In September of 1990, this very magazine anointed four designers as “The Kings of Color.” Written by the wildly charismatic André Leon Talley, the article focused on a quartet of designers taking their brushes, as it were, to the industry and painting liberally. Featured were the young upstart Isaac Mizrahi, va-va-voom Italian Gianni Versace, the effusive Frenchman Christian Lacroix, and the Turkish eclectic Rifat Ozbek. Each applied prismatic shades in an extremely deliberate way to set themselves apart from their peers, applying them energetically, joyfully, and purposefully, the results of which imbued their respective oeuvres with distinctive and dynamic jolt of energys.
Some 35 years hence and we’re in something of a color desert. The recent obsession with ’90s minimalism and the lingering effects of tastefully pared-back “stealth wealth” have reduced our collective palettes, leaving behind a restrained sea of black, white, navy, and gray. And yet there are some enterprising creators looking to buck the industry trend with their whole-hearted, abundant implementation of bright, bold, brassy color. Here, we survey this new generation of hue-happy sartorial engineers. From dazzling to dreamy, punchy to poetic, these are the New Kings of Color.
Christopher John Rogers exploded onto the fashion scene a decade ago, making a name for himself with expressive, feminine silhouettes and his radiant embrace of sumptuous hues of every type and kind. “I just think that [color] is the way I see the world,” he told the journalist Alina Cho during an interview. “I like to treat color as an object, so it’s about the color in a certain proportion as an object. It’s the way I have to exist.”
He’s equally at home presenting statement-making monochromatic outfits drenched in top-to-toe saturated hues—fuchsia, lime, orange—as he is riffing with his signature stripes in dizzying combinations. All this has won him two CFDA Awards, a growing list of respected retailers, and, recently collaborations with Target and J.Crew. But more than that, it has earned him a reputation as someone who is unafraid of the limitless potential of energetic color.
