The Thrill of the Crayon Box

The Pantone colour of the year was announced.  Honeysuckle is the shade for 2011.

pic from ApartmentTherapy.com



It's like a reddish-pink that I would group as a relative of the coral family, which my friend Natasha recently informed me is one of the most flattering shades for people in general, as in blondes and brunettes alike (and a host of people with other colourings) can pull it off.

If you got to Apartment Therapy you can read the full post with more pictures, but I copied part of the rationale over here for you...

...Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues. Honeysuckle derives its positive qualities from a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum.

I can dig it.

Every year, when I see the Pantone colour announced, I realize that I have been seeing this trend popping up sporadically on blogs for a while.  It sort of builds slowly and once it's announced the design bloggers go nuts.  Being on trend with colours might be a quixotic pursuit, and sort of futile, but I can't help feeling like colours are still fun.  The thrill of the crayon box in adult form.

I can't think of colour trends without thinking of the scene from "The Devil Wears Prada" where Meryl Streep's character bashes Anne Hathaway's character's cerulean blue sweater.

You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

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? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, 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.

And of course, I can't think of the colour cerulean without thinking of April from Gilmore Girls, who we love to hate, and who loves the colour cerulean.