Your next favorite color was decided two years ago

On April 29, 2025, while most of us were still deciding what 2025 was going to look like, a company in London announced the color of 2027.

They were not guessing. They were scheduling.

The company was WGSN, the largest trend forecasting firm in the world, together with its sister color authority Coloro. The color is called Luminous Blue, and it is not a mood or a vibe but a precise coordinate: Coloro code 125-28-38, one address among more than 3,500 in Coloro’s color system. Eleven months later, in March 2026, they did it again for 2028, a warm tone named Radiant Earth. The announcements were covered by the trade press, absorbed by brands, and folded into product roadmaps that are being manufactured right now.

Which means that some meaningful portion of what you will buy, wear, and scroll past in 2027 had its palette settled before you had formed a single opinion about it.

I wanted to know how that works. Not to be outraged about it. To understand the machinery, because if you make things for a living, the machinery matters. So I went upstream.

The machine

WGSN publishes a methodology page, and the numbers on it are worth reading slowly. The company states that its forecasts draw on an archive of more than five million catwalk, trade show, and street style images collected over 28 years. It states that it tracks more than 300 million retail SKUs daily, across 10,000+ brands and 200+ retailers. It states that it monitors a social signal map of more than 100,000 posts per month, and that it consults roughly 2,800 third-party data sources, triangulated with the help of AI.

Those figures are WGSN’s own, and no outside auditor has counted the images. But even discounted for marketing, the shape is clear: this is industrial-scale observation. One of its forecasters told Forbes in 2021 that the team collectively read about 800 blogs a day. That figure is one interview old and five years stale, but it tells you the posture: nothing is too small to scan.

Then comes the part that surprised me. All of that data gets handed to people. WGSN states it keeps more than 250 analysts across 16 countries, an arrangement it calls the analyst in the loop, and those analysts do resolutely unglamorous fieldwork: they attend music festivals and retail conferences, they walk trade show floors, they notice the color a shop paints its dressing rooms and the tone of voice a brand uses on its signage. In that same Forbes interview, the method gets summed up as part art, part science, part math, and part magic.

A machine that reads everything, checked by people who go outside and look at things. Hold onto that, because it is the whole secret.

The woman who pays attention

At the other end of the industry from WGSN’s data feeds sits Li Edelkoort, the Dutch forecaster behind Trend Union, who has been calling cultural shifts since before some of her competitors’ analysts were born. Her pipeline involves no SKU tracking whatsoever.

Her method, as she described it to Forbes in 2020, is intuition disciplined by anthropology, social studies, and history. A first-person account from someone who did research for Trend Union describes what that looks like in practice: walking a city with a camera, through bespoke tailoring shops, antique stores, and newly opened interiors showrooms, photographing objects where a nascent idea seems to be surfacing, then watching for the same idea to appear again somewhere unrelated. Repetition across unconnected places is the tell. One sighting is a curiosity. Three sightings is a direction.

Edelkoort has a line about this that I have not been able to stop thinking about: “People think I am some mystic or gypsy. But what I really do is pay attention.”

Two pipelines. One reads eight hundred blogs a day, one walks through antique stores. Both are doing the same thing: watching where ideas first touch the ground, and refusing to look away.

How a color gets locked

So how does an actual color of an actual future year get chosen? WGSN describes its process in more detail than you might expect.

It starts about two years out, with a macro framework the company calls STEPIC: society, technology, environment, politics, industry, creativity. Analysts feed in what they are seeing across all six. Seasonal color workshops then translate those currents into candidate shades, drawn from Coloro’s library of 3,500+ defined colors. And then comes my favorite step, the one that makes the whole thing feel less like prophecy and more like engineering: the shortlist goes through what Coloro calls Feasibility Intelligence, a manufacturability check confirming that the color can actually be produced consistently across dyes, materials, and screens.

The color of 2027 did not just have to be culturally resonant. It had to be achievable at industrial scale. Prophecy with a supply chain.

One disclosure the coverage rarely leads with: Coloro and WGSN share a parent company, so when WGSN and Coloro announce a color together, that is less a partnership between independent authorities than one organization speaking with two voices. It does not make the call less influential. It does make the word “consensus” worth reading carefully.

The street votes first

If the pipeline only flowed downhill, from forecasters to factories to us, it would be a bleaker story. It does not. The industry’s own history says the ideas flow up before they flow down.

Fashion scholarship calls it trickle up: subcultures create meaning first, and the industry names it later. Punk built its entire visual language on the street before any brand knew what to do with it. Sharon Graubard, a veteran of the forecasting firm StyleSight, put it plainly in a 99% Invisible episode about the industry: you can feel a trend bubbling up on the streets, and then you find the seeds of it on the catwalk.

Which reframes the whole machine. WGSN’s five million images and Edelkoort’s camera walks are both, at bottom, ways of listening to the street early and at scale. The forecasters are not inventing the future. They are extrapolating it from places where it is already quietly happening.

And here is the part that matters if you make things: almost all of those places are public.

Where to stand

The trade fairs that fill forecasting decks sell tickets. Salone del Mobile in Milan, the furniture fair where the design press goes to see next year early, drew around 316,000 visitors and more than 1,900 exhibitors in 2026, by Surface’s count. Maison&Objet in Paris gathered 2,300 brands in front of 67,000 buyers this past January, per DesignWanted. You do not need a subscription to walk either floor. You need a badge and comfortable shoes.

The graduate shows are even more open. Design Academy Eindhoven put roughly 200 graduates on display at Dutch Design Week 2025, and Dezeen runs a standing School Shows program that publishes student work from around the world on a rolling basis, free to read. Graduate work is where you see ideas before they have been sanded down by clients and budgets, which is exactly why the forecasters watch it.

Material libraries, the physical archives where new surfaces and substances surface first, take visitors. Material ConneXion in New York, which bills itself as the world’s largest materials library with over 10,000 samples, offers tours and consultations, and publishes a monthly materials update.

And the street is the street. It remains free, and it remains first.

The honest caveat: you cannot replicate the machine. Nobody watching independently can track 300 million SKUs or run image recognition across a decade of street photography. The proprietary data is a real moat. But the data is the amplifier, not the source. The sources are fairs, schools, libraries, and sidewalks, and they were never behind the paywall.

What I am doing with this

I came out of this research with a practice, not just an article.

The forecasters’ actual edge is unheroic: they look at more things, earlier, more often, and they write down what repeats. Edelkoort’s rule, watching for the same idea to surface in unconnected places, requires no subscription, no analyst network, and no permission. It requires a camera, a calendar of the springs worth visiting, and the patience to notice three of something.

So that is the assignment I have given myself, and this journal is where the field notes will land. Watch the graduate shows for what students are obsessed with before employers get to them. Watch the material libraries for what substances are about to become texture. Watch the fairs, but read them as a lagging indicator of what the studios were thinking eighteen months ago. And watch the street, which files its report before anyone.

The color of 2027 was decided in the spring of 2025. That fact bothered me less the longer I sat with it, because the decision was not conjured from nothing. It was read, out of a thousand public places, by people paid to pay attention.

Attention is not proprietary. Pay it yourself, and the calendar loses most of its power over you.

---

Sources: WGSN methodology; WGSN + Coloro, how the key colours are chosen; WGSN press release, Colour of the Year 2027; WWD on Luminous Blue; Forbes, 2021 interview with WGSN’s Laura Saunter; Forbes, 2020 interview with Li Edelkoort; Fashion Studies Journal on trend research methods; 99% Invisible, The Trend Forecast; Communicating Fashion (Univ. of Minnesota open textbook); Surface on Salone del Mobile 2026; DesignWanted on Maison&Objet 2026; Dezeen School Shows; Material ConneXion. Figures from WGSN and Material ConneXion are self-reported by those companies.