Pantone honours Prince with custom shade of Purple

The Prince Estate has partnered with the Pantone Color Institute to create a custom colour for The Purple One, also known as Prince. As is befitting of the purple clad pop icon this custom shade, called Love Symbol #2, is a natural purple hue.

Picturing Prince you will be hard pressed to see him in anything else but the colour purple. His relationship with the colour became firmly established in 1984 with the release of his soundtrack for the eponymous film Purple Rain. The soundtrack went on to win an Academy Award and Prince and purple were irrevocably intertwined.

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You might know the Pantone Color Institute from their annual colour of the year (FYI, this year’s colour is Greenery. The institute is a massive player in the fashion world, from global color trend forecasts, seasonal colour analysis of fashion week and their custom colour creations, they influence the colours of our daily lives.

In their collaboration with The Prince Estate they have taken inspiration from Prince’s custom-made Yamaha purple piano. “The colour purple was synonymous with who Prince was and will always be,” Troy Carter from the Prince’s Estate explained in a press release from Pantone. The collaboration is a way for Prince’s legacy to continue after his untimely death at 57 in 2016.

The colour was named for the iconic symbol that Prince went by from 1993 to 2000 and the estate is currently in talks about potential collaborations on products that will incorporate the ‘Love Symbol #2’ colour. We’ll have to wait and see where we’ll see this homage to Prince pop up first but as another purple shade, ‘Royal Lilac’, has already made its way into Pantone’s colour report for autumn so we wouldn’t be surprised Love Symbol #2 will do well this season.

Sally Wijers