How to wear yellow like Blackpink’s Lisa, Kate Middleton, Anne Hathaway – the happy colour is perfect for summer 2022

For years, I wanted to be the sort of woman who regularly wore yellow. I loved the vintage yellow dress model Kate Moss wore in 2003, and I bought one of the copycat designs she made of it at UK retailer Topshop. I was equally enamoured with actress Michelle Williams’ saffron-coloured Vera Wang gown at the 2006 Academy Awards. Both women looked utterly beautiful – but when recreating their looks, I had a questionable degree of success. That’s because, while bold sweeps of yellow are wonderful mood lifters, many women – myself included – are not brave enough to swan around in the sunflower and egg-yolk shades that dominate the catwalk. However, with yellow the major fashion trend of 2022, designers are creating collections that are not just beautiful but flattering. From buttercup to canary via lemon and dandelion, yellow – more than any other colour – is associated with summer, heat and happiness. As the world came out of multiple lockdowns last year, designers released more yellow collections than ever before, including Roksanda, Emilia Wickstead, Zimmermann and Molly Goddard. The popularity of the hue among celebrities is indisputable. One Bulgari party in Paris saw actress Anne Hathaway looking dazzling in a daffodil-yellow shirtdress and matching shorts by Valentino. Equally head-turning was Lisa from K-pop girl group Blackpink in a bandeau top and straight skirt from Korean brand Pinkong. The shades they picked weren’t quite as easy to wear as the one chosen by Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore an Emilia Wickstead dress to the Jubilee church service in London with a matching Philip Treacy hat. The hue was a specific one: a pale lemon yellow, which is a shade one fashion director calls more flattering than a facelift. Clearly the rest of us agree, as searches for pale yellow hats increased 300 per cent globally, according to Google, while “yellow wedding guest dress” and yellow shoe searches grew 298 per cent and 170 per cent respectively in the weeks after the Jubilee. More recently, at the Wimbledon tennis tournament’s women’s singles final, Middleton was clad in a yellow dress from London-based designer Roksanda that she had previously worn on a public appearance in Jamaica. The fashion press is now calling yellow the colour of 2022, and quite rightly. But the key is finding the right shade. “Pale yellow is a soft shade that’s a lot more flattering than anything in a more primary version of the colour,” says Ella Ringer, the creative director of Yolke, a European fashion brand that ships to Asia and uses yellow in nearly all its designs. “It’s one of those rare colours that works on blondes, grey-haired women, brunettes and redheads.” As with any colour, what you combine it with is all-important. Lemon works particularly well with cream, black, green, navy and chocolate but also classic neutrals such as camel. The only colour combinations to avoid are primary reds (too McDonald’s) and black (too bumblebee). Look to Queen Elizabeth if you’re aiming for head-to-toe yellow. One of the reasons the Duchess of Cambridge’s Jubilee dress was such a success was the fact that it nodded to the guest of honour who wasn’t in fact there. The fit and colour of her Emilia Wickstead piece was notably similar to a pale yellow dress the queen wore to attend the Cambridges’ wedding in 2011, complete with yellow hat and bag. Colour-wise, it was also similar to the paler, buttercup shades Princess Diana often wore in the early years of her marriage to Prince Charles. There’s a reason royals are so enamoured by the shade. The colour has long been an indicator of wealth: in China, egg-yolk yellow was long associated with emperors, power, royalty and prosperity, while in India, a buttery version of the colour was seen as spiritual and linked to Krishna. Saffron yellow is so heavily associated with money and power in India that it is even present in the national flag, placed there as a reminder to leaders to be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. Its symbolism may be working better on monks than politicians; Buddhist devotees’ robes are dyed saffron to show how their wealth lives in their calling. Perhaps the rest of us could get our lunch with a side order of symbolism – yellow is a trend for interiors as well as clothing. “Interiors and fashion have never been so closely intertwined and yellow more than any other shade bridges the two so well,” says Ringer, whose brand makes table linens and dresses. “There’s such a demand for matching dresses, tablecloths and napkins at the moment and I think because yellow is such a happy, joyful shade it’s the colour everyone gravitates towards.” Colour consultants such as Jules Standish agree. “We also associate yellow with sunshine,” she says, “which means that just by wearing it, we can boost our mood by being less anxious, feeling more in harmony and balanced and therefore refreshed and ready to go.” In a summer of doom-laden headlines, what could be better than that?