Color of the Year

Do you all follow the seasonal Pantone color forecast? I always forget it even exists until it pops up in my reader or something (as it did yesterday, thanks to The Mahogany Stylist!). Did you know the color of the year is Honeysuckle? (Not exactly breaking news; it was announced in December--before the year even began.) Also, did you know that in the Pantone universe, honeysuckle is a "festive reddish pink"? Very surprising. When I was little, we lived in Michigan for several years and I loved the honeysuckle, which was white and yellow. You could peel back the stamen of the flower and get a tiny, delicious drop of sweet golden yellow nectar. I think I would have loved it even more if it were pink!

Anyway, I love Pantone's honeysuckle color. It's such a pretty coral pink color that I would adore to incorporate into my wardrobe a bit more this spring.

I'm also loving lavender for spring (I've been wearing my new J. Crew cardi in orchid almost every other day) and what do you know? Pantone predicted that I would like that too. Here is their color forecast for spring, released months and months ago.

And here's fall 2011 already! It's just been released in conjunction with Fashion Week, along with coordinated sketches from major designers.

Which kind of makes you wonder: did Betsey Johnson (for instance) agree to use Honeysuckle in both her collections this year? Did she agree to that sometime in early 2010? Is this some kind of color conspiracy?

Which all means, of course, that we must end with a quote from The Devil Wears Prada:

But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? . . . And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.

P.S. Did you know that Pantone announced Cerulean as the color of the current millenium in 1999? The conspiracy grows!