Pantone's Colour of the Year 2024 is a soporific lulling of a globally grim mood
“Nurturing, velvety, gentle, heartfelt, tender, tactile, youthful”.
All words – wonderfully soothing ones – Pantone are using to describe their 2024 colour of the year, Peach Fuzz.
For those not familiar with the ritual, in early December each year Pantone, a colour specialist firm headquartered in New Jersey, select a shade (or, occasionally, a pair of them) that they feel will best represent the global mood over the next twelve months.
Last year the Pantone Colour of the Year was “brave and fearless” Viva Magenta, the year before “warm and friendly” Very Peri (a periwinkle bluish violet).
It’s something they’ve been doing since 1999, when cerulean was dubbed the colour of the millennium.
To me, Peach Fuzz recalls the work of the pioneering American cartoonist Rosie O’Neill.
Sometime in the early 1900s, the lone woman on the staff of Puck magazine began doodling a series of gambolling, cherubic little creatures rendered in shades of apricot, peachy pink and pale bisque with plump little bellies and heads shaped like radishes.
These sprites – Kewpies – would become both cultural icons and a marketing juggernaut that would hold sway globally over three decades.
"With so much death, destruction and uncertainty, it’s no wonder people developed a taste for an imaginary world"
It’s not difficult to understand the appeal Kewpies had for audiences between 1909 and the 1930s: these were turbulent times, riven by one world war and the build up to another, the Great influenza epidemic that killed at least 17 million people worldwide and very likely more, and the Great Depression.
With so much death, destruction and uncertainty, it’s no wonder people developed a taste for an imaginary world that embodied innocence and simplicity.
Sound familiar? We’ve all been through it recently, and sometimes it feels a little like the punches just keep on coming.
It’s hard not to feel as if the global public mood has become stuck at “grim”.
Read this way, Peach Fuzz makes sense: it’s an escapist haven of a hue.
It’s hard not to resist it’s soft, romantic aura: think Edwardian peignoirs, the golden-hour glow of 1920s travel posters, or the satin gowns and powder puffs of Hollywood starlets.
I’ve even got a set of my mother’s towels in a cupboard upstairs in precisely this hue, the edges scalloped and embroidered with bows: they’re slightly worn but I can’t bear to throw them away.
Just looking at them takes me back to be snugly wrapped up after an evening bath.
On the other hand, this soporific lulling effect also makes Peach Fuzz a miss for me.
Oh, I don’t doubt it will do well commercially, but it feels more like an antidote to the global mood than a reflection of it.
After all, 2024 is unlikely to allows us either much relief or opportunities for indulgent nostalgia.
America’s election will dominate the news, but that will only be one of 70 elections affecting around 4.2 billion people taking place next year (the British might even be among them).
Hand me a peach fuzz onesie and one of those old towels, I might just press the snooze button on the year.