Purple Is the Warmest Color
Everyone is wearing purple. Some would say it’s the shade of the season. But, that’s to be expected right? The color was all over the Fall/Winter 2026 runways, meaning in the seven-ish months between those collections hitting the runway and actually being available in-store, it had time to permeate as the palette du jour. But it’s not as simple as “purple is everywhere.” It’s actually like, why is purple everywhere?
It’s less crazy than it sounds. Purple is much more wearable than people think, for one, and it feels like a collective embrace of a color previously relegated to a statement, rather than a staple shade that actually goes with anything.
What is it about purple specifically? Perhaps that it’s overlooked. It can still be a statement color, as we saw on the COS AW26 runway, but it can also be a neutral (a rich aubergine can have the same almost-black effect as navy blue). We’ve seen purple most prominently though in colorblocked styling, which feels very new given that typically, colorblocking follows certain formulas like a neon and a neutral (see: Edouard de Weissenbruch’s personal style), or two primary colors (red and blue from Auralee FW26).
Purple and red was a prominent combination as seen on the Louis Vuitton and CELINE SS27 men’s runways, but one of the more interesting ones is the purple and orange colorblock (see: Colleen Allen FW26). There are also multiple Prada shoes from FW26 that come with two pair of interchangeable hiking laces; one of the first to sell out are the purple and orange. How two such Halloween-y colors go together so well, perhaps, is because they’re both secondary colors. When the tones are just right, it’s just wacky enough to work, which feels like a very self-aware, 2026-way to style a colorblocked outfit.
But a lot of other stuff outside of runway purview comes in purple, too. Like, everything from the new Vibram FiveFingers Trailope WP to On cloudrunners now comes in some grape-y hue; it’s the statement colorway of the moment.
It’s even been reported that the massive grail Jordan 10 “Sacramento” is going to be rereleased this December, a shoe whose purple-and-black colorway is an homage to basketball team the Sacramento Kings. Bringing back a grail-level retired shoe with purple accents during a purple-mania in the industry is a really smart move but also speaks to the hue’s vitality.
It’s reminiscent of the overly talked about cerulean monologue from The Devil Wears Prada. Cerulean is decided by the designers, gets airtime on runways, and trickles down to the sad charity shop where Andy Sachs bought her lumpy sweater.
Purple proves that this downward directionality isn’t the only way ideas can be filtered. Purple is everything everywhere, all at once; equally present on the streets and the runways to the point where the “who started it” conversation is completely moot. It’s more than just an “It” color, it’s a sign of how taste bubbles up, trickles down, and comes at us consumers every which way in today’s modern fashion machine.
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