The Bliss of Wearing Butter Yellow

New York Times

04-03-2025

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 color is named for, butter yellow ranges in tone from golden to almost white. And it has captured the fascination — and wallets — of a growing number of people.
'It will be the fashion color for the spring season,' said Jodi Kahn, the vice president of luxury fashion at Neiman Marcus. This spring, the department store went all-in on butter yellow, offering it in the form of items like Alaïa sunglasses, Vince sneakers and basketball-style shorts by Dries Van Noten.
Ms. Khan said the color'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, brown — that tend to populate wardrobes.
After being adopted by high-end labels like Jacquemus and Auralee, the color 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 Chloé are among those that have kept the color in the luxury space.
Butter yellow items on the runways at the fall 2025 fashion shows of Gucci, Marni, Versace and Jil Sander late last month 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 evangelized 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 color has become more mainstream, it has not deterred Ms. Ross Anton's interest in dressing like a block of Land O'Lakes. 'There is a charisma to it,' she said.
Cynthia Erivo wore a Jacquemus ensemble in the color to an Oscar party last Friday and, two days later, Timothée Chalamet coated himself in a butter yellow Givenchy suit at the awards ceremony itself. Others celebrities who have embraced the color include the 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 Tina Burgos, 52, the owner of Covet + Lou, a boutique in Newton, Mass. That is because the color is 'more subdued and works on more skin tones,' Ms. Burgos said.
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 key chains.
Jake & Jones, a boutique in Santa Barbara, Calif., 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.
Jennifer Steinwurtzel, 44, the owner of Jake & Jones, said she first noticed butter yellow blossoming in Scandinavian style capitals like Copenhagen, 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 color last year.
As butter yellow has proliferated in fashion, it has also bubbled up in the culinary world. In February, KitchenAid named 'butter' its color 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 color he chose for the restaurant — a soft yellow called 'saffron' from Fine Paints of Europe, which sells 2.5-liter cans for $175 — reflected a cozy, flattering light. He used the same color 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.
The chef Molly Baz, 36, became associated with the color after hosting YouTube cooking shows watched by millions in the butter yellow kitchen of her home in Altadena, Calif. She said she had been tagged in numerous posts on Instagram by people who had renovated their kitchens in the same color.
Ms. 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 characterized her interest in it as a moment in time.'We will, in all likelihood, embrace a new color story in this next chapter in which we rebuild and leave the butter kitchen as a marker of a truly glorious past,' she said.
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