Is it time to wear butter yellow?

NEW YORK – Butter yellow has been applied to a wide spread of items lately: cocktail dresses, jeans, jackets, hair clips, handbags and stand mixers.

It has been slathered onto the walls of restaurants and home kitchens, and has oozed onto red carpets and the stages of major pop music tours.

Like the dairy product the colour is named for, butter yellow ranges in tone from golden to almost white. And it has claimed the attention – not to mention the dollars – of a growing number of people.

“It will be the fashion colour for spring,” said Ms Jodi Kahn, vice-president of luxury fashion at Neiman Marcus. In spring 2025, the department store went all-in on butter yellow, offering it in the form of items like Alaia sunglasses, Vince sneakers and basketball-style shorts by Dries Van Noten.

Ms Kahn said the colour’s biggest selling point was its mood-lifting property. Butter yellow “has a bit of positivity and warmth”, she said, adding that it goes well with many neutral tones – white, navy and brown – that tend to populate wardrobes.

After being adopted by high-end labels such as Jacquemus and Auralee, the colour has gone on to infiltrate the offerings of brands across the pricing spectrum.

Mass retailers like the Gap, Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch are selling butter yellow clothing, as are independent brands based in various cities, such as Rachel Comey in New York, High Sport in Los Angeles and Cecilie Telle in London.

Contemporary labels like Tory Burch and Simkhai have also embraced it, and brands like Bottega Veneta and Chloe are among those that have kept the colour in the luxury space.

Butter yellow items on the runways at the fall 2025 fashion shows of Gucci, Marni, Versace and Jil Sander in late February suggested that interest in the sunny tone would not melt away soon.

Harling Ross Anton, 33, a writer who focuses on fashion and style, has long evangelised the merits of wearing butter yellow. In 2018, she posted a photo of herself in a monochromatic pale yellow outfit on Instagram and, in the caption, described it as a “stick of butter” aesthetic.

While the colour has become more mainstream, it has not deterred Ross Anton’s interest in dressing like a block of Land O’Lakes. “There is a charisma to it,” she said.

British actress Cynthia Erivo wore a Jacquemus ensemble in the colour to an Oscar party, and days later, French-American actor and fellow Academy Award nominee Timothee Chalamet coated himself in a butter yellow Givenchy suit at the awards ceremony itself in early March.

Other celebrities who have embraced the colour include American singer Sabrina Carpenter, whose wardrobe for her Short n’ Sweet tour included several buttery lingerie-inspired looks, many of which were heavily embellished with rhinestones.

Compared with other yellows like mustard or neon, butter yellow has wider appeal, said Ms Tina Burgos, 52, owner of Covet + Lou, a boutique in Newton, Massachusetts. That is because the colour is “more subdued and works on more skin tones”, she added.

The butter yellow items at her store include Mary Jane wedge shoes by Rachel Comey; cashmere sweaters by Demylee, a knitwear brand in New York; and baubles like beaded keychains.

Jake & Jones, a boutique in Santa Barbara, California, sells a similarly eclectic assortment of butter yellow products. Baggu shoulder bags, Cawley silk trapeze dresses and quirky boxy jackets by Eleph, a Dutch label, are among them.

Ms Jennifer Steinwurtzel, 44, owner of Jake & Jones, first noticed butter yellow blossoming in Scandinavian style capitals such as Copenhagen, Denmark, where brands were offering sunny clothing as an antidote to long, dark winters.

A sign to her that butter yellow’s popularity had reached a new saturation point was when one of her employees renovated a kitchen in the colour in 2024.

As butter yellow has proliferated in fashion, it has also bubbled up in the culinary world. In February, KitchenAid named “butter” its colour of the year and released a stand mixer in the shade for the occasion. In January, the restaurant Cafe Commerce opened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a pale yellow dining room.

Cafe Commerce’s chef-owner Harold Moore, 51, said the colour he chose for the restaurant – a soft yellow called “saffron” from Fine Paints of Europe, which sells 2.5-litre cans for US$175 (S$234) – reflected a cosy, flattering light. He used the same colour in his former restaurant Commerce, which closed in 2015, he added.

“You want people to be comfortable and you want them to look good – those two things come together in that yellow tint,” Mr Moore said.

Chef Molly Baz, 36, became associated with the colour after hosting YouTube cooking shows watched by millions in the butter yellow kitchen of her home in Altadena, California. She said she had been tagged in numerous posts on Instagram by people who had renovated their kitchens in the same colour.

Chef Baz, whose home was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires, called butter yellow “playful, cheery and inviting”, adding: “It made you want to eat.”

But she characterised her interest in it as a moment in time. “We will, in all likelihood, embrace a new colour story in this next chapter in which we rebuild and leave the butter kitchen as a marker of a truly glorious past,” she said. NYTIMES