LET THERE BE WHITE

Pantone's colour of the year, Cloud Dancer, is a classic white that is the perfect canvas for style interpretations. Here are five ways

- Carmen Sin

Colour authority Pantone made its most controversial prediction yet when it named white the colour of 2026. Since 1999, the firm behind the universal colour glossary, the Pantone Matching System, has tipped one shade that everyone will be wearing, using or generally coveting each year.

Whereas past picks tended more colourful, like 2025's Mocha Mousse or 2020's Classic Blue, its money this time is on Cloud Dancer. Pantone 11-4201 is, however you slice it, a standard-issue white.

Its all-purpose-ness has split observers. The colour symbolising light in the cosmic battle between good and evil is a semiotic Swiss Army knife. One can plausibly read into it elitism for its association with ivory, a coded promotion of white eugenics or, in its safe blankness, a kind of timid fence-sitting in a politically divisive world.