Pantone Renames Salmon Shade After Bon Iver’s Latest Album
The custom shade joins Prince and the Grateful Dead in Pantone’s club of music-linked colors
Pantone has given Bon Iver’s new album its own color chip. The company officially renamed 1625 C as fABLE Salmon, tying the peachy shade to SABLE, fABLE, the band’s fifth album that was released in April. The move caps a collaboration outlined in Pantone’s new case study, “The Story of a Musical Makeover Told in Color,” which follows frontman Justin Vernon’s shift from 2024’s SABLE EP into what he describes as his “new flesh,” a healthier self.
That arc plays out visually. The SABLE EP cover showed a pale square on a large black field. The new SABLE, fABLE artwork flips the composition, shrinking the black into a small square that floats inside an expansive salmon ground.
The color itself did not come from a standard swatch. When Vernon first approached Minneapolis painter Ruben Nusz about cover art, he became fixated on a salmon-colored frame in Nusz’s studio, which became the starting point. Working with Nusz and Miles Johnson, head of art and design at Secretly Group, he tuned the hue so it never drifted too red, yellow, or orange, until they eventually identified Pantone’s 1625 C as the one.
“Color and language are inseparable,” Nusz said, noting that the more abstract they made the salmon, the more it opened up and came to be defined by two words: Bon Iver. Growing up as an “emo, Jackson Browne–listening kid” in Wisconsin, Vernon once imagined Los Angeles sunsets in this color. This idea stuck with him for years, with Vernon eventually getting a tattoo of a pink-bellied salmon rendered as “flesh on flesh” on his arm. He now talks about the “salmon-belly” tone under everyone’s skin, a shade that suggests shared humanity as much as it does fish or twilight. The campaign pushes that idea outward.
From there, the team built a whole fABLE Salmon universe. A limited-edition zine shows Vernon dressed head to toe in custom-dyed salmon clothing. Photos place him with a 30-pound salmon. Tinned SABLE, fABLE smoked salmon, notebooks, hoodies, and beanies all match the chip. Graphic designer Michael Cina created a custom typeface and stripped the visuals to bare elements in a culture he calls obsessed with visual noise.
fABLE Salmon joins a small club of music colors that includes Prince’s Love Symbol purple and the Grateful Dead’s Grateful Red and Stealie Blue. Bon Iver’s project, though, turns one square of salmon into a full narrative about mood, body, and branding.