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November 2026

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Is coloured fabric back?

Pantone chose white for 2026, while the new season's runways turned to soft, natural tones. What do the two signals tell us?

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On 4 December 2025, Pantone announced its colour of the year for 2026: Cloud Dancer, code 11-4201. It was a white. It was the first time a white had been chosen in the Color of the Year programme the company started in 1999. Pantone described the colour as a soft, balanced white that brings calm.

The two people explaining the reasoning pointed in the same direction. Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said the noise around us has become overwhelming and that it is harder for people to hear their own inner voice. Laurie Pressman, the institute's vice president, saw the colour as a symbol of the search for balance between a digital future and the need for human contact.

Representative image.

It is an odd starting point for the question in the headline: what the institution recommends for 2026 is calm, not colour exuberance. Still, on the fashion side there is a different picture.

Pantone also announced that during 2026 it would start an initiative in which artists take on this colour with their own interpretations. The first step was a limited-edition tote bag designed by illustrator Emiliano Ponzi.

The new season's palette

For the spring-summer 2027 season, Pantone published a colour report based on New York Fashion Week. According to FashionUnited, the report contains ten colours and five seasonless neutrals. In Pantone's own names, the ten colours are: Anise Flower, Princess Blue, Waterfall, Langoustino, Chili Pepper, Rosy Future, Dragon Fire, Daiquiri Green, Hibiscus and Lavender Oil. The neutrals are Antique White, Tarragon, Arrowwood, Blue Indigo and Dolphin. Eiseman described what the palette has in common as a sense of joy combined with a wish to connect with nature.

A separate FashionUnited piece summarising four fashion weeks also points to soft tones: butter yellow, lavender and sage green. The piece's author, Pascal K. Douglas, calls this palette the 'ASMR palette' and claims these colours are soothing. This should be read as an opinion; the piece has no measurement to support it.

The same piece has concrete examples too. Dries Van Noten, Ester Manas and Gundi Studios are mentioned with tones associated with nature. Diesel showed a mint green skirt with a candy pink jacket. Bottega Veneta sent out light yellow pleated trousers with a bright pink blouse with a ruffled collar. In the collections of Victoria Beckham, Icicle and Ashley Williams, shirts with shoulders in colours from light blue to yellow and baby pink stand out.

Colour has shaken fashion before

Colour's entry into fabric was always tied to a technical advance too. In 1856, 18-year-old William Henry Perkin, while trying to make the malaria drug quinine artificially, unexpectedly found a purple dye. The residue of an experiment he thought had failed gave a purple solution. Perkin patented the dye and the following year set up a dyeworks in Greenford and moved to mass production. This is regarded as the beginning of the synthetic dye industry.

This purple-lilac colour, mauve, became a fashion craze between 1859 and 1861. A magazine of the time wrote that women in coloured dresses flocked to the countryside like spring birds; Punch magazine mocked the craze as 'Mauve Measles'. By 1870, new synthetic colours had overtaken demand for mauve.

The lesson is simple: demand for colour is fed by both technology and the mood of the time, and it changes fast. Mauve quickly became a craze and just as quickly gave way to new ones. The same question should be asked of today's soft palette: is it a one-season trend, or a longer direction?

What should we look at before saying 'it's back'?

We have two signals, and they seem to point in different directions. Pantone welcomed 2026 with white; the runways showed a wide range for summer 2027, from pastels to saturated red. What they have in common is that soft, nature-like tones stand out, not bright and loud ones.

But none of this is sales data. Pantone's report is an institution's forecast, and the runway examples are the brands' own choices. So the sentence 'coloured fabric is back' flattens the reality a little too much. A more accurate statement might be: in the spring-summer 2027 collections, soft, nature-inspired colours clearly feature. Whether customers will actually buy them will only show in store data over the coming months.

For a small producer the conclusion is this: a colour forecast shows a direction, it does not make the decision. The fact that Pantone's report also includes five seasonless neutrals is a reminder of that. Whatever the trend, some colours appear in every collection.

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