by Angela Fiore
Do we have to talk about Pantone’s color of the year choice for 2026? Yes, we do. Or rather, we don’t have to, I want to. Pantone, aka one of the blandest companies in the history of beige culture, that so far had managed to fly under the radar through a time of major stand-taking on fundamental issues, has unexpectedly rattled more than a few cages by doing the exact same thing it has done over the past two years: being boring and unimaginative. The color authority’s 2026 selection, Cloud Dancer, a shade of cold white that official imagery and repost embody through painfully unoriginal pictures of fabrics and – you guessed – clouds made social commentators and interior designers the world over flip tables, slam fists and declare themselves done with the whole trend-setting bs.
I called their choice unimaginative just now: it is worth mentioning that imagination plays no role in the determination of what Pantone’s color of the year ends up being, nor should it. In their own words, “The Pantone Color of the Year selection process requires thoughtful consideration and trend analysis. To arrive at the selection each year, Pantone’s color experts at the Pantone Color Institute™ comb the world looking for new color influences. These can include the entertainment industry and films in production, traveling art collections and new artists, fashion, all areas of design, popular travel destinations, as well as new lifestyles, play styles, and socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures, and effects that impact color, relevant social media platforms and even upcoming sporting events that capture worldwide attention”. This was posted on the brand’s website in 2022 and they go on to say that, for over two decades, “Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design.”
Cloud dancer – Pantone’s first-ever white choice – was apparently chosen as an emblem of “calm” and “quiet reflection” and it managed to triggered the exact opposite: fury, suspicion, and a wholesale rejection from design communities worldwide. The timing couldn’t have felt more loaded. Many critics saw the choice of Cloud Dancer as either tone-deaf or biased.
Disclaimer: in this piece I will quote creators, designers and commentators who have shared specific positions on this topic. I am well aware that they are neither the only ones who engaged in discussion about it nor the only ones to have shared the specific views that I am attributing to them. They are, however, those whose reasoning has struck me the most. And they also are especially prominent in my bubble, while they might not be in yours. I will use this opportunity to boost smaller creators and entrepreneurs who I think make excellent points. And yes, I have my take on it and no, it is not particularly original, but nothing has been truly original since Hegel, so manage your expectations. Ok? Ok. Here we go.
The dog whistle debate: theories on the “whitewash”
1. Cloud Dancer, Pantone’s 2026 color of the year, is a white supremacist dogwhistle
Three interpretations have crystallised around this controversy, each more damning than the last.
First, the harshest accusation: Cloud Dancer functions as deliberate white supremacist dogwhistle, to the extent that some people are calling it “Klan-Robe-White“. The point of dogwhistles is, of course, plausible deniability. The accusations follow the same line as those directed at the American Eagle campaign featuring Sidney Sweeney’s “good jeans”, even though, it must be said, American Eagle was not being particularly subtle about it, whereas Pantone has not directly linked its chosen white hue to the concept of skin tone. Quite the contrary: Pantone’s president Sky Kelly, who is a woman of colour, came out to defend the brand’s decision, assuring the public that they do not aim to drive conversations on the value of colour, they aim at facilitating them.
A vast crowd of social media users, creators, designers, and commentators, however, are not having it. At a time when white supremacy is in the news everyday in most of what is traditionally considered “the West” (meaning mostly the United States and Europe), with an increasing number of political figures saying the quiet part out loud and being vocal about their racist views, can Pantone’s choice really be considered non political? Many argue it can’t (among the people I have heard making good points about this are social commentator Brenna Pérez and jewellery entrepreneur Kaelen Van Cura, but even Glamour Magazine had to at least acknowledge the debate). And while it may be true that Pantone does not create the conversation on the social relevance of colour, it is also true that the moment Pantone’s color of the year is announced is also the only time the whole discourse on the social and political power of colour and its intentional use breaks out of the restricted circle of politicised designers and design-oriented political commentators and the rest of the world chimes in.
It is objectively impossible to believe that any team of creatives, communicators, marketers, researchers or even semi-sentient and partially-literate corporate droids may have dropped a shade of white that looks like unseasoned boiled chicken as “color of the year” and had no thoughts whatsoever about what kind of controversy that could spark. This thesis argues that, after years of companies scrambling to appear to be inclusive, diverse, liberal, and as left-leaning as it was reasonably possible without giving up the means of production, most brands have now realised that there is money to be made by riding the conservative wave and that, to put it bluntly, fascists, christian nationalists, white supremacists, and trad-wives are a more lucrative niche to tap into than the anti-capitalist, non-white, queer left. The conversation on this particular theory comprises commentators arguing that it is not that deep, creators saying that it absolutely is that deep, and Pantone saying that it is that deep, but not down that particular rabbit hole.
2. Pantone is not being actively racist, it’s just registering how racist we are
Second, Pantone as capitalist barometer. Corporations don’t create zeitgeist, they track it, bottle it, and sell it back to consumers, which is, more or less, what Kelly said. If white supremacy trends upward in the cultural consciousness, Pantone notes the data and follows the money. Not out of ideology, but in a completely amoral way.
However, registering trends is not what Pantone is or aspires to be famous for. They are supposed to be leaders. They are not supposed to acquire data on the colours that are used the most in a swath of industries and regurgitate them in the form of a usable RGB code. That’s what you expect of statisticians working for public institutions or universities, not from a company whose bread and butter is colour and its uses in all things design.
And yet, are they relevant? Colombian design-focussed content creator Esteban Gómez makes an excellent point in that regard. They are not. Their colours for 2024 and 2025 were respectively mocha mousse (a rich milk-chocolatey brown) and peach fuzz (exactly what you would expect from a colour called “peach fuzz”) and yet: have you seen anything of significance done with these colours over the last two years? Absolutely not, because Pantone stopped being actually relevant decades ago, but we are collectively pretending otherwise because we need content. With his characteristic deadpan tone, Gómez argues that, at a time when everything is catching on fire, Pantone went for the colour of surrender, a colour that makes no statements, that does not make anyone uncomfortable (debatable) and that reinforces a tendency toward minimalism that has had him and many other design professionals and enthusiasts sigh in frustration for a few years now.
3. Recession? What recession?
Third, a few commentators have connected white (sorry, “Cloud Dancer”) to recession aesthetics. White is supposed to signal austerity. According to this line of reasoning, if Pantone truly “registered” a shift towards whiteness (in either sense), this could be because garment and objects are being produced in white or, at any rate, in more neutral, basic palettes because saving on pigment and colouring processes saves money in times of economic contraction. Some described the color’s “lack of color” as a “recession indicator“, suggesting that when coffers empty out, so do color palettes.
And yet, many have pointed out, this is absolutely not the case. If you look at former periods of recession, from the Great Depression to early post-war Europe, white is most definitely not the first colour that jumps out at you, for a number of reasons.
First of all, white is not a colour that textiles or other materials used to make everyday objects come in naturally: it is a dye. Clothes have to be dyed white, furniture, appliances, buildings, and tools have to be painted white. If you cut down on dying and painting, you end up with a palette of greys, browns, a few dark greens or desaturated yellows and little else. Moreover, white textiles have to be kept clean, treated with care and washed often, as they stain incredibly easy. During a recession, anything high-maintenance is beyond most people’s means and both clothes and objects that can be used for longer without appearing dirty are favoured. In times of real economic recession, people are also way less picky. They buy second-hand clothes, they fix furniture and appliances or buy the cheapest used version they can find. If anything, the result is a mismatched, unintentional-looking aesthetic, one that can scarcely be called an aesthetic at all. But cream-coloured minimalism? Nope.
However, beauty entrepreneur Charlotte Palermino connects white with recession in another sense, one that I find more plausible in this context. Specifically, she mentions how, during a recession, large numbers of people, especially in the United States, tend to swing back to values that are considered more “traditional”. Such a set of values tends to identify white as a symbol of “purity”, of light, of everything that is “right” (not as opposed to “left” but as opposed to “wrong”, which, to anyone who subscribes to this universe of meaning, might amount to the same thing). Clean vs dirty, chaste vs promiscuous, intelligible vs obscure, reassuring vs scary. White is one half of the dichotomy par excellence and it represents the side on which a certain kind of person (of voter) tends to feel more secure in times of unsettling change.
Do I agree with this specific interpretation of Pantone’s decision? Yes and no.
Let me add some historical weight to the matter: we need to talk about minimalism’s obsession with whiteness and how it stems directly from colonialism and racism, not recession.
Minimalism’s fascist roots: Adolf Loos and cultural erasure
Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect, did not exactly invent minimalism, but it certainly provided some philosophical backbone to certain ideas that were already circulating in the United States and in Europe in the early XX century. In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime“, Loos equated ornamental decoration with what he declares to be inferior stages of cultural development and goes so far as to connect highly decorative styles with degeneracy and criminal behaviour. To this day, whether or not we have a penchant for minimalism, we are more likely do describe interior decoration or clothing that uses simple design and neutral palettes as “elegant” and to call extremely intricate decoration or highly-saturated colour-combinations “kitsch“.
To learn more about how and why this perception is a colonialist heritage, you can turn to more authoritative sources than myself. Personally, I particularly appreciated how interior decorator Kemide Lawson, founder of the brand The Cornrow, described it on her Instagram home interiors account Cottage Noir.
Generally speaking, minimalism labels standardised, decoration-free aesthetics as sophisticated whilst dismissing ornate cultural expression as poor taste. While that does not, of course, make anyone liking a minimalist environment, for whatever reason, intrinsically racist, it is still true that this aesthetic has created a mutually beneficial relationship with colonialism and capitalism. On one hand, it flattens diverse aesthetics into submission, tracing a clear line between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, tasteful and tasteless, those who make the decisions and those the decisions are made for. On the other, if you apply it, for instance, to interior decoration, it helps erase any trace of human passage from a space.
Imagine an apartment for rent. It is, in effect, a white cube or a combination of white cubes with presumably neutral-coloured floors, doors, window frames, kitchen or bathroom tiles. The landlord has an interest in maximising the revenue of renting it out while minimising the cost of maintaining it. Now, in this scenario, the ideal tenant is one who brings in cheap, light-weight flatpack furniture, who does not hang anything on the walls, who does not even dream of repainting anything or making any major change, which would make the renovation more expensive for the landlord, before the next tenant can come in. The intention behind minimalism is the erasure of every cultural object, leaving no indication of any cultural heritage or belonging, since human life is not the main focus of what happens in a space, but an unfortunate byproduct of the space’s primary function, which is to generate revenue. It may not be a coincidence that Cloud Dancer has also been disparagingly dubbed “Landlord special“.
As it happens, the first person I talked to who had developed a deep love of minimalism was a survivor of Italy’s 2009 devastating earthquake. Back then, they told me they had lost everything they held dear and were forced to leave their hometown of L’Aquila and, eventually, the Country. Having moved to Scandinavia, they claimed to have found extreme peace in the concept of nordic minimalism. The fact of not owning anything, of not needing anything, of sleeping on a cheap, replaceable bed while holding every earthly possession inside a relatively small and perpetually packed suitcase, they said, was the only thing that provided respite from the ever-gnawing terror of losing everything a second time.
I know anecdotal evidence is not evidence, but there it goes: the only time I encountered a conceptual defence of minimalism that was not based on tearing down the alternative as “kitsch” or “common”, it was a trauma response.
Let me add one more disclaimer: these concepts do NOT apply to the debate on minimalism in architecture, which is more complex than that and which, I believe, is best left to architects and engineers. For those who are completely unfamiliar with the basic concepts, I will summarise the debate by saying that the counterarguments include the fact that, especially in Europe, certain instances of extremely decorative architecture were based on the use of materials that were often imported by plundering natural resources, mostly from the “colonies”. On the other hand, certain architectural forms that the layman might bundle up under the label of ‘minimalism’ focus on practicality, the sustainability of construction processes and the optimisation of living spaces. I am talking exclusively about minimalism in decoration, fashion, communication and design.
The cultural counter-movement: maximalism strikes back
What’s my point? My point is: if Pantone “registered” a shift toward white minimalism, where did they go looking? Because we clearly haven’t been looking at the same trends. And, in a world where niches and micro-niches make up the vast majority of trends in any industry, looking in any given direction and not in another is a choice and that choice is political.
Maximalism, a return to colour, appreciation for racially and culturally relevant styles are all out there. Choosing to look elsewhere is a deliberate decision.
Designers, creators, people from the global majority are mounting a colorful rebellion. Users today, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are drawn to experiences that pop after one too many all-white, text-only hero sections. The sterile aesthetic has worn thin.
In 2025, maximalism represents freedom, expression, and identity, with designers incorporating global cultural influences—vibrant textiles, historical symbols, and local storytelling traditions. This isn’t random decoration; it’s reclamation. And this is why the internet is not having it. And yes, this might be the longest and most heated conversation ever sparked by a Pantone color of the year, but it may also be the one that makes Pantone officially irrelevant, unless it makes different choices in the future.
Communities are suggesting alternatives to Cloud Dancer, swapping minimalist fear of visibility for bold color, ethnic motifs, root re-appropriation, and unapologetic cultural expression. Interior designers note that clients seem more open to interiors that look like they can be touched, appreciating designs that add their own personality.
The shift acknowledges what minimalism has long denied: that ornamentation carries meaning, history, and identity. Traditions of visual richness persist globally in public spaces, architecture, daily rituals, and artistic practices, carrying historical memory, environmental adaptation, and symbolic meaning.
Among the alternatives that have been suggested one of the most interesting and popular is Phthalo Green. This rich, deep, bluish green, suggestive of organic materials and deep foliage, beside being a beautiful, versatile and interesting colour, has also been chosen for what it represents. A funny and interesting sum up has been given, while painting beautifully with this colour, by Australian artist Jennie Planet. Phthalo green has already been used in the past to substitute “toxic” colours. Up until the early XX century, most green paints were highly toxic, as they contained dangerous quantities of arsenic. That made wallpaper, makeup, utensiles, musical instruments, furniture and even children’s toys practically poisonous. The appearance on the market of a pigment made out of non-poisonous Phtalocyanine was a quiet and yet life-saving revolution. In the same way, accepting the poison of taste-manipulation is proving “toxic” to our cultures. And the way out, once again, appears to be green.