Colour Me: Heritage Purple

In a new content series, Crowd DNA decodes the latest colour trends to unpack cultural shifts. This time, we’re looking at purple - hopefully without too much purple prose…

Introduction

Welcome to Colour Me – Crowd’s newest content series, using semiotics to decode colour trends and unpack cultural shifts in the process. Our second instalment explores purple’s changing cultural story. We look at how sugary lilac was at the forefront of the Y2K revival, and how emergently heritage purple is dominating our imaginings of new technological frontiers working alongside humankind’s spiritual renaissance.  

A Brief Cultural History

The changing brand and product use of purple charts the story of our broader cultural reckoning with technology, and our changing use of online/offline boundaries. Here we will see how it has been used to express the exciting frontiers of tech and then as part of a course correction – to evoke ritualised pasts as we have returned to prioritising human needs.  

Purple re-emerged in the cultural arena around 2019: at the height of the Y2K revival, and it was sugary lilacs that dominated (making a callback to the playful optimism of the early years of the dot com era). Then in 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta and catapulted us forward into new technological frontiers as the Metaverse, AR, VR and AI entered the cultural lexicon.

And so, Pantone ushered in the vibrant Very Peri as Color Of The Year (2022) with a description that could’ve come straight from Meta’s handbook: an “empowering mix of newness”, it would help us handle these new digital landscapes: “Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives… PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri places the future ahead in a new light. 

Cut to 2024 and in our problematically interfaced world, purple is shifting shades again. Where tech-utopias once offered excitement, intrigue and opportunity, more of us are now wanting to renegotiate our relationships with the online world. And so we are seeing a heritage purple (royal; reliable; luxuriant) being used by brands and products to draw us back into a world of offline enchantment. 

Here we track the metamorphosis of purple from digital dawns to strength in heritage.

From Hyperreal Frontiers

Dominantly, purple symbolises the coming together of technology and spirituality. We see this in how sugary lilac lights up the digital playground in these campaigns, so pretty in pixels. This purple has a delicateness to it, a vague insubstantiality that suits the hazy intangible realities of the online landscape. It’s a colour for dreaming. But it also intersects with the digital, and as this dreamy purple couples with technology, it offers what we are calling an engineered magic.  

Brands present this by opting for placing the sugar lilac against harsh, neon glows, lit up screens, and with lots of contrast between light and shadow (eg Lenovo, poppi, Messika, Chromasomic); or by how the Collider Beer campaign codes digital enchantment by using AI-created images – a bottle levitates before a purple-hued sky with a sparkle motif. Meanwhile, Chromasomic’s ‘Making Sense of Colour’ installation couples dream-like purple (the hyperreal LED light squares) with a nod to technology (the scaffold construction).  

Brands also use sugary lilac as an intentionally hazy, undefined visual language: Future Society combines pixelated graphics with delicate twinkles, all bound up in an otherworldly purple that gives a dreamy quality, while other brands use clouds and backdrops that shade from blue to pink, giving the purple a delicate, nebulous quality (eg, Collider, Sleepy Cocoa, Coach). 

This is a colour that hovers at the edges of the worlds that are known to us, shading the as-yet undefined (and still optimistic) realms of distant dreams and digital futures.  

 

Future Society use biotechnology to recreate ancient scents 

Chromasomic’s exhibition induces synaesthesia in its visitors, using the algorithm to create a highly sensory experience through the prism of colour

Coach’s new rebrand centres on dreamy visuals, transcending the physical world

To Human Heritage

Emergently, purple is the colour of opulence and sign-posts that there is an even more richly textured and enchanting world that lies beyond the computer screen. Purple is powerful, stable and substantial – velveteen, diaphanous, heavy – but now never pixelated. A colour you can almost hold in your hand. As we yearn for materiality, in its emergent expression purple is returning to its traditional connotations: now offering legacy over frontier with its rich and dynastic (the colour of royalty) history. 

And so we see how purple is infused more with red – the colour of flesh and blood, of humankind (and far from the dreamy, delicate blue-toned purple of imagination and possibility in its dominant expressions). Where purple was dreamy and hyperreal, it’s now decidedly human.  

This purple speaks to power and stability: see omsom’s bold, capitalised lettering and the strength implicit in clenched fists and firm angular body shapes (eg, Olivia Rodrigo, Suot Studio, Natwest). Strength and stability is communicated through direct, unflinching eye contact (eg, Orebella, Isabel Marant). Purple’s heritage is invoked to underscore its preciousness: Waterford’s Heritage Hunter uses the idea of legacy to dial up desirability with linguistic cues that call out its whisky as something highly sought after – ‘hunter’, ‘rarity’ and ‘resurrected’ tradition.  

We also see brands using Heritage Purple as a vehicle for texture and tangibility, calling us back into the real world through visuals of artefacts, where the human touch – or footprint – is foregrounded. Waterford Whisky draws upon rich, satiny textures while LOEWE offers intricacy, craft and ancient wisdom inspired by the artefacts of dynasty, reaching back through millennia for an offering that is precious, inimitable. Technology and AI are not the focal point.  

So, emergently, purple’s most fulsome articulation lies in the offline world, decadent and heavy with the weight of its history: a colour for indulgence and sensory stimulation.   

Lasvit Design focus on IRL enchantment

omsom go all in on indulgence and tangibility, silhouetted against rich purple

Waterford Whisky draw on purple’s age-old connotations to double down on ideas of ‘heritage’

Heritage Purple: How To

Heritage Purple, as a colour, contains both past and the future. In the quest for cultural relevance, here are some tips on how to leverage it to your advantage: 

  • Do dial down technologically-infused representations of purple. 
  • Do use visuals grounded in the real world, away from hyper-realistic and overbright AI-generated imagery. This engenders trust in consumers. 
  • Do lean on traditional connotations of purple – power, rarity, magic to speak to a demographic seeking the stability and materiality of the offline world. 
  • Dial up the visual and linguistic cues around indulgence and opulence as respite from narratives of doom and scarcity.

Future Forecast

We foresee purple doubling down even more in the physical world, and leveraging its rich and storied heritage to signify trust and reliability that is vanishing in an online world increasingly defined by scepticism and mistrust. We predict purple will become even more bold, textured and decadent in its future expressions: going back to the future, and drawing us into the richness of the world that exists beyond the black mirror.