The Wonderful World of Color

A prime example can be seen with the emergence of global warming on the national agenda. This time last year, environmental sustainability took center stage with the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. CMG forecasted that green and other earth-tone colors would be prevalent in 2007. The ‘prediction’ could not have been more accurate. For the first time ever, Hollywood A-listers arrived at February’s Oscars’ in “green” automobiles—hybrid vehicles touting their energy efficiency and low pollutant status. “[CMG] members have found they can often identify the ‘new hot colors’ in advance by reading the important influences we identify,” noted Bredenfoerder. “What did we see at the Oscars? Quieter, neutral colors and a marked presence of greens and blues.” Is it all starting to make sense now?

What’s Hot

It is important to note CMG’s forecasts are “color directions not directives,” stressed Bredenfoerder. “We do not claim to dictate; we do our best to identify the major influences and how they might translate into new, stable color directions.”

Back to this year’s colors: greens, browns and neutrals have made themselves household names. Bredenfoerder provided nothing short of a collage of colorful quotes from what some of fashion and design’s top brass are saying about the colors’ emergence on the scene:

“The prevalence of green, from sportswear to dressier looks, is an ongoing phenomenon, showing renewed respect for green that speaks to preservation of the environment,” noted Leatrice Eiseman, director of The Pantone Color Institute, at last September’s New York Fashion Week.

After green, consumers should be getting down with brown.

“The big news in color is brown. Yes, people, brown is the new black. Paired with baby pink and blue, rich jewel colors, or black and metallics, brown is really happening,” noted Nancy Bernard of Step Inside Design Magazine.