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In 2020, Pantone’s choice of color of the year, Classic Blue, proved eerily prescient. Announced weeks before the first Covid-19 cluster was discovered, it’s a shade used for medical scrubs around the world.
Perhaps knowing that lightning strikes are unlikely to strike twice, by 2021 the team of trend forecasters at the American paint brand has selected two shades, Ultimate Gray and Illuminating, the second time they have done so in the two-decade history of the paint. Color of the Year.
Used by fashion, graphic and interior designers, the Pantone Institute’s color matching services are a resource for predicting palettes that might be popular with consumers. Their color choices of the year are often controversial.
This year, the combination has been compared to the shades of high-visibility vests, road markings and “Screams of sick urban melancholy, a brutalist facade, cold sun and concrete”. Vogue simply described it as “really weird.”
Pantone says its picks this year are “a message of happiness backed by strength.” But darker readings for Ultimate Gray, a pale dove shade that compares to “beach pebbles and natural elements” aren’t hard to come by. The sweatpants that we all wear every morning; the uniformity of the days that are confused with each other; vinyl floors in an ICU ward.
His second Illuminating option is a buttercup yellow, which Pantone describes as “bright and cheerful”; “Shining brightly” and “infused with solar energy.” It is the first time in more than a decade that a yellow shade has been chosen. In 2009, when they selected a warmer yellow, Mimosa, they said that “no other color expresses more hope and reassurance than yellow.” A lot may have changed in 10 years, but it seems that Pantone’s rendering of yellow hasn’t.
Speaking to Vogue, Pantone trend forecasters explained that they selected two colors because “it became clear that there was never going to be one color that could express everything that needed to be expressed, that it was instead critical to have two independent colors that could come together. “.
In 2016, when they selected Rose Quartz, a shade that became better known as Millennial Pink; Along with a soft blue Serenity, the dual option represented “wellness” and “movements toward gender equality and fluidity.”
Pantone’s Color of the Year choices often make a social statement: the climate crisis was a clear starting point for the 2019 Living Coral pick and 2017’s Greenery shade. In September this year, the paint brand too released a vibrant shade of period red in an attempt to end the stigmas around menstruation.
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