Pantone Colour of the Year: Cloud Dancer

By Ian Ziegler

Colour affects how we perceive the world; it influences our impulses, stress levels, and moods. Colour is part of everyday life; we make choices about the colours we wear, the colours and shades we put on our walls and our beds. There are countless ways that colour impacts our daily lives and choices. So, when Pantone announced its ‘Colour of the Year’ for 2026, a year already marked by political and social issues in the first month, many people responded to the choice with scepticism and disagreement. Pantone announced, ‘Cloud Dancer’ as the colour of the year, a shade of white that, as Vogue described, is ‘not stark white, it’s specifically a natural shade of white.’ This shade of white is an unexpected choice, especially in the wake of the Trump administration’s attack on DEI and, most recently, their inhumane treatment of immigrants and American citizens by Homeland Security and ICE.

Collage of models in SS26 fashion week.

Image courtesy of Vogue.

While this time the Pantone colour of the year received much more media attention than it normally does, that does not mean it is a new thing, nor does it mean it does not impact how markets and fashion houses cater their businesses for that year. Pantone first started announcing the colour of the year in December of 1999, for the start of the new millennium. In 1999, they announced their first colour of the year to be Cerulean, a colour that will ring a bell for its popularity in the iconic movie The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep summed up the importance of the colour in a single monologue, a scene that is as iconic as ever.

So, if 1999/2000 was the year of Cerulean, and 2025/2026 is the year ‘Cloud Dancer,’ what does that entail for the quickly changing trend and volatile political atmosphere? The confronting whiteness of ‘Cloud Dancer’ could be seen to contrast the political response of the progressives; however, it also encapsulates the desires of the world at large: purity. Contrary to the stark white we associate with hospitals and blankness, ‘Cloud Dancer’ is a white that is calming, pure, the colour of the clouds in the sky. It is not a statement about whiteness but a statement about tranquillity, something we all desire to achieve this new year.

Cloud Dancer, the Pantone Colour of the Year for 2026.

Image Courtesy of Pantone.

So when you see a white trench coat gracing you on the street, or an all-white outfit on a night out, it is not a surgeon off duty, or Mormons out and about, but someone who is relating to the calls for clarity in a time of uncertainty, someone who can resonate with the need for purity, the need to being dancing with the clouds.

Bibliography

Garcia-Furtado, Laia. “The 2026 Pantone Colour Is ‘Cloud Dancer,’ a Natural White.” Vogue, December 4, 2025. https://www.vogue.com/article/pantone-color-of-the-year-2026-cloud-dancer.

Demy, Jenna (or first author if different). “Pantone’s 2026 Colour of the Year: Cloud Dancer.” The New York Times, December 4, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/style/pantones-2026-color-of-the-year-cloud-dancer.html.

Dantas, Ítalo José de Medeiros, and Layla de Brito Mendes. “The Zeitgeist of Colours: Semiotic Analysis of Pantone’s® Colours of the Year in the 2000s.” Eikon (Journal on Semiotics and Visual Culture), no. 9 (July 23, 2021). https://ojs.labcom-ifp.ubi.pt/eikon/article/view/781

Lee, Kyung Seon., 2015. "The Colour of the Year: A Textual Analysis of Pantone's Colour Communication Techniques through the Application of Barthes' Semiotic." Order No. 1606234, Liberty University. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/color-year-textual-analysis-pantones/docview/1756612073/se-2.