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Multi and dark

Carly Mul • December 9, 2024

The year 2024 is coming to an end and the yearly announcements of the colors for the year 2025 have been published. What can we expect in 2025? Some years brought big changes, some did not. I will share some thoughts with you as I think 2025 will be interesting, especially for color! 


In 2024, the trend of bringing nature inside has reached its top. Neutral colors, hints of green and brown are dominant in interior design and very popular at every level of retail. The colors are seen in furniture, accents, housewares and walls alike. I took two photos this week at Pottery Barn, but could have taken it anywhere. These warmer colors have completely replaced the cool white and grey. Grey is still a little bit present as one of the natural colors, especially the darker tones, but white is definitely out. The natural colors are combined with a pop color, usually from the orange family. 


What can we expect for 2025? The nature inspired colors will stay strong but there are two new trends coming up with quite some intensity. In general we are going at a speedy pace and it is hard to keep up. In Jan of 2023, not even two years ago, white was still the leading color but I wrote that it was on its way out. It has been dumped out! 


First of all: we are moving to a much darker palette. Kona color of the year 2025 is Nocturne, a deep and saturated dark purple.  It has been a while we had such a dark color selected! Yes, purple is definitely more in the picture, but not one single color is jumping out. The trend is using a lot of colors: MULTI is everywhere. In previous blogs I called this the "library look" as the inspiration is coming from libraries. The covers of the books with the little letters dancing around, are making a unit held together by the bookcases themselves. Books stand for leisure, journeys to unknown destinations, adventure, expanding experiences in comfort. A library is almost the opposite of the clean and uncluttered look we had during Covid. It is a little messy and the relaxed chairs and sofas look totally different than the white and grey living rooms we had for a while.

Nocturne is a good selection not so much because of its purple but because of its depth and darkness. Very often the color of the year is not so much exactly that particular color, it is much more of an option based on a certain palette. Nocturne is selected by Robert Kaufman with quilters in mind and they could pick only one color. Purple is for many a favorite and a smart commercial choice.


Benjamin Moore, the paint company, selected "Cinnamon Slate" as the color for 2025. "Mocha mousse" is the Pantone color for 2025. All these colors are not selected for quilters, but for interior design and clothing. As I have mentioned often before, interior design is the place where the quilt industry is getting its inspiration from. The quilt industry follows interior design. These newer brown colors fit in the trend of 2024 that brought many shades of unusual browns and greens to the front. They bring nuance to interior colors. They are the colors of little accents in nature, a microscopic look at twiggs, grasses, seed pods, herbs mosses etc. So in a way the selection is totally not surprising. It fits right in where we already are and it has proven to be well received by interior design businesses from Target all the way to the top. Consumers are buying these colors for somewhere in their homes. It may be a new vase, a sofa, an accent wall, just about anything.


 I expect these to be colors that are not inspiring to every quilter. Actually I read a lot of negative comments about the selection. These browns create strong opinions! Modern Quilt Studio called Mocha mousse the drugstore pantyhose color. Yes, maybe that is a good description if you talk to an audience of people over 50. But the younger generations have never worn, seen those hoses. I don't believe my daughters (mid and late thirties) have ever worn tights in those colors and a drugstore isn't their place of shopping either. They look at these natural neutrals much more positively and even use them as nail polish! Talking negatively about beiges and browns shows your age! Modern quilters are definitely incorporating these tones in their quilts and then, with a pop of color, they take a new dimension. It is not the drab from your memory.... I saw several quilts that made it into Quiltcon 2025 with these colors. Mocha mousse combined with Nocturne and maybe Aqua or Orange.... that is totally new!! Congratulations to Émilie Trahan who is a great sample of a modern quilter using modern color combinations!

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Another interesting fact is that both brown colors are really an obvious combination of colors. Cinnamon Slate is a mix of heathered plum and greyish brown. Mocha mousse has brown and pinks. They are not open, clear colors, but "in between" colors that are hard to place. They are layered, have multiple colors in them. Trendy for 2025 are colors that are mixes of colors, MULTI here too. I explain it in my lecture to quilters this way: imagine you have a some piles of blue, green , purple and grey fabrics and you want to sort some more fabrics to the piles. Most fabrics are easy to place. They are clearly blue or purple. All those colors are not the trendy ones. New for 2025 will be the use of many "in between" colors, colors that make you hesitate where to put it: is it more blue or more green? Purple or grey pile? Brown or pink? These in between colors are coming from a second trend: looking back. Vintage, reproduction, reformation are the words connected with this and we see a revival of historic colors, especially the colors used outside in the past.


A few weeks ago I was visiting my daughter in NY City and Nordstrom had a big display with the title "reformation". It looked like a Little house on the prairie style. Lots of beiges and browns with rosy accents.  Many little flowers on dresses and big flowers in wallpapers. Very nostalgic. Actually most of the floor had the same colors as Pottery Barn. Do I like it? Will I wear any of that? Nope, not an entire outfit, but I may combine a shirt in that style with some dark gray for a winter outfit. There are others that can get excited about thoses dresses, that I wouldn't even wear in my favorite colors (which were one floor higher;)) Target has many racks of this kind of clothing that is not for me, but young girls are grabbing it! They grew up with an abundance of bright colors and are ready for another look. They have never seen the dustier/duller colors before. 


On a side note: I just read an article about "beige moms". Apparently these are mothers trying to expose their children to a broader variety in colors... not only brights! I am definitely a beige grandparent as well, because I find it frustrating that all the kids' stuff is in bright rainbow colors. Over and over again, always the same. As if kids can only be happy that way. The other day Nora wanted to draw the sky and complained she didn't have light blue in her selection of markers. Only royal blue. Of course, I looked for a set of non-bright colors, and had to go to the adult section of the shop to find such a set. That is crazy. Kids should be able to play with all colors. Now she can make light blue skies, grey clouds, brown trees and still use the bright for her endless flowers. She too thinks it looks much better (and loves the fact that I took her comment seriously).


For quilting, the trends of multi and going towards darker colors together lead to busy small prints in darker colors. The prints can be darker, the backgrounds can be darker, but the total look will be very much darker than 2 years ago. Liberty of London and Calico designs are very much in the picture, but only in darker colors, not sweet pastels.


I mentioned in my last blog that Anna Maria Textiles was the winner for me at Market. All Anna Maria's collections for 2025 will all be available in 3 different color ways. Anna said in her schoolhouse presentation: "not very matching, but more an eclectic collective mood of colors". That is her way of saying: MULTI. Her 3 colorways are: Dusty (vintage) , Cheery (brights) and Lush (darker, bohemian, which is really Anna's favorite). So smart and so good! With these 3 color stories she picks up the leading trends of vintage and dark and combines it with the less trendy but always commercial bright colors. She covers 2025 in every collection for her quilting community.


Other designers and companies are doing this as well but they cover often only one part. For instance, Andover is reprinting old favorites of Jo Morton who is back with Andover after a couple of years with Moda. Andover reprinted her best super classic lines, but they didn't look back with new eyes at the classic lines. They reprint it just as it was/is and are using it in the same way.  I hope they have an audience for this. It didn't do much for me and I have sold those fabrics years ago because they were great collections indeed! Vintage means "inspired by the past" but still adding a current twist to it. That is not simply going back.

The Little girls on the prairie display at Nordstrom was vintage inspired and the girls may have worn the same kind of dresses. However their poses and surroundings were very much those of independent, today' s females, who didn't  seem to miss their old environments. Inspiring marketing!
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