[imagesource: Peakpx / Creative Commons Zero – CC0]

What a time to be alive, everybody.

Here I was thinking 2023 could be a tough year, with the political future of South Africa uncertain, the cost of living rising, and the threat of a global recession looming large.

Then Pantone arrives and announces that the “brave, fearless, and pulsating” viva magenta is its colour of 2023 and suddenly everything doesn’t seem so daunting.

Business of Fashion with these details:

Viva magenta, a red tone, will encourage optimism and allude to the rise of the virtual world as well as technology such as artificial intelligence in the months to come, Pantone said in a statement.

Image: Pantone

“We are creating a dynamic world that encourages experimentation, one that leverages the virtual within the physical realm and emboldens our strength and spirit to explore groundbreaking possibilities,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute.

Viva magenta, viva.

According to The Guardian, the colour is 150 years old and “yet still future-facing, at once digital and primordial”:

In popular culture at least, shades of magenta are everywhere, from the signature berry-coloured smokey-eye makeup of Charlize Theron’s Marvel heroine Clea, to Emily Blunt’s plum-coloured aristocratic-western getup in The English…

Lewis Hamilton shows off his sense of style in a magenta suit in Monza following furious outburst – https://t.co/pK3DFcd6qc#News pic.twitter.com/3S62wP0XTA

— 234 (@my234Radio) September 8, 2022

It’s not the easiest colour to wear but it can send a message. See Lewis Hamilton’s defiant layering of the shade after his outburst at the Dutch Grand Prix. The US paint company Benjamin Moore earlier forecast the return of red interior walls, naming the similar – but even more striking – “Raspberry Crush” as its own colour of the year.

Don’t tell the Afrikaners about Charlize liking viva magenta, or else it might get cancelled before it’s had a chance to show off how brave and fearless it is.

James Fox, the Cambridge art historian and author of The World According to Colour, says it’s an apolitical colour “about the resilience of the human spirit”.

I think we best call it here before this gets even sillier.

[sources:busfash&guardian]