishistic black that was cropping up on spring runways, Shah wondered if it had something to do with "society's moment of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD)" - at which point, you couldn't be blamed for thinking his argument was a moment of old-fashioned BS.
"I don't know," says designer Lida Baday, trying to wrap her head around the idea of KIPPERS. Otherwise, her 20-year career has been marked mostly by certainty. She has never needed anyone to say that minimal is happening - that's just her style.
It's in her heart, so she finds forecasting services generally unnecessary. However, for researching colour, she does subscribe to a couple of them. Even so, while enjoying their anthropology, Baday doesn't rely on them for specific direction.
Click here to read more!
Related articles:
Simply chic: Grey updates your urban look
Spring trends: How to get the look for less
How to dress a petite frame
Image courtesy of Marcio Madeira
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