As 2024 draws to a close, there seems to be fear in the air.
From a whirlwind election season to rising concerns about climate change, global unrest and a fragmenting sense of community both online and offline, people are feeling uneasy.
“It really feels like we are on the cusp of multiple crises around climate change, but also of growing global unrest and a fractured political landscape here in the United States, but also elsewhere,” said Jessa Lingel, professor of digital culture at the University of New York. Pennsylvania, told Yahoo Entertainment. The mood on the internet reflects this.
Trusted news and daily treats, straight to your inbox
See for yourself: The Yodel is the source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories.
“It is not only in the media landscape that people turn away from platforms such as Twitter [aka] ” “I think a lot of people are dealing with their disappointment and frustration with the election by turning off traditional media like the news and also kind of breaking away from some of the mainstream platforms.”
Disruption seems to be the overarching sentiment heading into the new year. According to trend forecasting agency Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), one color effectively captures this mood. It’s called future twilight.
“Future Twilight has a dark, moody and intriguing hue, somewhere between blue and purple,” Urangoo Samba, WGSN’s head of color, told Yahoo Entertainment. “It has a sense of mystery and escapism, and plays on themes of transition – whether moving from dark to light, or from sunset to sunrise – making it perfect for a period of tremendous change.”
Future twilight on the runway. (WGSN)
After analyzing “millions of data points,” WGSN’s Global Color Workshop selected future twilight as the color of 2025. In choosing a color of the year, Samba said versatility across all industries and regions is key. Future Twilight serves the purpose.
The color is said to offer “reassuring stability” in what WGSN describes as today’s “age of polycrisis.” The future twilight also has a “celestial, otherworldly” quality, which Samba says is influenced by “the second space age” and the rise of “synthetic creativity” such as AI-generated art.
Evan Collins, an architectural designer and founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, an online database that catalogs turn-of-the-century design aesthetics, told Yahoo that the “dusty, celestial” color of the future twilight is prominent in the “whimsical ‘ aesthetic that existed. mainly from the late 80’s to the mid 90’s. The term, coined by Collins, combines both whimsical and gothic elements and is anchored by dark purples and blues that resemble the future twilight.
“Especially in times when there is a lot of struggle and stress [when] When people are struggling with all kinds of major social problems, they will look to the mystical,” he explained. “[Whimsigothic] is not so future, space-oriented. It is more about looking back to the past to provide some comfort about an uncertain future.”
Collins doesn’t necessarily agree with the color as a reflection of the space age.
There is a sterility associated with technology that Collins said will be absent in the future twilight. WGSN’s descriptions of the color as “futuristic” and inspired by “science and technology” are more in line with the stark, cold aesthetic of the ’80s, Collins said.
The future twilight, as Collins understands it, is more a color of nostalgia and familiarity than of futurism and technology.
“It’s heavenly [and] alien, but not in a synthetic, high-tech space way,” he said of the color. “I actually think there’s a lot of negative things about that and the popularity of a moody, heavenly color is a way of actually taking it back. That is [why] ‘whimsigothic’ is popular and perhaps even dark in academia, and the trend towards darker tones that hark back to older spaces, which are cozy and have more traditional design vibes, as opposed to cold, synthetic ‘tech bro’ stuff.”
Lingel, like Collins, believes that the future twilight is a color that recognizes the uncertainty of our times – whether it’s politics, climate change or the continued push for AI – and how it affects the way we express ourselves online .
“For most of us, it’s not reasonable to think that we simply won’t communicate or relate to digital culture online because it’s such a powerful form of community,” Lingel said. “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty about how we use it, how digital culture changes human relationships. I think for many people the election was a very powerful, sobering reminder of the filter bubbles we live in.”
Lingel sees the future twilight as rooted in contemplation.
“I do see a connection with caves and caverns,” Lingel said of the color. “Caves are a place where people go to be contemplative and meditative, so I think people are looking for those spaces and not necessarily finding them online right now… I see the appeal of this tension between escapism and the future , and also looking for some form of stability.”
Technology is drastically changing our relationship with empathy. The future twilight in this context symbolizes our struggle to preserve it.
“I think this is a time when people are reevaluating,” Lingel said. “‘How am I going to spend this time online? Where am I going to find community? Are there healthier ways I can use these platforms?’ So I guess [future dusk] speaks to that desire for meditative spaces.”
For WGSN, future twilight remains precisely named and described. The color is representative of the exciting and unprecedented advances in science and technology. It is intended to herald an era of transition.
