FW25 Color Stats
Another season, another reason, for counting colors
We’ve been here before. I’ve posted about color trends in fashion in 2023, twice in 2024, and now I’m doing it again.
Methodology Recap
Fashion operates on a seasonal cycle; designer ready-to-wear fall/winter collections are released in the spring (so stores have time to buy them). Vogue Magazine kindly hosts photos of all the “major” collections — this season included over 10,000 images from hundreds of designers.
My automated counts come from asking GPT-4o to name all the specific colors in the clothes in each image, and aggregating the results. I’m still using the same method detailed in this post, with similar results, except that of course the cost per query has declined and the rate limits have become negligible.
My manual counts, as usual, are restricted to non-neutral colors (no black, white, brown, beige, gray, or navy) to keep the time commitment borderline-reasonable.1
Results
As is the case every year, most colors are neutrals, and black is particularly dominant because this is a fall/winter season.2 We’ve got a lot of beiges, browns, and grays, punctuated by a few “bold basic” colors like red, blue, and green.
If we just look at non-neutrals, we see that red is clearly in the lead, which is typical of every year. We also see a lot of “jewel tones” — bold and dark shades of red, purple, blue, and green.
The manual results are fairly similar to the automated ones. In both versions, red is in the lead, and deep cool “jewel tones” make a strong showing. Yellow, light blue and pink, and olive green are also prominent.
We see some of what I’ve been calling “synonym effects” here. In my manual counts I categorized a lot of colors as “burgundy” that GPT-4o split across multiple categories like “burgundy”, “deep red”, “maroon”, “dark red”, and “dark burgundy”. As a result, “burgundy” took the #2 spot in the manual counts and was only #6 in the automated counts, but the automated top-30 colors included many more “burgundy synonyms.” Either way, the results refer to the same underlying reality — there’s a lot of dark purplish-reds out there.
Trend Changes
How have this season’s colors changed compared to last year’s fall/winter collections?
The most striking changes in the neutrals this year are:
fewer metallic colors (gold & silver)
more browns, beiges, and grays
If we look at the non-neutral colors, the most prominent changes are:
fewer “autumn leaf” colors (olive green, mustard yellow, orange)
more “jewel tones” (bright and deep blues, greens, purples, and reds)
It’s clearly a cooler palette.
If you compare to Fall/Winter 2023 (I didn’t do a manual version for FW24) we see a continuation of the overall trend:
more dark reds
fewer “autumn leaf” colors (olive green, old gold, flame)
more dark green
As far as “themes” go, some of the recurring motifs of the season have to do with drama (gothic looks, big-shouldered corporate suits, fur and feathers) while there’s also some tendencies towards pared-back simplicity and more “normal” clothes as the luxury market remains weak.
let’s be real, there’s nothing reasonable about counting hundreds of colors by hand, but I find repetitive tasks soothing.
the “no wearing white after Labor Day” rule is a smidge outdated, but people do still tend to wear darker colors in the winter.
I've been observing the color of cars for the past 3 or 4 years. I think it was in 2021 that I suddenly noticed that all new passenger cars in the US were in fascist colors: red, black, white, dark blue, or silver.
It didn't used to be that way. The highway used to be full of other colors as well: orange, gold, yellow, green, purple, brown.
Who decided to use only those colors, I wonder? Why did Toyota and Honda join in as well? They still make them in all colors for the Japanese market. Google "cars in Japan", and you'll see all the colors, mostly pastels rather than dark. Lots of pink, yellow, green, baby blue. Just one example: https://blog.csojapan.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/img_9667-1.jpg .
Nice to find someone else who finds repetitive tasks soothing.