Soft Pastels

Pastels are no new spring trend – the season of blossoming flowers, baby birds, and budding leaves poetically lends itself to shades of lilac, eggshell, and fern – but Spring 2024 saw a refreshed and revitalized focus on using these classic seasonal colors in stylish new contexts. Not content to leave it at a baby blue or a pale orange, designers investigated how color interacts with materiality and texture, bringing new dimension to these seasonal favorites.

Rick Owens, Prada, and Givenchy, for example, used pastel tones across sheer, diaphanous fabrics to create an ephemeral distortion of the body’s boundaries. Meanwhile, Maison Margiela found unexpected edge within pastel as it cunningly deployed the color palette in its chaotically composed rewriting of restrictive feminine dress forms. Zimmermann and Versace saw pastels in a more classically feminine and romantic light, while Collina Strada gave them a grunge princess treatment in her show that began as an exploration of AI and neural net technologies.