‘Orange is the new brat’ as we head into Taylor Swift fall

Much like certain songs and movies come to define the zeitgeist every summer, so too do colors. And like the songs and movies that come to encapsulate the cultural moment, it’s usually hard to predict which color will emerge as the dominant hue in social media posts, clothes and accessories.

Back in 2024 was, of course, the summer of brat green, inspired by the Charli XCX album “brat” — and our next guess says this year is looking like it might be defined by another pop music phenomenon.

Amanda Kehrberg studies digital culture at Arizona State University, and joined The Show as our resident culture expert to discuss more.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: So tell us about this color and this artist that you think are looming on the horizon.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, I imagine listeners can guess. We’re talking Taylor Swift. We’re talking Swiftynomics, “The Life of a Showgirl” album dropping on Oct. 3, and we have this moment now where we can safely say, orange is the new brat.

DINGMAN: Orange is the new brat. I love it. I love it.

So what, what do you take away from this, this orange color? What are what are some associations there?

KEHRBERG: So orange is generally known in psychology as this energetic, lively, excited, really, really friendly color. Also known — if anybody has ever had your aura photo taken in Sedona like me — I can’t relate to the orange one. I always have a shocking bold red color, but orange also for people is this lively friendly color.

And according to Taylor Swift, that’s what her life has been like lately. Her new life with Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce.

My theory, of course, is that if you look at the blur of the last two years and the Kansas City Chiefs’ colors of red and gold and you mix those together, you get a kind of Portofino orange glitter that we’re talking on this new album.

DINGMAN: So what are some other places we have seen this orange hue crop up since her album reveal?

KEHRBERG: Yeah. So this is what happens every time some new color just takes over the zeitgeist. Everybody scrambles to participate in some way. So of course we’ve got the local Kansas City Union Station went orange, but we also had the Empire State Building go orange. X, Google, Canva, brands across fashion and food posted orange content, M&Ms.

But I have to say the people who had it the best are pretty much every social media manager who woke up in Texas that day. Just, “Orange you glad you don’t have to change your brand colors at all?” Just Whataburger, Texas Longhorns, pretty happy people.

DINGMAN: Well, so what do you think is behind, because as you were just pointing out, we see this phenomenon all the time where brands, social media headers, people change their traditional color schemes to associate themselves with this new color that, say, a popular artist is expressing.

What do you think is behind that urge to kind of align yourself or associate yourself with that color?

KEHRBERG: Oh my gosh. I mean, that’s the classic thing, right? If we can like steal a little bit of that feeling that you have about an artist, about an entertainment product, about a new song, whatever it is, we can associate that happy emotion that you have with them with our brand. You just feel a little bit of that today for M&M’s or for Balenciaga.

It’s just a way I think to get to make your brand feel a little bit new and fresh and involved in the conversation, even if, of course, you’re not going to long term change those colors, because the fact that they’re steady and reliable as the colors they are is also important.

But yeah, social media, because it’s a changing conversation every day, really lends itself to, oh, we need to find ways to connect with people today and of course tomorrow in the long term.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

DINGMAN: You know I have to say something I’m thinking about as we’re talking about this is, you know, as a millennial public radio host, I’m contractually obligated to be into vinyl. And I sometimes find myself having this sort of crusty conversation like, “Nobody cares about album art anymore. It doesn’t really matter.”

But between Charlie XCX and Taylor Swift, there is a sense, it seems like, that an artist with a really strong vision can still drive not just the cultural conversation, but kind of cause us to see the world through their eyes a little bit.

KEHRBERG: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think that, as a millennial public radio listener, I agree. Also contractually obligated to be into vinyl. I’ve got, I’ve got Sabrina Carpenter’s new album on the way right now. And I think, yeah, it really is shaping the conversation now in a way that I feel like it it hasn’t in a while.

So when these, these new album covers drop and then we wait for all of the different versions, too, it becomes a way to shape the conversation both aesthetically and thematically as well. I think Sabrina Carpenter has definitely led the discourse very much thematically in recent months, while in the case of Brat summer and then now Taylor Swift’s orange, it’s been very much an aesthetic disruptor.

And it has been a disrupter. I mean, if you look at like what Pantone thought the color of the year was going to be, we had Mocha Mousse. Pinterest, based on all their aggregation of everybody’s clicks and cues, thought it would be dark cherry. Nothing matters. Nothing matters when Taylor Swift enters the conversation.

DINGMAN: Right. Crowds out everything else. Well, the other thing that I think is interesting about these colors — like orange, green — these are very like bright, attention grabbing colors, which seems like a bit of a departure from the so-called millennial gray phenomenon.

KEHRBERG: Yes, yes. Oh my gosh. I swear I can’t open TikTok now without some bright-eyed Gen Z person completely demolishing a millennial gray kitchen. We had so much gray in our lives. I mean, not to get too dark, but I think we had a lot of gray in our lives thematically.

And then the movie desaturation that we saw in across cinema in the 2000s in the early 2010s, I mean, there was just a specific aesthetic that was really, really pushed against bright saturated colors.

And so we’re seeing such a response to that now, whether, yeah, we’re talking about these really, really bright greens or that we saw even with Billie Eilish, the yellows that we’ve seen come from artists like Rihanna and Beyonce. I mean, these are just bright, bold, saturated colors, and that is a very different vibe.

DINGMAN: Well, we’ll be keeping an eye on the orange as we head into fall.