Will your wardrobe reflect optimism or despair in 2023?

If you are a frequent reader of this column, you would have perhaps sensed an air of dread in my words, especially towards the end of 2022. A recent column about the chaos we’re living in is a case in point. It’s not just the geopolitics, politics itself and an economy that is perpetually teetering on the edge, it’s the rising cost of living putting a lot of pressure on our pockets; never mind load-shedding as a constant reminder that we quite possibly live in a failed state. 

We’re not alone. Everywhere in the world there seems to be an incessant sense of instability reflected in the politics, the stubbornness of Covid-19, and the likes of Twitterer-in-chief Elon Musk, who seems to be cranking up the volume on what is really minority far-right noise with every tweet.

In spite of all this, I don’t particularly think of myself as a pessimist, and it looks like I may not be the only one hoping for a brighter day. As many use this period to plan for the year ahead — ‘new year, new me,’ we often say — trends in fashion and indeed predictions from the Pantone Color Institute and other trend watchers posit an optimistic outlook on 2023.

Pantone’s colour of the year is viva magenta, “a shade rooted in nature descending from the red family and expressive of a new signal of strength”, the institute’s executive director, Leatrice Eiseman, writes. She continues: “Viva Magenta is brave and fearless, and a pulsating colour whose exuberance promotes a joyous and optimistic celebration, writing a new narrative.”

We’re desperately in need of one.

Luckily, we can turn to fashion for said positivity. Runways throughout 2022 presented bright hues and hints of decadence that made fashion look as fun as it used to be before the casualcore forced on us by the pandemic. We saw skin-baring trends, we saw fringing, pretty crochets and Barbiecore took off.

What’s Barbiecore, you say? A trend underscored by a bright pink hue most memorably coming out of the 2022 Valentino Fall show. Thebe Magugu famously transformed a fuchsia pink ball gown from Valentino for Vogue Magazine’s dress-swap initiative where two designers are tasked with reinterpreting one another’s work.

In 2023, we will see the debut of film director Greta Gerwig’s Margot Robbie-starring Barbie movie. Over on Pinterest, the trend has been developing since back in 2019 and strengthened over the lockdown periods of 2020 and 2021, as people no doubt sought something to hold on to in the face of that dark time. Similarly, on Tik Tok, “Barbiecore” became a trending hashtag.

On the red carpet, US country singer Kasey Musgrave gave us a pink Moschino moment at the Met Gala in 2019. The likes of Sebastian Stan and Glenn Close followed suit at the event’s 2022 edition.

Barbie’s resurgence as a trendsetting cultural icon is perhaps due to Mattel, the makers of the doll, adding a huge dose of diversity, giving her a variety of skin tones, hair and body types to reflect a cultural zeitgeist that demands inclusion. According to a variety of reports, Mattel’s Barbie Fashionistas doll line, released in 2020, features 176 dolls with a number of body types, 35 skin tones, and almost a hundred different hairstyles.

Elsewhere in fashion, 2023 sees the return of Louis Vuitton’s now 10-year-old collaboration with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, with items speckled in her signature multicolour and metallic dots — a joyful line to usher in the new year as it was unveiled on January 1 in Asia, before getting rolled out to the rest of the world on January 6.

In spite of the controversy the British royal family is currently embroiled in, I can bet a pretty penny we will be seeing their influence seeping into fashion, as the pomp of King Charles III’s coronation captures the world’s attention this May.

So, despite everything — with some of you reading this on your power-bank-charged phones due to load-shedding — I remain hopeful that this will be a year where humanity will hold steady and create a new narrative for itself in the way fashion seems to be. It’s up to all of us to literally wear the optimism on our sleeves, and maybe, just maybe, we can be inspired to find a “new strength”, as Pantone’s viva magenta suggests.