While most citified people tend to wear a surfeit of black, I have an excess of yolk, lemon meringue and buttercup in my wardrobe.
I see it as smuggling vitality and freshness into my shopping cart and psyche. I鈥檝e long been prone to to spot treat a particular malaise, to paint over a bleakness of the spirit. If many of us shop for the lives we鈥檇 rather have, the people we鈥檇 rather be, I also tend to I鈥檇 rather have.
In the spring of 2020, when everyone was panic-buying essentials like sanitizer and toilet paper, I too ordered what seemed most pressing: a chunky cotton cardigan from Spanish knitwear company Baba脿 in a warm butter yellow hue named mimosa, after the happy spring flower. The colour was all that the world wasn鈥檛: comforting and uplifting and hopeful.
Now that I think of it, the next things I found myself adding to cart that spring were the same colour: a pair of Pekin ducklings. My husband and son and I decided to spend a month as the ducklings鈥 foster family, and our tiny charges waddled around our 海角社区官网home bringing a downy goldenness to what I will summarize as a non-sunny time.
Chlo茅 and Loewe Spring 2025.
Getty ImagesNow, as we all find ourselves in another cortisol-flooded state of high alert, all things yellow are sprouting up on racks and runways and red carpets like daffodil trumpets in spring 鈥 an esthetic revolt against the gloom of our times.
鈥淗ow wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun,鈥 painter Vincent van Gogh once said, whose incandescently yellow canvases shone in contrast to the sadness and despair in his soul.
In his seminal treatise on the , 19th-century German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mused: 鈥淵ellow is agreeable and gladdening, and in its utmost power is serene and noble.鈥
More recently, in her book “The Aesthetics of Joy,” author Ingrid Fetell Lee wrote: 鈥淏right colour operates like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. It stirs us out of complacency.鈥 If colour is caffeine for the eyes and the soul, yellow is a double espresso. It鈥檚 like a visual SSRI, thought to trigger the release of feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin. As the brightest colour in the visual spectrum and the first colour processed by the human eye, the yellow of road signs, caution tape and Manhattan cabs can also quicken the metabolism, increase the heart rate and ignite our nervous system.
Katie Holmes at the Fall 2025 Zimmermann show in Paris; Timoth茅e Chalamet dressed like a stick of Normandy butter at the 2025 Oscars.听
Getty ImagesBut now that hypervigilance is the nervous disorder du jour, the jaune du jour is butter. Today鈥檚 yellow is tender and soft, lacking the acidity and alarmism of its bolder brethren. On the spring runways, Chanel showed a tweed suit the colour of cr猫me p芒tissi猫re, while Chlo茅 served up all manner of pale yellow confections, including a ruffled dress in silk and lace, both silhouette and hue resembling a fluffy souffl茅.
At the Oscars in March, actor Timoth茅e Chalamet turned up dressed like a stick of Normandy butter, albeit a refined, beautiful, Givenchy-clad one. At Paris Fashion Week, actor Katie Holmes attended the Zimmermann show draped in pale-yellow wide-leg trousers and a matching jacket thrown insouciantly over a chocolate-brown bodysuit 鈥 an outfit reminiscent of a petit pain au chocolat.
On the latest season of ”The White Lotus,” actor Sarah Catherine Hook鈥檚 Piper Ratliff floated around a Buddhist temple in a cotton-silk sundress from California cool-girl brand Ciao Lucia, the hue of freshly churned dairy channelling the character鈥檚 na茂vet茅. And at the Coachella music festival this past weekend, supermodel Kendall Jenner looked ready to sip camomile tea on the lawn in a creamy yellow cotton midi dress by Proenza Schouler.
Piper of “The White Lotus” in a butter yellow sundress from Ciao Lucia.
HBO鈥淏utter yellow is a call to action 鈥 which is to say, it is calling us to find peace and softness in a space that is charged and heavy,鈥 mused Ren茅e Power, designer and founder of Vancouver-based brand A Bronze Age, which is celebrating all things well-buttered this season.
While designing the Valley Dress in butter, Power thought of her grandmother鈥檚 cabin in Point Roberts, Washington. 鈥淲e wanted to define a space in the fashion scene that welcomes people home, that holds people close and reminds them of things they have long since forgotten,鈥 said Power.
A Bronze Age鈥檚 Judy raincoat 鈥 which reminds me of Catherine Deneuve鈥檚 yellow raincoat in the 1964 French New Wave film “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” 鈥 found nostalgic inspo in grandma-core plastic rain bonnets. 鈥淧ost COVID-19, people were eager to layer and take听on brighter, flashier patterns, we were excited to move and socialize and run into a new era. Now things are shifting,鈥 Power said. 鈥淲e crave softness and familiarity during times that are ripe with uncertainty.鈥 Pastel yellow serves as a visual palate cleanser 鈥 lemon sorbet for the soul 鈥 but also as a sort of sartorial pacifier amid our collective need to self-soothe.
There is an obvious stitchwork between the material world and our interior worlds, between landscapes political, esthetic and emotional. Still, I have often judged myself for my impulse to comfort shop, to throw clothes and colours at an emotional crisis. As writer Judith Thurman once wrote, 鈥淔eminism made fashion a guilty pleasure.鈥 So I like to comfort myself with something else Thurman wrote, vis-脿-vis her own guilt-wracked relationship to beautiful things. 鈥淚鈥檓 often ashamed of caring so much about clothes,鈥 she wrote in the New Yorker. 鈥淔ashion belongs to the realm of the senses. Clothes are more comforting, at times, than food. They arouse and sate all kinds of appetites. In that respect, hunting for them is fun.鈥 It is, especially if you catch a Spanish cardigan the shade of buttered baguette.
Shop the butter yellow trend
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