Blue New Year?

So according to Pantone, not only is 2008 the year of the Rat, but it is also the year of blue... Blue Iris, that is.



I don't know how I missed this, but apparently Pantone has been assigning colors to years for quite some time now. I mean, I know every year there are some colors that are hotter than others (2007 was Chili Pepper Red... interesting it wasn't some form of Green--lord knows that's all anyone talked about), but I was completely unaware that there was a specific color picked for each year.

The Times article goes on to talk about fashion, and how blue has been popping up on the runways of late. Which lead me to think of the great speech Meryl Streep (as Miranda Priestly) gives to a dumbfounded Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wear Prada:

"This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff."

Interesting... she's talking about the color blue.