Every brand has its own pattern to develop colors for each season. By looking deep into the brand’s philosophy, global color trend, brand’s color development, it is not hard for us to forecast its color use of the coming season.
About Initial
Clean and simple cutting, natural colors, interesting textures, combining simple elegance and functionality to a timeless form, are the signatures of Initial.
Initial’s brand philosophy is promoting relaxation, asking customers to get away from the busy daily life and back to originality. The brand’s concept is to help to shaping customers’ behaviors by changing their value judgments. Simple and harmonious colors of garments and shop interiors are introduced to fulfill metropolitan’s desire for peace and rest. For every season, a particular theme will always be applied to the collection e.g. photo hunt, traveling, time.
Colors of Initial
It is so obvious that Initial loves to use the core color of Beige, Brown, White for its designs, creating an unique monochromatic natural earth tone. Alternative colors other than the core colors are added as theme colors to form a seasonal color set. Initial carefully chooses its fabric colorations to make definite statements, as color use is the brand's major selling point. In fact, the alternative colors are dominated by the theme and the inspiration selected by initial’s designer. No artifical colors, only natural colors are used.
Color theme is applied to fashion, store interior and atmosphere, promotion all these aspects, to build a consistent style, thus turn into the brand’s competitive edge to impress its customers. It is like a whole package to wrap customer’s mind. Color combination is important tool helps presenting seasonal theme.
Analysis
After analyzing all of Initial’s collection and view its usage of color, we could spot out its tendency of using color.
Decoding Initial color formula:
Earth tone core colors + seasonal colors matching the theme
Earth tone core colors + seasonal colors matching the theme
1. Different shades of white, beige and brown form the core color family of Initial. These earth tone colors, considered as core colors, are used as basic colors in every season.
2. It is obvious that there is an increase in complexity in color family. Other than its core colors, white, beige and brown, more seasonal colors are added to its design in the newest collections when compared with old ones.
3. Seasonal colors of every season depend very much on the seasonal theme.
4. Only natural colors are used to achieve principle of familiarity, artificial colors are never seen.
5. Colors used in F/W are duller than that in S/S. Dark and rich colors were designated for winter, while pale and pastel colors were designated for summer.
6. Generally speaking, a richer color combination is used in F/W than S/S.
7. Initial color selection for every season is affected by the global trend. Initial chose its hottest color in line with the brand’s mood and degree of tint and hues, applied the color on garments in designed proportion.
8. Usually, special tertiary colors are chosen as theme colors.
9. Themes of Initial are usually about relaxation, e.g. traveling, photo hunt.
10. Proportion of earth tone colors used in designs is decreasing season by season.
11. Color uses in menswear, womenswear, accessories, store interior, promotion items are very consistently matched with brand philosophy.
To summarize, I would predict that in F/W 2009, Initial would still keep the brown, white, beige as basic colors for the collection, with relatively smaller proportion. Seasonal theme would be again about relaxation or the nature. There is also a great tendency for Initial to use the global hottest color of F/W 2009 (e.g. lavender purple and orange-red) as part of it seasonal colors. Monochromatic color scheme and complimentary would still be used continuously.
About my Initial F/W 2009
The 2009 F/W collection of Initial can be predicted by the evidence provided by the theme study and the brand color study. In my prediction, the collection would be inspired by the scents of nature. The theme is set as '' SMELL NATURE, HEAR SILENCE”, asking people to use their olfaction to experience relaxation, feel close to nature. Color of lavender, daisy, grass and wood are inspirations, as they all have very natural scents, making people feel relaxed.
A range of shades of purple, orange, green and brown are chosen as the seasonal colors for fall and being matched with different intensity of beige and brown, as it is Initial's common practice. Chosen colors are all tuned to relatively low chroma and value, so as to remain natural and comfortable. Hot colors predict for 2009, lavender purple (Pantone 687) and orange red (Pantone 1645C) may be the other possible major colors for the collection. Overall, the proportion of core color would not be too much this time.
Review
Aspect to improve in this project is that a deeper study in proportion of color use could be done. As Initial does not have much picture on its collections for publications, it is quite different for me to analyze its proportion of color use as a whole collection.
More practice can be done on achieving harmony with larger variety of colors, as practice makes perfect.
