Basia Bulat is a real breathy indie type, and on the title track of her new LP, The Garden, she unfolds into this incredibly delicate space by layering her voice on top of a classically orchestrated string quartet. And the video sets all that to drippy, ambient florals, which, combined with the strings, basically amounts to adult Fantasia. If that throwback-throw-forward feels right to you, mark your calendar for the album release in February; every track is an orchestral setting of a song from Bulat’s archive, exploring birth and rebirth and old eras giving way to new — a Q1 release if ever there was one.
It’s January, baby, and you know what that means: Pantone is BACK with another color that they hope can catch just a shade of this mess of a zeitgeist. I know myself well enough to understand that I will never be satisfied with their ideas, but this year’s choice of periwinkle transmits no image if not the whole team throwing their hands up in resignation.
“Displaying a carefree confidence and a daring curiosity that animates our creative spirit, inquisitive and intriguing PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives.”
……What? Let’s try putting it another way:
“Rekindling gratitude for some of the qualities that blue represents complemented by a new perspective that resonates today, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri places the future ahead in a new light. We are living in transformative times. PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri is a symbol of the global zeitgeist of the moment and the transition we are going through.”
Are we talking about periwinkle or did we do some stream-of-consciousness journaling and then fill in the blank with a color? Whoever’s in charge of the copy over there, let them know that co-star is hiring.
Maybe it’s time for Pantone to outsource this work to actual culture critics. They could have gotten by quite well, for example, with Jess Cartner-Morley‘s thoughts on zoomer green (or Bottega green, depending on how you live your life). A line in the lede of her Guardian piece — “If the taste is too vanilla, that’s not fashion” — might as well be a direct indictment of periwinkle. She continues: “Which is how we have ended up with a colour-of-the-moment that symbolises nature, but actually looks a bit synthetic. The green that is everywhere right now is a flat, saturated, straightforward green. It is not the colour of moss or of olives or of sea foam. No, it is the colour of green-screen technology.” And how’d it get here? By becoming the go-to accent to the former it-color, Millennial pink. *This* is how trends are born: not conceived in the color factory, but grown on the vine creeping across the wall of whatever was engulfing us before.
Speaking of the zoomer lifestyle, word on the Tok is that we no longer make new year’s resolutions; we rebrand. If that sounds like a whole mess of untenable aspirations, that’s about right, though if you were to actually execute on one of these, it might set you up nicely for an agency job one day. Influencer rebrands are incredibly thorough, featuring mood boards, presentations, and “soft launches,” (really just Tok-televised morning routines) — all (er, mostly) things that adult people get paid to do in their working hours. So scoff all you want, but if a new year’s resolution can double as an internship, full steam ahead.
