I am usually fairly relaxed about the pre-Christmas announcement of Pantone's colour of the year. Mediocre, to be precise – especially when the subtext is: this is what we will be wearing next year. Because the days when fashion designers, boutiques and glossy magazines dictated what was ‘in’ each spring and autumn are long gone. With the advent of social media, fast fashion and a seemingly endless number of micro-trends, this system has dissolved. It used to be different: there were two seasons and clear visual codes. And if you wore flared trousers in 1974 or had at least one neon-coloured item in your wardrobe in 1982, it wasn't because of an individual style choice, but because you could hardly avoid it in the shops. Trends were visible, tangible – and above all collective. That was called fashion.
Pantone, on the other hand, was not originally a trend forecaster, but rather a colour standard for printers, designers and graphic artists. While every colour print is mixed from the four colours cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), Pantone colours with clearly defined colour codes ensure that the blue in the logo on the letterhead looks exactly the same as on the ballpoint pen that you want to distribute as a promotional item. Pantone continues to fulfil this function today. But at the same time, something has shifted. Since the introduction of the ‘Pantone Colour of the Year’ in 1999, colour has become more than just a reference; it has become a narrative. Every year, a new shade is chosen, imbued with meanings, moods and social diagnoses. Colours are suddenly supposed to explain how we feel, think and live – or how we should live. Pantone has thus long been more than just a colour system. It has become a cultural instrument, a seismograph for moods, but also an extremely effective marketing tool. Hardly any other institution manages to charge abstract colour tones in this way and at the same time disseminate them on a massive scale – as a global talking piece that can be followed with interest, viewed with scepticism or simply ignored.
Pantone 11-4201 Cloud Dancer fits strikingly well into this logic. It is not a brilliant white, not a cool promise of purity and certainly not a fashionable effect tone, but a muted, soothing off-white. Some reactions were accordingly: boring and sterile, to the objection that a simple ‘white’ does not deserve the status of a trend colour and, on closer inspection, is not even a colour at all. Pantone, on the other hand, describes Cloud Dancer as a symbol of a society rediscovering the value of quiet contemplation – a formulation that can be read as melodious trend rhetoric, but which also strikes a chord. In an age characterised by loud images, simple truths and increasingly authoritarian gestures, this white seems like a conscious counter-concept: not as an escape, but as a rejection of constant noise. After years of visual overstimulation, permanent visibility and noisy positioning, Cloud Dancer focuses on restraint rather than exaggeration. It doesn't want to prove anything, dominate anything, occupy anything. It doesn't put a full stop, but a semicolon. And I like that.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Cloud Dancer is so easy to imagine in olfactory terms. Not as a fresh, clean white, but as a soft, creamy off-white. A softly nuanced state between skin, fabric and silence. In the world of fragrances, this attitude is not expressed through clear, radiant brightness, but through musky, milky or powdery textures. Through compositions that do not create distance, but allow closeness without imposing themselves. Fragrances that are not statements, that do not seek to explain or prove anything. They remain close to the body, are sometimes almost inconspicuous, and unfold their effect precisely through their restraint. Like Cloud Dancer itself, for me they are not a stylistic statement, but a state of being. A form of subtle attention: quiet, alert, unexcited. Calmness not as a retreat, but as a conscious decision against noise – and thus possibly the most radical form of style today.
