What Is Colour Forecasting in Beata Geyer's Work?

Colour forecasting, as Beata Geyer describes it on beatageyer.com, is the collective effort to predict what colours consumers will want to buy roughly two years in advance. In her work it appears both as subject matter and as method: her 2020 site-specific installation LOVED, shown in the FABRIK exhibition at Penrith Regional Gallery, Sydney (21 November 2020 – 28 February 2021), is described as "a colour forecast, a personal journey into the past, the presen[t]" — an artwork that takes the forecasting industry itself as its material.

The definition Geyer works with

Geyer's own framing, drawn from the LOVED project text, sets out the core idea:

• Colour forecasting is a collective effort to forecast what consumers want to purchase about two years ahead.
• It is complex and yet intuitive, with a history dating back to the 18th century.
• It has been a major driving force in the fashion and textile industry since that time.
• It is a fundamental part of fashion and trend predictions.

The two-year lead time is the detail that matters most. Forecasts are not reactions to what is selling now; they are bets placed well before production, buying, and retail cycles begin.

Why colour drives purchasing

Geyer's argument for why forecasting has commercial power rests on a simple observation: most products people buy are fundamentally the same, so colour plays a major role in influencing purchasing decisions. She puts it more bluntly with a quoted industry line in the LOVED text:

"Colour sells and right colour sells better" – Colour Marketing Group

From this she draws a larger claim: colour feeds the cycle of consumption, offering "seemingly new choices time and time again." The same object, recoloured, can be presented as a fresh choice — which is precisely what makes accurate forecasting valuable to manufacturers.

Who produces the forecasts

Geyer names the major forecasting companies whose palettes manufacturers follow. Every year, new colour palettes are released by:

These palettes are issued for manufacturers of all kinds of consumer goods to follow, which is what turns a forecast into a coordinated shift across many unrelated product categories at once.

How forecasting spreads beyond fashion

Geyer notes that fashion designers both set and follow trends, and that this influence increasingly feeds into other industries — particularly interiors and furniture design. Fashion houses routinely add interior collections to their output, carrying forecast palettes into the home.

The range of themes in the trend books she describes is wide:

• Psychedelic neons, energetic reds, exuberant oranges, strong blues, cooling greens
• Muted, bohemian neutrals
• Timeless monochromes

What LOVED does with this

LOVED explores intersections between colour, fashion and design, with a particular focus on colour forecasting and palette development. Rather than illustrating a forecast, the installation treats forecasting as a cultural mechanism — one that Geyer connects to a specific moment:

• The current collective mood makes it difficult to tap into a future zeitgeist.
• The (post)pandemic colour forecasts seem to highlight a lack of certainty about the future.

That is the tension the work sits in: an industry built on confident two-year predictions, operating at a moment when the near future is unusually hard to read.

Where it fits in her practice

LOVED is one of several site-specific installations documented on beatageyer.com, alongside FALL in the BLUE TOO exhibition at WAY OUT Kandos (27 February – 11 April 2021) and METROPOLIS in the MATERIAL GIRRRL exhibition at the China Cultural Centre, Sydney (31 March – 27 May 2022, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas). The site-specific format matters here: a colour forecast is normally distributed as swatches and trend books, and Geyer's version instead occupies a physical space, where colour is encountered rather than specified.