Sorry Pantone, But In A Year Defined By Orange Dominance, Your White Feels Tone-Deaf

For a company that built its cultural capital on capturing the zeitgeist, Pantone seems oddly out of touch with the moment, or maybe the internet is overthinking, which I don’t reckon it is. What was once a clever PR ritual, one shade to symbolise the year ahead, complete with marketing tie-ins, moodboards, runway citations and brand partnerships, has slowly slipped into something flatter, duller and increasingly disconnected from the visual culture it claims to read. 

Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the 2026 Colour of the Year: Cloud Dancer. A stark, unadorned white, it has already sparked widespread criticism, spawned countless memes, and earned the kind of skeptical side-eye usually reserved for headlines such as “£800 candles to boost your wellness” or “ashwagandha for beauty”.

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Pantone says Cloud Dancer represents “a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world.” The internet says: “Pantonedeaf.” And honestly? The internet may have a point.

Once an Aesthetic North Star, Now a Recession Indicator

For years, Pantone’s Colour of the Year drove conversations in films, fashion, design, interiors, almost functioning like a cultural mood ring. You could catch designers embracing it on the runway, early, and even sceptics acknowledged its soft influence on global taste. But its influence has thinned. Recent selections feel disconnected from real cultural shifts, more like an annual obligation to crown a colour at random. Peach Fuzz, Mocha Mousse, Viva Magenta, each arrived wrapped in lofty descriptions, and each faded without sparking any meaningful visual movement, especially when more culturally resonant hues were overlooked.

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Cloud Dancer takes this disconnect to new heights. As a matter of fact, white is not only technically not a colour, but in a moment marked by global political tension and rising conservatism — the global shift towards anti-DEI sentiment — choosing a white shade is, at best, clueless. At worst, it’s symbolic in ways the brand clearly didn’t anticipate. Even colour analysts have joked that white-as-Colour-of-the-Year feels like a recession announcement: “We can’t afford colour anymore.”

Why This Year’s Choice Feels Especially Tone Deaf

Let’s address the major issue with the symbolism behind the colour, especially for us South Asians. White traditionally signifies purity, calm or simplicity for some, but the roots have a massive elitism connect — historically a colour only wealthy classes could maintain and, in some contexts, oppressive beauty standards. A person on X (Twitter) pointed out: “I know it’s just a colour. But picking white as Colour of the Year when white supremacy is on the rise? Wild.” The timing isn’t subtle, and Pantone’s insistence that “skin tones did not factor into this” only highlights how insulated the selection process may be.

Meanwhile, the Real Colour of the Year Was Everywhere, and It Was Orange

If Pantone’s job is to capture what culture is actually feeling, then they spectacularly missed the memo, because 2025 has belonged to orange. It’s everywhere: from Zendaya’s burnt-orange Louis Vuitton gown at the Golden Globes that reset fashion’s moodboards overnight, to McLaren’s papaya dominance in Formula One, capped by Lando Norris winning this year’s championship and turning everyone’s For You Pages into a rolling reel of orange-tinted edits.

The new iPhone 17 arrived in a punchy orange hue, and retail data across streetwear and runway reported a 50–60% spike in orange purchases. Even pop culture narratives leaned in: Marty Supreme built its entire visual grammar around searing orange, from the film’s title cards to its marketing roll-out; the Life of a Showgirl aesthetic, Y2K revivals, marigold bridal lehengas and saffron street style all pushed the shade from niche to newly aspirational.

In a year when orange was so omnipresent you couldn’t swing a crossbody bag without hitting it, Pantone somehow chose paper white. It’s a bit like naming “silence” the word of the year during a global protest wave. For many consumers, it reads more like: a clean slate for whom?

Is Cloud Dancer Symbolic… or Gaslighting?

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Pantone positions the shade as restorative and meditative. But with political uncertainty across continents, climate anxiety, economic precarity and a global sense of cultural fracture, the idea that white equals serenity feels almost mocking. One viral comment said it best: “Without meaningful change, calling  this colour ‘calm’ feels like aesthetic gaslighting.” And that’s perhaps the real issue: the Colour of the Year is no longer capturing collective emotion, it’s escaping from it.

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