Does the Colour Of The Year actually matter in multi-hued India?
Do you follow or throw shade at the Colour Of The Year? Design experts weigh in on whether the global craze for new palettes matters in India
Don’t be fooled by those pastel-wedding Reels. Under the veil, India remains polychromatic and proud. Peach Fuzz is the Pantone Color Insitute’s Color of the Year. Four months into 2024, does Fuzz even matter? See how India’s design industry is adopting and abandoning global colour obsessions.
“Colour trends are more closely followed by global brands such as Ikea, Miniso or Muji,” says Sajid Moinuddin, co-founder and creative director of Mumbai-based HB Design. In 2019, the firm incorporated coral, Pantone’s colour of that year, into a project for an Indian women’s-health startup. But by and large, Moinuddin says that colour forecasts are not always relevant for India. They stump individuality.
Shubhra Chadda, co-founder of home décor and fashion brand Chumbak, also serves as director of the brand’s product and design. She finds that annual colour forecasts are helpful for business. “We pay keen attention to them as they are often aligned with popular design trends and reflect what consumers prefer,” she says. So, Peach Fuzz dominates the brand’s current dinnerware and accessories range. “While we are deeply rooted in Indian traditions and aesthetics, we want to stay relevant globally,” she says. “So, it’s crucial for us to track Pantone’s insights.”
Zoom out of the homeware market and the palette gets more vibrant. Kaustav Sengupta, director of insights at VisioNxt at National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), spends much of the year collaborating with creative types on what the hues of the coming year will be. He also works with Nippon Paints’ Indian team on Nippon Colour Vision24x25 – a zonal colour forecast for India. It’s not a random selection. “Colour doesn’t exist by itself,” he points out. “If I say ‘purple’, you will have to think of it with its natural associations.” It’s what makes Peach Fuzz, warm, inviting, passive, easier to sell for a few months than every colour all the time.
Sengupta says it’s easier to develop a colour story or a palette than a single colour in the creative business. “In India, our preferences change every 300 miles. So, there can be no single notion of colour – there are nuances and this must be recognised,” he says. He admits that convincing the Japanese brand to understand the Indian context took time but they did finally come around.
Some colours effortlessly connect with a generation. Think of Millennial Pink, that soft ashy rose that dominated in the previous decade and is nowhere to be seen at the moment. Could one imagine Barbie’s world without its signature bubblebum pink? What about marsala, a maroonish hue that had a brief moment in fashion and vanished? Pantone has been selecting colours of the year for only 25 years, but it’s own processes are now being criticised for their lack of transparency. When they chose a warm, verdant shade called Greenery in 2017, swerving from the global preference for softer colours, design critics alleged that they’d been paid off by Android, which uses a similar colour in its branding.
Late last year, when Peach Fuzz was announced, news emerged that a suspiciously high number of brands (including Polaroid, a toothbrush company, a cosmetic line, and even a tea manufacturer) had already paid Pantone to use the colour. The insinuation was that the “much research and consideration” that the company says it puts into picking colours every year may be a bit tainted.
Much of India, thankfully, doesn’t care about what the self-appointed colour authority predicts. We’ll pair age-old indigo with Gen Z yellow. For us, gold is a goes-with-everything neutral shade. We love pastel wedding-wear but we haven’t given up deep peacocks and reds. A colour of the year is just one more filter to keep in or leave out while shopping.
