Colour Futures #3
The Colour of Longevity by FranklinTill

Modern consumer society skips to the beat of fleeting trends and fast-moving fashion cycles, of cuts and colours touted as being the next big thing... until the next next big thing comes along. But as people become more attuned to the consequences of overconsumption on the global climate emergency, future-facing designers and brands are increasingly focusing on more sustainable, long- lasting and circular approaches to production and consumption.

The question of colour – how it is produced, applied, made to last – is capital in any brand or manufacturer’s sustainable agenda. How can colour be harnessed to combat current production and consumption practices? What role does colour play in creating timeless design? The third instalment of the Colour Futures Sessions hosted by FranklinTill and GF Smith was dedicated to finding out.

To delve into the issue, FranklinTill gathered a panel of experts working with colour in different areas of the design and creative industries: Verònica Fuerte, founder and creative directress of Hey, a graphic design and illustration studio in Barcelona known for its rainbow-bright visual universe; Carol Hopkins, global senior design director for colour at adidas; Dian-Jen Lin, co-founder of the London- based Post Carbon Lab, a design research laboratory that grows sustainable microbial dyes for textile applications; and Daniel Olatunji, founder of slow fashion label Monad London.

In a wide-ranging discussion that covered the yen for standardised colour, the demands and expectations of consumers worldwide and the emotional state of pigment-producing bacteria, one element proved true: the idea that colour may best stand the test of time when it is imbued with story and meaning – deep value that lasts beyond seasons as it is passed from one generation to the next.

Meaningful Colour

Colour is inextricably linked to story. “It’s fundamental,” Fuerte said. Her work designing identities for brands is meant to stand the test of time, making the notion of longevity crucial. “We are building a creative world – a creative language,” she said, which means the colours she uses must be chosen to last.

Shades Beyond Standard

Sustainable and regenerative future colour will be thick with shades of meaning. Where we may once have prized colourfastness and predictable, reliable shades, the tide is now slowly changing, for producers and consumers both. Thanks to new and emerging sustainable and regenerative dyes and textile applications, future colour will be unpredictable, inconsistent, nonuniform, imperfect – and very much in demand because of it.

“My attraction to natural dye processes is the fact that over time, the colour fades and you get different characteristics coming through, depending on the colour you started with,” Olatunji said. He routinely works with artisan dyers and handweavers in his native Nigeria to create the ruggedly crafted, handsomely hued fabrics Monad is known for. “One of the things I like about working this way is that there’s always going to be different shades of the same colour. I can’t replicate the exact colour each time.”

Letting go of the desire for standardised colour may be a particular challenge for large and multinational brands working at scale. But the novel and the unprecedented simply have to be embraced, Hopkins said, pointing out the intriguing unknowns that are cropping up as adidas investigates circularity in its production processes. Take the brand’s FUTURECRAFT.LOOP, a completely recyclable running shoe that can, at end of life, be returned to the company, which will break it down and reuse the materials to make new trainers.

Stories to Colour Hearts and Minds

Getting buyers on board with new colour codes will require making people fully aware of different production processes, guts and all – and then making it clear that particular design choices are being made for particular reasons.

Certainly, a subset of consumers is already asking probing questions, and would welcome the opportunity to make a rewarding choice.

For instance, quality control and standardisation may be important for some brands, but there is a consequence – “a cost”, Lin said – to having that level of control in the colours used. While fossil fuel- derived pigments have been favoured for their efficiency and technical performance, these industrial dyes are known to harm human and animal health and contribute to environmental degradation. Plant-based and bacteria-derived dyes, in comparison, are slower to produce, and result in unpredictable, irreproducible patterns, in streaks and gradations of shades. Designers and manufacturers shouldn’t shy away from telling that story. “It’s all about priorities,” says Lin. “At Post Carbon Lab, we take what we get, with gratitude. The microbes come to us, we make them happy and they produce happy colours.” Potentially happy consumers, too.

The undeniable link of colour to people’s emotions, at once individual and universal, will be a key element in winning widespread acceptance and support of unstandardised future colour – even the absence of colour. Storytelling adds value, Hopkins said. Take adidas’s No Dye footwear: tonal white shoes and boots that contain no pigment. “A white shoe in an outdoor space is very controversial, but you have to tell these stories – tell people why there’s no dye in this product,” Hopkins insisted. “It’s celebrating the beauty of, when you go out on a hike, you bring back the hike with you. That’s a memory: the shoe becomes an artefact of where you’ve just been.”

Colour Connotations

As we enter a new era of sustainable and regenerative design, brands, designers and manufacturers will increasingly strengthen the emotional connections colour can make, redefining and realigning notions of longevity in colour.

For some, longevity is colour making something old new again – dyeing a garment to give it, and us, “a change of perspective,” Olatunji said.

For others, longevity is colour linking us to the past as much as it does to the future. “Nostalgia connects us to colours,” says Hopkins. “And we hand down nostalgic colour cues through the generations.”

For some others yet, longevity is colour telling the fantastic story of our shared existence through deep time. “The microorganisms we use have, embedded in them, 3,500,000,000 years of evolutionary wisdom,” Lin said. “They’ve developed different features, different ways to adapt, and that encapsulates the beauty of these microbial colours.”

Whether bright or neutral, fast or poetically faded, the colour of longevity may ultimately prove to be, as Lin described it, “the colour of gratitude, the colour of care, of nourishment, of regeneration”.