What color do we imagine the future?

Last week Pantone unveiled the color of the year - PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri - and for the first time it was not an "existing" color but a completely new shade. Pantone's goal is to frame the cultural change that seems to be just around the corner thanks to the integration between reality and virtual. In recent years contemporary culture has struggled to imagine the future, often seen as a scary and cold place burrowing into retro-mania and nostalgia. The metaverse is the perfect hook to relaunch the idea of the future and the possibility, that depends on capacity of imagination. Big ideas are useful to shape collective behavior and change the prospective on shared problems.

Speaking of the metaverse one of the features common to many of the emerging creative industries - from gaming to digital art passing through the world of cryptocurrencies and the web3 - is the color with which virtual worlds are imagined: a shiny shade halfway between the rainbow and the chrome, which can be defined as iridescent. Colors have a symbolic role in our culture - just think about political regimes - and in particular when a trend emerges so organically from creatives with backgrounds and from different industries, the rules that two tests make a clue apply. Fascinated by this trend, nss worked on the free paper "Iridescent Trend" that explores the aesthetic approach of the industries that are driving the change in the cultural paradigm and that will influence the years to come.

Iridescence is not a color but an optical property. The name derives from iris, or rainbow, which by extension indicates the range of colors of the visible spectrum. This property manages to be unique in its entirety of different colors. Iridescence creates divergent sensations combined with this new label associated with the dimension of the future. It is an intangible property but easily replicable on a digital level. Iridescence implies a subjectivity; it lies in the eye of the viewer, not in the object. This property echoes the process of progressive relativization of the virtual universe, where the experience of two users in the same environment can be completely different from each other. An ever-changing object makes the experience fluid, questioning the objectivity of reality.
Gaming is the sector riding the new trend, while fashion brands just realized that digital fashion can be an opportunity to open a new revenue stream and space to patrol. Contemporary art is probably the industry that is contributing most to the generation of this aesthetic, thanks to the boom of NFTs and blockchain technology.

On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, in 2022 nss magazine will launch the first magazine dedicated to fashion and pop culture in the Metaverse. Announcing nss meta was the campaign "Saluti dal Metaverso", a set of billboards in the main Italian stations where humanoids merge with reality, inviting people to join them on this new journey.

nss’ goal has always been to keep a fresh and innovative approach, with a constant effort to discover and tell stories regarding new trends working as a real tastemaker for insiders as well as curious minds. Along with nss meta, nss research & development was founded. Monthly reports to discover, forecast, and analyze new Generations’ shifting values and what is happening in the global culture. The world is moving so fast, technologies are changing human behaviors and needs.