Fashion, beauty, design, lifestyle, colour is for brands a major challenge that appeals to the collective unconscious and reflects the times.
With Virginie Motte – longtime Director of Trends and Brands at the BHV (Galeries Lafayette) – we will see how the influence of colour changes our behaviour, unleashing the intuitive creativity and polysensoriality that are essential in this still uncertain context.
Sandrine Maggiani: Throughout the seasons, and especially today, what changes have you spotted in the use of colours by the brands to create their collections?
Virginie Motte: Each colour has its effect according to the use we make of it. In decoration, colour shapes proportions, changes space, influences architecture and has a role to play with light. The extended choice of shades and colour combinations also makes it possible to tell a story better through the immobility of objects and surfaces.
Image: @lemaraismood
Because of the new lifestyle habits we are experiencing, existing trends, such as the development of multi-tasking, decompartmentalized living spaces, will also accelerate. Colours will adapt, become less segmented and softer.
SM: As a result of the upheaval we have just experienced, will the relationship to colour change? How will this be expressed?
VM: The continuation of this exceptional episode should trigger a desire for calm and softness, for authenticity. A search for “refuge” values. Natural colors such as écru will be very prominent. Mineral and woody tones will be perpetuated. Overlooked colours such as pink reaffirms its return in sophisticated places but also in living spaces.
Image: @lemaraismood
The change in behaviour could come from an ecological awareness that encourages consumers to want to know the origin of the colours’ production, to ask for as little chemical treatment as possible, to favour vegetable dyes especially for children.
SM: Now, while part of our face will remain hidden, will the colour become the revealer of our personality, our state of mind?
VM: By choosing a colour, we express a real personal message and this impulse will be accentuated. While clothing has lost its function as a “social identifier” in favour of comfort, it will be the role of colour to express a desire for distinction or, on the contrary, a more radical need for invisibility. Creating new cultural identities and hybridizations such as using monochromes that reinforce the feeling of determination and risk-taking.
Image: @lemaraismood
SM: In the near future, will we need saturated, contrasted and expressive colours or, on the contrary, ranges that reflect a desire for sobriety, or even essentiality?
VM: We need colours more than ever because they release new energies in fashion but also in decoration and design, where the material-colour combination is already very strong and where we can dare to do anything.
The colour will be stronger and more saturated, the contrasts bold or on the contrary authentic. Generally speaking, the colours will be nuanced. The need for ecology will be expressed more strongly in new combinations of local tones and unusual shades that presage a more flexible way of creating colours.
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