the color forecast

OK, so far I've been more impressed by this than anyone I've told about it, but I am not going to let that stop me from blogging about it: the color forecast.

What is the color forecast, you might ask? The Pimkie clothing company has installed cameras in Paris, Milan, and Antwerp that record each passersby's clothing, magically extracting the colors and posting them to their website. Not only that, but they provide visualizations that you can use to explore the colors of the day, week, and month. So perhaps forecast is a bit of a misnomer, since we're mostly looking backwards, but let's look past that and explore some of the data.

Here's what clothing colors have looked like recently in Milan:

Normally, I would be offended at a chart that combined as many colors as the ones above (or even a fraction of them). But that doesn't apply when what is being visualized is the color mix itself. Apparently, periwinkle is in right now in Milan. Who knew? Answer: Pimkie, and they are going to use this knowledge to try to get you to buy periwinkle colored clothing:

I still love it.