In December 2020, when parts of the world were still in lockdown, Daniel Lee, then the creative director of Bottega Veneta, opened his spring/summer 2021 show with a skirt suit and matching mules in a saturated bright green, the colour of the most artificial of artificial lawns.
It wasn’t the first time he’d used green for the Kering-owned fashion house, but the yowzer shade stood out in those sad beige times, a booster jab of a colour that became instantly known as Bottega Green. It looked great on social media too. A flash of the hue on an Instagram feed announced that even if you hadn’t left the house you were still, yes, relevant.
Colour trends still sometimes follow the path described by Meryl Streep’s fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. “In 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns,” Priestly tells Anne Hathaway’s fashion-indifferent Andy, “and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.” But green has not been consigned to the clearance bin. It is still very much with us.
Almost two years on, statement greens have continued to sprout — most notably at Fendi’s show in New York in September, where a livid pistachio dominated. Bright green has been widely worn during this autumn’s fashion weeks by front-row regulars such as Tank magazine fashion director Caroline Issa and Canadian stylist and Instagram influencer Neelam Ahooja. Ahooja is best known for wearing monochrome looks by minimalist brand The Row, but since The Row now also does green she has been experimenting. She likes to wear them both with black for contrast.
Green has spread across menswear too. Last month, Harry Styles attended the film premiere of My Policeman in a trinity of bold Gucci greens — a dark emerald jacket and silk corsage, lime trousers and a 1947 vintage green leather top-handle bag. Less theatrically, the Irish actor Andrew Scott donned a zingy peppermint suit by Paul Smith to the London premiere of Catherine Called Birdy.
Green has become so popular in the past few years that it has taken the place of Millennial Pink as a generational colour, dubbed “Gen Z Green”. Outside of fashion, the hue is also performing well. In March, Apple released two new foresty shades called Green and Alpine Green for the iPhone 13. In June, Elle Decor declared: “Green has become the colour du jour in recent years, popping up in kitchens and living rooms in various hues from emerald and acid.”
Perhaps the product category green is most suited to is wellness. When at the end of this summer, Kate Moss launched her new beauty and wellbeing brand Cosmoss, it was in a triumph of pondweed-coloured glass packaging. OK, maybe moss green, but had it launched three years ago, would it have been quite so mossy? Perhaps not.
Why are we still obsessed with green? It likely has its roots in the pandemic when, forced to our homes for weeks at a time, our desire for nature increased. “I think on a deep level that’s how green has become a core colour,” says Joanne Thomas, head of content at Coloro, a colour trend forecaster. “People were emerging from their homes with this renewed appreciation of nature, a lust for the outdoors to almost ensure survival. Green links to that and to so much that many people are striving for now — nature, organic living, wellness.”
Thomas says that Priestly’s monologue about how colour trends work is dated. Because of the internet, trends are now more led by consumer behaviour. “Brands and the catwalk don’t dictate the trends. It’s more about looking at what the consumer wants and what they’re showing emotionally and how brands can cater to those emotions more.”
The fashion industry didn’t invent our desire for green, it just read the room. It is surely not a coincidence that green is the decreed colour of environmentalism, something the fashion industry has an awkward relationship with. The spring/summer 2023 Loewe menswear show in June saw a collection that included “living” garments and accessories. Soaked and scattered with chia and catswort seeds six weeks previously, the clothes sprouted vivid green plants. A statement of optimism or an exercise in denial? Perhaps both. “It’s like a safety blanket, a comfort blanket,” says Thomas. “If we’re dressing in the tones of the earth that we’re trying to protect, even while not doing a very good job of it, that offers us some sort of comfort.”
Coloro forecasts two years ahead and, having recently worked on trends for autumn/winter 24/25, Thomas can report that “green is still there. It’s moving into more lime, mint iterations, softer hues, after the really bold shades, but it isn’t going anywhere.” For some time to come, then, green will continue growing on us.
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