Object of the Week: One Green Still Breathes. Bury the Colors That Don't.

Walk any showroom this summer and count the colors, the silvers that call themselves timeless, the whites that call themselves clean, the grays with three separate names for the same absence, the blacks, and the one daring beige that believes itself a rebel, and understand that an entire industry has agreed to mistake the draining of all color for good taste. And then, offered without apology on the 2026 Volkswagen Tiguan, one exterior option with a name you can say from the far end of the lot: Avocado Green.

Consider what that name did. When Volkswagen and Away dressed a capsule of luggage this month, they reached past the whole muted rainbow of the parking lot and dyed the collection, per the release, in a hue that mirrors the standout Avocado Green of the Tiguan. A suitcase brand went looking for nerve, and found the only pulse in the building parked on a crossover. So I will say what a color this brave is owed: a state funeral, and this green in the front pew.

Not a funeral for the green. The green lived. Hold the funeral for the dead, for every nameable hue the showroom quietly buried, the tangerines and the teals, the marigolds that used to argue with the sun, the oxbloods and the racing greens and the plums, lowered one by one into the ground under a spreadsheet that called each burial timeless. Drape the room in black. Let the survivors of the palette process past the caskets. And seat Avocado Green at the head of it all, sole survivor and chief mourner, the last shade in the room with the courage to be a color and not a fog.

Mourn accordingly.