Cloud Dancer might miss the mark, but makes space for the kind of creativity the next 25 years could really use.
Since 1999, every year in December, Pantone has elevated a color meant as more than just a swatch for your design library. The institute’s pick aspires to be a resolution for the new year, but its messaging is sometimes splotchy. Last year, Mocha Mousse, a quite-luxury-coded brown, was "underpinned by our desires for everyday pleasures," read the press release, and asked us to lean into the aspirational and luxe. But this bid for indulgence felt askew with what followed in the official materials, that brown also comes from nature, a not very not luxe place. In 2024, the pinky-orange Peach Fuzz emphasized a desire for a year full of sharing, community, and togetherness before mentioning we might also consider using it to "find peace from within."
The messaging around Pantone’s 2026 pick, Cloud Dancer, is similarly pulling us in different directions. The stark white shade promises to turn a space into a "refuge of visual cleanliness that inspires well-being and lightness," says the marketing materials. But Laurie Pressman, the institute’s vice president, also equates it to a "blank canvas," which can be a formidable prospect, as any creative who’s suffered the weight of making their first mark on a metaphorical page knows.
This year, the institute’s face-value messaging isn’t the issue so much as the choice in color, with a salvo of criticism coming largely from outside the house of home design. Some of it is gentle ribbing—my hair stylist wanted to know, were we really going to bring back frosted tips?—while others on the internet are throwing elbows, decrying the elevation of whiteness as an alignment with the perceived eugenics messaging of Sydney Sweeney’s maligned American Eagle ad. Others are going so far as to say it undergirds white supremacy. (Donald Trump, for one, could use truckloads of Cloud Dancer, having recently mentioned he wanted to freshen up the Eisenhower building in Washington, D.C., by washing the granite building completely white.)
"Pantonedeaf" is at least one phrase being thrown around to describe the pick. Dwell’s audience editor, Nicole Nimri, called it a recession indicator—up in the clouds, the markets can only go one way. Senior guides editor Megan Reynolds said Cloud Dancer sounds like a really bad weed strain—nobody should be that high. The Instagram account for the tabloid Weekly World News called the hue the "The Landlord Special," poking at the nation’s painfully high housing costs and puncturing any airs of sophistication Pantone may have hoped to put on. To me, the name alone is jazz hands, the stuff of cloying theater kids. It’s difficult not to read it as Cloud Daaaaaancer, in the voice of Brandon Flowers, a white Mormon man whose cultural relevance peaked in 2007, which only puts the choice further out of touch with the moment. (And that’s coming from a forever fan of the Killers.)
Pantone chose Cloud Dancer, a stark white, as its 2026 Color of the Year.
Courtesy of Pantone
Brands and designers are faring no better at what to do with it. At Dwell, an avalanche of pitches is burying our inboxes with icy-white bouclé throw pillows, snoozy subway tile, and even a Cloud Dancer edition of Play-Doh, which should be banished along with 2022’s "sad beige" trend as one of the more soulless and uninspiring things I can imagine my toddler playing with. Some are offering advice on how to incorporate white into our homes—about as useful as a tutorial on drinking water. The whiteout it all amounts to recalls Kim and the artist formerly known as Kanye’s Axel Vervoordt–designed Hidden Hills, California, manse: heaven for some, a psychiatric ward for the rest of us.
When I asked Sami Reiss, who covers covetable furniture for Dwell and with his newsletter, Snake, for a good example of white furniture (I had to ask, as there was none in my inbox, and especially not from Joybird, the millennial-coded home decor brand owned by La-Z-Boy that announced three milquetoast pieces in the official Cloud Dancer colorway), he said "it all comes back to the Royère Polar Bear, no?" This, of course, is Jean Royère’s 1947 sofa, a plush, swooping settee that might be as close as one can get to luxuriating in the ether. "These things are cloud-shaped, puffy, soft," he continued, adding that, actually, the return of Royère’s wispy white furniture can be traced back to Kim K. "I think about [her] having one a decade ago or so, and how it brought everything in that style to the forefront." Ye once actually tweeted it was his favorite piece of furniture, at a time when anyone still cared about what he had to say.
Joybird, a home decor brand owned by La-Z-Boy, released a three-piece furniture set in Cloud Dancer, including this Carin sectional.
Courtesy Joybird
The Polar Bear sofa by Jean Royère in 1947 did Cloud Dancer before Cloud Dancer did.
Courtesy of Royère
See the full story on Dwell.com: Your Challenge for Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year, Should You Choose to Accept It
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