Why Every Luxury Brand Is Abandoning Color Right Now, and the Three That Aren't

In January 2026, if you lined up the campaign imagery from Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Celine, and Saint Laurent, you'd struggle to tell them apart. You'd see desaturated tones, muted grays, cream-on-cream typography, and near-identical sans-serif wordmarks. Luxury fashion has entered its monochrome era, and it all looks the same.

Scroll past those campaigns, though, and you'll hit a Jacquemus billboard soaked in tangerine, a Loewe window full of tomato red, and the orange of an Hermès box that hasn't changed in decades.

That split is the biggest branding argument in luxury right now. Why is the industry draining color from its identity systems, why are three brands doing the opposite, and what should designers in luxury-adjacent work take from each? Below are the answers, with palettes for each approach.

The great desaturation: how luxury lost its color (2024-2026)

It all happened fast. Burberry's 2023 rebrand under creative director Daniel Lee stripped its heritage check to near-monochrome. The Equestrian Knight returned, but the color palette retreated. By late 2024, Balenciaga's campaigns under Demna had shifted to stark black-and-white photography, with a brutalist look closer to a political pamphlet than a fashion ad. Bottega Veneta's 2025 campaign work leans heavily on tonal greens and grays that, on screen, read as neutral.

Then there's the typography convergence, which started well before the current color drain. Saint Laurent dropped the "Yves" and went to a plain sans-serif in 2012, and Burberry swapped its knight for a flat sans-serif wordmark in 2018, before bringing the knight back in 2023. Celine (which dropped the accent under Hedi Slimane and kept it dropped), Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Burberry all migrated to clean sans-serif or thinned-serif wordmarks. When your logotype is a thin black line on a white background, color takes a back seat and the typography carries the identity.

It spread well beyond fashion. Luxury beauty brands followed: La Mer's 2025 packaging refresh softened its already restrained palette further into pale celadon and silver, while Byredo continues to expand its grayscale system across fragrance, makeup, and home. In luxury hospitality, Aman's identity is all parchment and stone, and Edition Hotels sticks to matte black and warm white.

Here's what the dominant luxury palette looks like in 2025-2026:

Four of those five are close to non-colors. The one metallic accent, champagne gold, works more like a texture than a hue. That's what luxury looks like right now.

The strategy: why colorless reads as expensive

The move to monochrome has clear reasons behind it.

The "stealth wealth" cultural moment. Post-pandemic, post-logo maximalism, high-net-worth consumers signal status through absence rather than presence. A $4,000 cashmere coat in oatmeal says more to its target audience than a $4,000 coat covered in logos. Color restraint matches that mood. Quiet luxury has grown from a styling trend into a whole identity philosophy.

Recession signaling and brand risk aversion. Global luxury spending plateaued in 2025, according to Bain & Company data. When the economy gets shaky, brands fall back on "safe" visual identities that feel timeless rather than trendy. Monochrome reads as permanent. Saturated color reads as seasonal, and seasonal reads as risky.

The algorithm problem. Saturated color performs unpredictably across screens, social feeds, and dark-mode interfaces. A vivid coral that looks great on a calibrated studio monitor can look garish on a phone in direct sunlight. Monochrome systems are much easier to control when the brand lives mostly on screens. When your entire customer acquisition funnel runs through Instagram and TikTok, visual consistency matters more than visual drama.

Post-logo culture. As logomania fades, brands need identities that work without a hero symbol. Tonal neutrality becomes the identity. Call it "vibe branding" instead of "mark branding": you recognize the atmosphere rather than a logo.

The cost of conformity: when every brand looks the same

When everyone adopts the same strategy, nobody stands out.

Publications like It's Nice That and the Brand New blog have tracked how quickly luxury houses are shedding what made them visually distinct. On social media, independent critics have created side-by-side comparisons showing Celine and Saint Laurent campaigns that are functionally interchangeable. When two brands occupying the same market tier produce imagery that could swap logos without anyone noticing, neither brand owns its visual space.

A 2025 Vogue Business study found that Gen Z consumers struggle to differentiate luxury houses by visual identity alone when logos are removed. Participants were shown campaign imagery and packaging from five major houses with all wordmarks stripped out. Correct brand identification hovered around 22%, barely above random chance.

Brands strip out identity to signal exclusivity, and the sameness signals conformity instead. The "luxury uniform" turns into a cliché. If your strategy is to look expensive and every competitor has the same strategy, you just look generic.

That leaves an opening. For a brand willing to break away, the monochrome consensus makes standing out easier than it has been in years.

Case study: Hermès, Jacquemus, and Loewe, the color holdouts

Three brands are refusing to desaturate. Each uses color differently, but all three treat it as part of the structure rather than decoration.

Hermès: the original color-as-identity brand

Hermès orange (roughly Pantone 1385 C) hasn't shifted in decades. The brand's 2025-2026 campaigns, silk scarf collections, and stores are still unapologetically saturated. Orange is the brand. That consistency compounds over time, like a financial asset. Every year Hermès stays orange, the association gets stronger, and every competitor that drops color makes Hermès stand out more.

Own a color for long enough and it starts to own the category.

It can become something you defend in court, too. Tiffany has long enforced its trademark on Tiffany Blue, and Louboutin took the protection of its red sole all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union. A color held consistently for decades stops being a style choice and becomes property.

Jacquemus: Mediterranean saturation

Simon Porte Jacquemus has leaned harder into saturated color as the rest of luxury pulls away. The brand's 2025 Le Raphia campaign used deep terracotta, azure blue, and sunflower yellow across packaging, pop-ups, and Instagram content. Walking into a Jacquemus pop-up feels like stepping into a sunny courtyard in Provence. In a feed full of gray and cream, you feel that right away.

Here color does the job of setting the brand apart. Jacquemus uses it because the brand's story is about warmth, sensuality, and the South of France, and the palette tells that story.

Loewe: bold color as intellectual confidence

Under Jonathan Anderson, Loewe built a handmade, art-adjacent identity that uses bold color to signal creative authority. The 2025-2026 campaigns use deep reds, vegetable-dyed leather tones, and gallery-like color blocking that looks deliberate rather than decorative. Anderson's Loewe references ceramics, sculpture, and artisan traditions where color is inseparable from material. A vegetable-tanned leather in deep burgundy is a statement about process and provenance.

What the three have in common

For Hermès, Jacquemus, and Loewe, color carries meaning: heritage, geography, or a particular worldview. None of them treat color as a trend. They're colorful because the brand calls for it, not because colorful is "in," and that conviction is what makes the color work.

What this means for designers: choosing a side (or not)

So where does this leave you if you're building a brand in the luxury or luxury-adjacent space?

If you're branding an established or heritage-adjacent product, the monochrome approach is lower-risk but demands exceptional execution everywhere else. Without color to carry the identity, you're competing on typography, materials, spatial design, and texture. Your packaging has to feel exceptional in the hand, and your stores have to work through light and proportion. It's hard mode, with little room for error.

If you're branding a challenger or direct-to-consumer luxury brand, bold color may be the single most effective way to create instant recognition. But it must be ownable and consistent, not seasonal. Pick terracotta this year and sage green next year and you've followed two trends without building a color identity. The Hermès model works because of decades of discipline. Orange has nothing magic about it.

If neither extreme feels right, there's a hybrid approach. Brands like Aesop, Byredo in certain product lines, and Le Labo use a restrained base system with a single accent color or material texture that provides warmth. Not many brands have tried this middle path. Four neutrals anchored by one deliberate color can give you the polish of monochrome and still make you memorable.

That one saffron accent among the neutrals does a lot of work. It gives the eye somewhere to land, makes the brand recognizable mid-scroll, and shows intent without shouting.

Building a luxury color strategy that lasts

Whether you go monochrome, saturated, or hybrid, a few principles hold:

• Commit for decades, not seasons. The strongest brand color is one that never changes, as Hermès shows. If you're going to claim a hue, you need to be willing to live with it for 20 years. If that thought makes you uncomfortable, you haven't found the right color yet.
• Test across environments. Luxury branding lives across packaging, retail, digital, and editorial. A color has to work in all four to be worth owning. Print it on paper, look at it on a phone in sunlight, wrap a building in it, and light it in a dim store. If it fails in one place, it will hurt you there.
• Audit your competitors. Before choosing monochrome by default, map the colors every direct competitor uses. If they're all neutral, a saturated palette may be your smartest move. Standing out always depends on who you're standing next to.
• Beware the trend cycle. Today's monochrome luxury will eventually feel as dated as 2010s logomania does now. Brands whose color actually means something will outlast the cycle. Brands that adopted monochrome because everyone else did will scramble when the pendulum swings.

Speaking in color

Luxury's move away from color is rational. It responds to real cultural, economic, and technical pressures. But Hermès, Jacquemus, and Loewe show that color used with conviction and consistency is one of the strongest assets a brand can have.

Neither approach is simply right. The worst strategy is the one picked by default. Whether you build in monochrome or full saturation, make the choice on purpose, be able to defend it, and base it on what the brand actually means.

When everyone else is whispering, color is one way to be heard.