Not only on the catwalks – or at the already iconic halftime performance of the singer Rihanna at the Super Bowl – also the red carpet lives up to its name in this awards season. Why is the whole world seeing red right now?
The examples are manifold: US rapper Doja Cat sat in the front row at the Schiaparelli fashion show in a blood-red ensemble with thousands of crystals, the artists Sam Smith and Kim Petras provided a complete group performance at the Grammy Awards in red to cause a stir; Rapper Lil Nas X wore a red fake fur at New York Fashion Week.
Red seems to be everywhere these days.
It replaces the color that until recently seemed ubiquitous: barbiecore pink. And while the world still eagerly awaits director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, the question is: Has Pink grown up in the meantime?
The FW23 catwalks are unmistakably red
Red has been a constant on the FW23 runway. The color featured prominently at New York Fashion Week and previously on the Copenhagen catwalks. At Ganni, handbags in numerous shades of red paired with sequined dresses, Saks Potts covered models head-to-toe in red leather, and in New York, every creative and label from Marc Jacobs to Gabriela Hearst and Marni experimented with red snakeskin looks, sequined dresses and faux fur -coats.
“Entering a red era, the palette has overtaken the barbiecore pinks at New York Fashion Week and is now one of the city’s defining colors,” agrees Karis Munday, analyst at global retail data provider Edited.
And when it comes to shoes, red is starting to catch on: After Rihanna’s Super Bowl moment, Munday watched via Google Trends as searches for the red MM6 Maison Margiela x Salomon low sneakers the singer wore surged 4,000 percent. In the UK, she reports, the sneaker sold out just two days after her debut – in the US it took four days – despite having been in stock since November.
And then of course there is the It shoe of the moment: the ‘Big Red Boot’ from MSCHF. A border crosser, whom the artist collective itself describes as “cartoon boots for a cool 3D world”. Wearing these $350 shoes looks like something straight out of a video game. Needless to say, it caused a hype on Instagram and is sold out on the brand’s website.
Red conquers luxury fashion
Edited also sees a rise in the color red in the luxury market. In terms of clothing, red new goods have increased significantly across genders in the last three months: an increase of 34 percent in women’s clothing and 55 percent in men’s clothing compared to the same period last year could be identified. “The ‘Year of the Rabbit’ collections from Dior and Burberry made a big contribution to this,” adds Munday.
Away from the luxury fashion market, red items in womenswear have increased by 49 percent year-on-year in the last three months. The color red led to a 69 percent increase in womenswear sales and a 210 percent increase in menswear sales in the first two weeks of February compared to the same period in January. Accessories were an important factor for all genders, especially heart motifs. Sales of red heart-shaped accessories increased by 415 percent compared to 2022, especially at Shein, according to Munday. The coming months should show whether this trend will continue after Valentine’s Day.
In your ‘New York Fashion Week Color Trend Report FW23’ Pantone speaks of “happy colors”. But the deep red named ‘Viva Magenta’ dominating 2023 is not strictly a happy one. It is too ripe for that, too carnal, its blue component too high. An untroubled red would not really fit into the current times, just as little as a radiant Barbie pink, which thematically clearly belongs to the dopamine dressing of the past year.
A bold magenta
“Viva Magenta provides us with the security and motivation we need to survive long-term disruptions,” Pantone writes, and continues: “Three years with a pandemic, in the face of war, an unstable economy, social unrest, the collapse of supply chains and increasing climate change, we need to recover. And yet we have to find the motivation to keep going. Here, Viva Magenta envelops us in strength and panache and sends us out into the world with the verve we long for.” Verve, that could easily be translated as ‘courage’, it is reminiscent of a heart, but not of a kitschy, romanticized abstraction ( ❤️), but to the real organ.
This ‘Viva Magenta’ is a shade that oscillates between organic fleshiness and trendy virtuality and is also accompanied by a whole ‘Magentaverse’ of shades of red on the Pantone website. A real Rohrschacht test for the eye, because the color magenta does not actually exist on the color spectrum. Magenta is a mixed color of red and blue. Because these two colors are at opposite ends of the color spectrum, they don’t mix there (they only do when plotted on the color wheel), and so magenta has no wavelength. To save a long and very confusing explanation: our brain ‘creates’ magenta because it has a hard time dealing with ambivalence.
This is exactly what makes the color so insanely topical. Because complex problems and ambivalences determine life today, but many people are still looking for quick, uncomplex solutions. Such black-and-white thinking was perhaps still possible in the past, in a bipolar world. In today’s multi-polar world order, much more mental agility is required. Dichotomies such as dividing gender into ‘male’ and ‘female’, or dividing reality into ‘virtual’ and ‘analogue’ are a thing of the past. In order to understand the world today, the brain has to deal with numerous ambivalences and gray areas. So the perfect moment for a bold magenta.