SINGAPORE – Colour authority Pantone made its most controversial prediction yet when it named white the colour of 2026. Since 1999, the firm behind the universal colour glossary, the Pantone Matching System, has tipped one shade that everyone will be wearing, using or generally coveting each year.

Whereas past picks tended more colourful, like 2025’s Mocha Mousse or 2020’s Classic Blue, its money this time is on

Cloud Dancer

Pantone 11-4201 is, however you slice it, a standard-issue white.

Its all-purposeness has split observers. The colour symbolising light in the cosmic battle between good and evil is a semiotic Swiss Army knife. One can plausibly read into it elitism for its association with ivory, a coded promotion of white eugenics or, in its safe blankness, a kind of timid fence-sitting in a politically divisive world.

Others see the relatable yen for calm or a clean slate. The airy choice is a “conscious statement of simplification”, said Pantone Colour Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman in a statement that referred to a cacophonous and overwhelming world.

It also mixes well with all other colours, “supporting rather than shouting”, states the institute’s vice-president Laurie Pressman in an article on the firm’s website.

Local fashion designer and stylist Josiah Chua welcomes the pick, which he says feels like a “collective reset”.

“After seasons saturated with brights and high-impact hues, this soft white washes everything back to calm, allowing space to breathe, reflect and begin again,” he says.

However you lean, the debate over white’s abstract properties feels strikingly of the moment. As chief fashion critic of The New York Times Vanessa Friedman put it: “So...