Combining without guessing.
Colour & Pattern
Seasonal colour analysis has a cult following and a shaky basis. The two underlying variables it gestures at are real, simple, and you can assess them yourself in daylight.
Colour & Pattern
The rule about not mixing patterns is wrong and unhelpful. What actually determines whether two patterns work together is scale, and the principle takes about a minute to learn.
Colour & Pattern
Navy, charcoal, camel, cream, olive, brown. Building a wardrobe on neutrals is standard advice and it fails when people pick neutrals that do not work with each other.
Colour & Pattern
Complementary, analogous, triadic — the colour wheel gives you the vocabulary. What it does not tell you is that saturation and value matter more than hue relationships in clothing.
Colour & Pattern
A print is the loudest thing in an outfit and it makes every other decision for you. Which is either a constraint or a shortcut, depending on whether you know it is happening.
Colour & Pattern
It is the default for half the wardrobes in the country and it is genuinely unflattering on a significant number of people. The reason is value contrast, and there are workarounds.
Colour & Pattern
White is the most flattering neutral on a great many people and the most demanding garment in a wardrobe. Both of those are worth knowing before buying a white shirt.
Colour & Pattern
Most colour advice was written for a narrow range of skin tones and translates badly. The underlying variables — undertone, depth and contrast — apply universally; the recommendations attached to them do not.
Colour & Pattern
Wearing several shades of one colour is the easiest way to look deliberately dressed. It is also the technique most likely to look like an accident if the shades are too close.
Colour & Pattern
A neutral wardrobe becomes interesting through one deliberate colour in a small quantity. The proportion matters more than the colour, and most people use too much.
