New Yorkers do it. Parisians do it. Fashion types, Swedes and architects do it. In fact, name any stylish tribe and you’ll find that they do it. Wear black, that is – a colour that has come to signify so much: rigour, elegance, sex appeal, piety, formality, slenderness, even wickedness.
Recently, however, black’s supposedly timeless status as the go-to hue for the chic has been thrown into the shade. And maybe that is no bad thing.
Scroll through any British fashion website today and a rainbow of colour beams out. The breadth of shades feels remarkable: Topshop sets out its stall with a parrot-green silk skirt, a lemon coat and an azure trouser suit. At Boden, it’s all tomato-red cardigans and spotty cerise frocks. At Zara, there are russet and emerald tartans and rollneck jumpers in highlighter pen yellow and candy pink.
Yes, Britain is in the midst of a heatwave, but this is no seasonal aberration. For months, the fashion news agenda has been hijacked by colour, seen everywhere from Amal Clooney’s dandelion-yellow royal wedding frock to Janelle Monáe’s so-called “vagina” trousers (pink, of course).
Colour is hot, and the trend forecaster WGSN has the data to prove it. In January, it says, brightly coloured clothes represented a 20.2% share of the UK market, up from 16.7% two years previously. Meanwhile, between April 2017 and April 2018, black fell by 10%. Yellow has performed spectacularly, up 50% year on year. Another retail analyst, Edited, has a different take, but one which is nevertheless telling. Though it reports that the overall ratio of black clothing sold is up, the shade has slipped out of the fashion spotlight, falling by 2% this year within “best-selling products – the stuff that sells out fast”, according to the retail analysis and insights director Katie Smith.
Black is not dead, but Florence Allday, Euromonitor International’s analyst, predicts it will become an “increasingly smaller proportion of retailers’ product offering”, thanks to shifts in our lifestyles. “Now your office can be anywhere, the boundaries between formal/informal, work/home, online/offline are blurring,” she says. “Colour is no longer seen as frivolous, eccentric or inappropriate.”
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