2017 Pantone Color of the Year: Greenery

The Pantone Color of the Year for 2017 was Greenery, PANTONE 15-0343. Pantone defines the honor itself plainly: a symbolic color selection; a color snapshot of what we see taking place in our global culture that serves as an expression of a mood and an attitude. The mood of 2017, as Pantone read it, was a turn back to the natural world.

A refreshing and revitalizing shade, Greenery is symbolic of new beginnings. It is a fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring when nature's greens revive, restore and renew — illustrative of flourishing foliage and the lushness of the great outdoors, its fortifying attributes signal consumers to take a deep breath, oxygenate and reinvigorate.

Nature's Neutral

Greenery is nature's neutral. The claim sounds like a slogan until you test it: outdoors, green is the one color that never argues — it is the ground against which flowers, stone, water and sky all sit comfortably. Brought indoors and into wardrobes, a yellow-green keeps that referee quality. It can hold a palette of brights without joining their argument, or replace beige and gray where a scheme needs a neutral with a heartbeat.

Pantone tied the choice to a measurable shift in daily life: the more submerged people are in modern life, the greater their innate craving to immerse themselves in the physical beauty and inherent unity of the natural world. That shift, Pantone observed, is reflected by the proliferation of all things expressive of Greenery in daily life through urban planning, architecture, lifestyle and design choices globally — green walls, planted offices and botanical everything.

From the Periphery to the Forefront

A constant on the periphery, Greenery is now being pulled to the forefront — it is an omnipresent hue around the world. That sentence describes the color's fashion trajectory precisely. Green had spent years as the supporting shade — the leaf in the floral print, the background of the photograph. In 2017 it stepped forward as the subject: solid greenery dresses, coats, sneakers and bags, worn as the main event rather than the scenery.

A life-affirming shade, Greenery is also emblematic of the pursuit of personal passions and vitality — the second half of its brief, and the reason it suited active and leisure clothing so well. Few colors photograph as alive; a yellow-green knit or jacket carries its own lighting, suggesting morning and growth even in a gray city street.

Wearing a Yellow-Green Without Wearing a Costume

The shade's zest is its challenge: full-length Greenery is a statement, and the wearer should mean it. The graduated routes are reliable — a Greenery bag or sneaker against denim and white; a Greenery blouse under a navy or charcoal blazer, where tailoring disciplines the freshness; leaf and botanical prints, which deliver the color pre-mixed with its natural companions.

Its best partners are the colors of its own habitat: white like daylight, wood browns and tan leathers, stone grays, and the floral pinks and yellows that foliage exists to set off. Metallics should be warm — gold, like sun through leaves. Treated that way, Greenery behaves exactly as advertised: less a trend piece than a change of air in the wardrobe.

Photos