Heian era
Crimson & Navy— 紅と紺
Deep safflower crimson against navy — the courtly contrast of Heian-era robes and formal Edo textiles.
Collection · 24 palettes
Fashion Color Palettes
Colors that survived centuries of wear — in fabric, dye, and silhouette.
Japanese textile tradition is one of the oldest and most sophisticated color systems in the world. Every combination in the Wada catalog began life as a textile recipe — dyestuff combinations achievable with plant-based pigments on silk, cotton, and hemp. These aren't digital abstractions. They are combinations that have been worn. The ones here translate most directly to contemporary fashion: editorial lookbooks, clothing brand identity, collection decks, apparel packaging, and the kind of runway reference that a fashion designer's studio would actually pin to the wall.
From the archive
Support the archive The full catalog, on your disk, as a thank-you.
- All 378 palettes (348 Wada + 30 editorial) in five formats
- Figma design tokens (W3C-spec JSON, drag into any file)
- Tailwind v4 + v3 configs — drop into any project
- CSS custom properties — every plate, one stylesheet
- 378 museum SVG plates — print-ready at any size
- Full JSON — colors, names, eras, moods, dominant hues
See what's inside
Launching soon. The free archive stays free, always.
Library
Colour books worth owning
The theory and reference behind palettes like this — recommended on Amazon.
Book links are Amazon Associates affiliate links. Your price is unchanged; a small commission supports the archive. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Studio
Off the screen
You have the fashion color palettes in front of you. These are the materials a colour study like this actually gets made with.
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Pantone
Color Bridge Guide Set — coated & uncoated
This site hands you hex codes. Color Bridge is the deck that shows what an RGB or HTML value becomes as CMYK ink, and which Pantone spot sits nearest it — the translation step between a screen palette and a printed one. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both stocks.
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Pantone
Color Bridge Guide — coated
The coated half on its own — Pantone to CMYK, RGB and HTML in a single fan. The smaller entry point if your work only ever goes onto coated stock.
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Studio spectrophotometer
A spectrophotometer profiles the whole chain — display, printer, projector, scanner — so the colour you picked is the colour that comes out the other end. The full-fidelity option for work that ends up printed.
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Calibrite
Display Plus HL colorimeter kit
A colorimeter calibrates the monitor itself. Worth saying plainly: an uncalibrated screen is the most common reason a palette that looked right on your desk looks wrong everywhere else.
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Passport Photo 2
A pocket target for fixing white balance and exposure at the moment of capture — the step before any colour correction, if your palette starts from a photograph rather than a screen.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 24 — Art Nouveau
Gansai are traditional Japanese watercolour pans — dense, matte and easy to mix, the closest everyday medium to the flat printed colour Wada's plates were made in. This is the Art Nouveau-themed 'II' edition, a different 24 to the standard set.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 36
The larger pan set. More range means mixing toward a specific plate rather than approximating it from six colours.
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Strathmore
300 Series watercolour pad, 140 lb cold press
140 lb cold press is the weight that takes a wet wash without buckling — the paper most colour studies end up on.
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Pentel
Fude Touch brush sign pen
A felt brush tip for the labelling and linework around a swatch study — the annotation half of a colour notebook.
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Pantone
Formula Guide — coated & uncoated
When a palette leaves the screen, this is the shared vocabulary between you and the press. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both.
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Amazon Associates affiliate links — your price is unchanged and a small commission keeps the archive free. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.