Welcome to 2012: The year of Tangerine Tango. Or so says Pantone, who has been releasing a “color of the year” since 2000. According to Pantone, Tangerine Tango “provides the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward”.
Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, elaborates: “Sophisticated…dramatic and seductive, Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it. Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, (it) marries the vivaciousness of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy.”
For seasoned color watchers, the revelation of the color of the year is as suspenseful as finding out who won the Oscar for Best Picture in, say, 2009. After all, Pantone does not select a color at random. Instead, they hone in on the trendiest color — a color whose ascendance began long before Pantone’s coronation.
Indeed, tangerine first began showing up on fashion runways, ultimately becoming a major story during Fahion Week 2011 (Spring 2012 preview shows). The shade was especially prevalent in the Tommy Hilfiger, Elie Tahari, Adreinne Vittadini and Shaun Kearney collections. Cosmetics followed suit, and soon interior designers began incorporating the color to provide high-impact moments of color in otherwise uniform spaces, or bursts of energy in unexpected places.
Because we deal with clients who need to be ahead of the color curve, color trends are something we follow habitually. In fact, we often work on projects that require us to project what trends will ignite a year or two in the future, when a product in development will first hit the shelves, or a store in the conceptual phase will first open its doors. So we are old friends with Tangerine Tango and its ilk.
But even if the announcement from Pantone does not inform our current slate of projects, the color of the year remains relevant for a number of reasons. First, it is the go-to color for items with limited shelf life: trendy clothes, throw pillows, party decor and, perhaps, brand identities for macaroon shops. Likewise, the color will continue to trickle down to the mass market, meaning 2013 will see it’s share of Tangerine Tango on a wide array of goods.
So while designers are at work creating the next trend, for all you whose favorite crayon has always been “red orange”: Your time has come.
