SS 26 Color Range Preview: How the Season’s Major Theme “Refresh” Impacts Summer 26 Colors? The - Spring-Summer 26 - Colors
As climate change escalates, with intense cold becoming rarer and heat waves increasing, fashion is undergoing a transformation. The industry is turning to natural and low-tech solutions to ensure comfort in high temperatures.
Read also: Season Preview Spring-Summer 26: Designing to cool down
In this context, color is being re-imagined as a tool, offering a creative response to the growing need for coolness. The impact of color, both physically and psychologically, is far from insignificant; it plays a key role in how we perceive cold. By reflecting the light, pale shades have a genuinely refreshing effect — a technique already embraced in urban planning. In clothing, this chromatic direction, combined with other innovations, offers a simple, effective solution. Adapting to climatic changes, the Spring-Summer 26 color palette introduces fresher tones offering subtle, cool variations of neutrals, blues, and greens, with watery, milky and organic hues that oscillate between icy transparencies and cold, sophisticated opacities. Offering a sense of visual freshness, the season’s blues and greens serve as new functional tones in the SS 26 collections, reflecting the desire for breathability and serenity.
Blues
Spring-Summer 2026 blues are neither classic nor banal but serve as bold, statement colors in collections. The cool, even icy Ethereal Sky offers a modern take on sky blue — a hue that subtly complements and brightens looks. Blues also exude sensuality with Chalk Blue, a soft grayish shade, used in feminine, flowing designs, casting sophisticated silhouettes in a new light. Already well-established in collections, deeper and more saturated blue shades take center stage in statement pieces, this season. These blues color the season’s most avant-garde designs taking inspiration from activewear cuts for leather or fabric outerwear pieces.
Greens
Greens also play a starring role for Spring-Summer 2026. Soft, cool lightly tinted shades become more versatile throughout the collections. Like the blues, they brighten and refresh the color ranges. A faux-natural Oxygen Green emerges as a key shade for the summer season, embodying the need for coolness and calm. A vibrant khaki is revisited in metallic versions geared to more technical applications, extending beyond its traditional roles in casualwear and tailoring. Ritual Green, a dark green already prevalent in collections, is now a timeless, classic hue.
Neutrals
The growing presence of neutrals in palettes once again mirrors the desire for clarity, simplicity, and visual lightness in collections, spanning all categories, from high fancy designs to casual and sport-tech items. Warmed tones — slightly yellowed, beige, or pinkish — are increasingly popular. Often derived from the natural colors of fibers, these shades highlight the intrinsic quality of raw materials. This restrained intensity in colors, paired with reduced pigment usage, also aligns with environmental concerns.
The PV ColorBook SS 26 will be available from 11 February at Première Vision Paris and online in the Fashion Resources section from 17 February 2025.
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