Very Peri: Know the color of the year 2022 and what its origins are

The New York Times

The events of the last couple of years have led most of us to spend a lot more time online. And so it makes sense that the Pantone Color Institute’s choice of color of the year for 2022 — an intense purple called Very Peri — was inspired in part by the metaverse.

“We’re not making a projection. It’s something that’s really happening,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of Pantone, which sells a color categorization system that allows, for example, a designer in Italy and his client in Argentina to speak exactly the same shade of yellow.

Each December, the company highlights a color that, according to it, will be the dominant hue of the year ahead, based on the developments registered in fashion, interior architecture and new technologies. And the latest technology, Pressman said over the phone, has big implications for the future of color that go beyond simple trends.

Video games, for example, are having remarkable effects on color, she said, as people now frequently enter virtual spaces, “creating avatars and looking to dress a certain way, or creating collections, possibly based on a palette.” that would not necessarily be possible to reproduce in the real world”. (There is a limit to the pigments that can be safely produced without the use of toxins and reproduced consistently in the physical world, she said. That doesn’t happen online, where the possibilities are endless.)

Fittingly, Very Peri is the first Pantone color of the year that was not selected from an existing catalog of thousands of hues, but was instead developed from scratch.

The new color promotes the idea of ​​”looking at the world with different eyes” and inspiring “unexpected solutions, in what we define as audacious minds,” Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said in a telephone interview.

To demonstrate the potential of digital color, Pantone collaborated with Polygon1993, a multidisciplinary Parisian artist, to distribute nine NFTs, digital artworks, inspired by Very Peri. Microsoft has adopted the hue for laptop, phone, and tablet screens, and as a wallpaper for Microsoft Teams software.

“Is there a digital-only pick?” asked Pressman. “I don’t know; we’re studying possibilities.” While some companies are already using Very Peri in furniture and appliances, the violet hue is having a polarizing effect on interior designers and other style observers.

Ghislaine Viñas, an interior designer in New York known for her bold use of color, classifies the red elements that exist in the hue as strong, and the blue ones as positive. “It’s a gender-neutral color, just what we need right now,” she said in an email.

In Paris, designer India Mahdavi, also known for her adventurous use of color, described Very Peri in an email as “the ultimate celestial color, the color of the sky between dusk and dawn”. She suggested using it to paint ceilings, or for a velvet sofa – “a sofa you could sink into, the same way you sink into sleep”.

But Brock Forsblom, a New York-based interior designer, warned over the phone that an excessive use of color would create an “alternative universe like ‘My Little Pony’, or ‘Princess Jasmine on a hot night out. And Georgia Wilkinson, studio coordinator at Creed Design Associates, a design firm in Leicester, England, criticized the color’s “over-the-top and cartoonish” quality. Her verdict, via email, was that “I certainly wouldn’t live with that color painted on my wall — nor would I dream of subjecting a customer to it.”

Li Edelkoort, a trend analyst based in Paris, said in an email that “Very Peri seems to be a very dangerous color during a time when we need warm palettes for home interiors, with shades like terracotta, brown and beige.” Edelkoort, born in Holland, is an activist and design education expert who founded the Trend Union consultancy in 1986, and has expressed rejection of what she describes as “Pantone pushing that shade of purple blue down people’s throats without regard for way in which they are living and evolving. Human beings want to be embraced by their environments, in troubled times, and that leaves no room for an invented and uncool shade of blue”.

In response to Edelkoort’s comments, Eiseman said that Pantone’s intention was not to compel appreciation of any particular hue, but rather to “highlight the relationship between color trends and what we see happening in all areas of the design world.”

No color can be said to be universally attractive, she said, and advised people who are suspicious of the Very Peri to consider using it as an exclamation point when painting a single wall, or as a color for a single piece of furniture. . But Eiseman herself has a room painted entirely from Very Peri, including the ceiling.