Pantone has announced Mocha Mousse as its 2025 color of the year. It’s the second year in a row that Pantone has chosen a food-themed color to represent the mood of the year.
As Fashionista reports, this milk-chocolate hue continues the theme of food following 2024’s official color, “Peach Fuzz.” That pastel, sherbert-y shade was decided upon to inspire calmness and comfort, a feature shared by the newly crowned soft-coffee tone.
“Underpinned by our desire for everyday pleasures, Mocha Mousse expresses a level of thoughtful indulgence,” Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of Pantone Color Institute said in a press release. “Infused with subtle elegance and earthy refinement, Mocha Mousse presents a discrete and tasteful touch of glamour. A flavorful brown shade, Mocha Mousse envelops us with its sensorial warmth.”
Though this year’s unofficial color was, without a doubt, “Brat” green, an acidic neon inspired by Charli XCX’s chart-topping pop record, the announcement of Mocha Mousse suggests people are turning towards muted and relaxed colors, influenced by a desire for a softer, more balanced life of peace and ease.
“Mocha Mousse finds harmony and balance between the demands of modernity and the timeless beauty of artful creation,” read a press release. Vice President of the Pantone Color Institute, Laurie Pressman, added, “The everlasting search for harmony filters through into every aspect of our lives including our relationships, the work we do, our social connections and the natural environment that surrounds us. Harmony brings feelings of contentment, inspiring a positive state of inner peace, calm, and balance as well as being tuned in with the world around us.”
This dessert-inspired shade is also reflective of the fashion landscape, with brown overtaking black as the go-to neutral for designers in their Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 collections. Brands like Coach, Bottega Veneta, Miu Miu, JW Anderson, Chloé and Brandon Maxwell have all embraced some variation of the toasted tint on recent runways, inspiring a 1,000% increase in searches for chocolate brown on shopping platform LTK this past November. Mocha mouse falls on the lighter, subtler side of the brown spectrum.
“Infused with a sensorial warmth that comes through in soft touch weaves, buttery leathers and suedes, cushy velvets, cashmere, angora and shaggy, furry knits that envelope and embrace, Mocha Mousse transports our senses into the pleasurable comfort it inspires and invites,” read a press release.
In addition to the announcement, Pantone will be taking Mocha Mousse on a celebratory international tour. The company will first stop in London to light up the city skyline in the cozy shade. New York, Shanghai and Mumbai will also receive visits.
Pressman added, “For Pantone Color of the Year 2025 we look to a color that progresses our embrace of the feeling of our Pantone Color of the Year, Peach Fuzz into another dimension, extending further into our desire for comfort, and the indulgence of simple pleasures that we can gift and share with others.”
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