The History of Hawai‘i: A Honolulu-Based Color Consultant Helped Locals Navigate Color Choices in the 1980s

For 133 years HONOLULU Magazine has kept its readers and advertisers at the vanguard of fashion, insight and fun. Starting out as Paradise of the Pacific in 1888 with a commission from King Kalākaua, we’re the oldest continually publishing magazine west of the Mississippi. Here is a look into our archives.

September 17, 2020

Brie Thalmann,

To help locals navigate 1980’s plethora of wardrobe color choices, HONOLULU fashion writer Deborah Witthans suggests consulting with Honolulu-based professional color consultant Pat Weaver of Color 1 Associates, a national organization with more than 1,000 representatives across the country. “For $75 she looks at an individual’s skin tone, hair shade, color of lips and eye, then creates a personal color harmony chart.”

Today, having instant access to trends that change every 30 seconds can be overwhelming, something Pantone (our modern-day color consultant) hints at with its 2020 Color of the Year, Classic Blue, described as “instilling calm, confidence and connection.” The color institute muses, “As technology continues to race ahead of the human ability to process it all, it is easy to understand why we gravitate to colors that are honest and offer the promise of protection.”

Kind of makes us miss the good old days. Pat, where you at?

The Way We Wore

Signaling the start of fall (and the much-anticipated release of designers’ new fall/winter collections), September is traditionally one of our big fashion issues. With that in mind, we devoted the September 2020 edition of From Our Files to stylish blasts from our past.