Sewingplums

Do you look good wearing the strong yellow of Easter chicks ?

Many trends this season are more about colour and prints than shape (see trends post).

Strong pure colours are important : red, blue, yellow, plus the intermediate green, purple, orange. All in bright versions, not with a little white or black mixed in to soften their impact.

Colour reproduction on my screen isn’t good so this may not look ‘primary’, but hopefully you get the idea. Drawing the colour wheel this way shows it may be a good idea to choose the right red or green. Though the best colour may only be obvious if you’re clearly either cool or warm in colouring (which I’m not).

One way of being super trendy is to wear three or four strong colours combined. With each garment in a different colour. Or several colours in one item, perhaps body, sleeves, and neck band/ collar/ cuffs in different colours.
See Style.com on Hyper Color.

Or two colours, one of the strong colours combined with white.

Well, colour blocking has been suggested by high fashion magazines for some seasons now, but I can’t remember seeing anyone wearing these tropical colours in this quiet suburb in this cool rainy climate 😀

Care with strong colours

If you can’t decide whether to wear bright colours and bold prints, they’re probably not for you. Have a look at Nancy Nix-Rice’s excellent articles, 7, 8, 9 on colour and 10 on prints.

Perhaps you can wear one or two of the strong clear colours, but not all of them. I can wear red, though reds with a touch of blue, not a yellowy red (odd, as I’m mainly ‘autumn’ in colouring). Other strong colours completely overwhelm me.

White is also a key trend this year, but it’s too ‘strong’ for many people. Does it help if you wear a white slightly tinted with blue, or white tinted with cream ?

A touch of strong colour

What if you don’t look your best when wearing strong colours or strong contrasts ? Would you still like a little trendy brightness ? Add it in bag or shoes. Just not near your face.

Or use it for trim, perhaps binding, piping or frills. Personally I think that makes a garment rather inflexible about what it will combine with. So don’t use it unless you have several items this will look good with.

Pantone colours for this season

Here’s the pdf of Pantone’s colour suggestions for Spring 2011.

Goodness, you can even get a Pantone app. . . though it needs accurate colour pick up from your mobile phone camera.

Happily Pantone are aware that some of us need muted (with a touch of grey), or paler (with added white), or more subtle mixes. They don’t include all those brights. They choose colours with names like :
Coral Rose (“sophisticated orange”)
Beeswax
Honeysuckle (not sure what they mean by this, perhaps it’s a problem with colours on my screen, UK native honeysuckle is rose-red and cream.)
Russet
Peapod (yellow-green)
Blue Curacao (related to turquoise)
Regatta (blue)
Lavender
Silver Cloud
Silver Peony

Look also at the colours mentioned by the designers in the pdf, who use more colour names, and wonderfully luscious sounding colour combinations.

Pantone colour predictions for the coming Fall are also more muted.

So if you’re a ‘Summer’ or ‘Autumn’ feeling left out by the high fashion brights, not to worry. There are many other attractive colours relevant for this season.

Some Soft ‘Summers’ like the top-to-toe ‘nude’ shades that are another fashion theme. This is a grayed palest pink, Pantone’s Silver Peony. Another colour we can’t all look good in. Would it help if you use a muted bluey pink, or a muted peachy pink ?

Or try the palest most washed out shades of denim blue.

For Warm ‘Autumns’, refer to Pantone rather than Vogue ! The simple colour wheel doesn’t work well for browns.

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If you’re like me and the season’s brights and nudes don’t make you look your best, just stick to your most flattering colours, and choose to ignore being trendy about colour this season 😀

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Links available April 2011

This entry was posted on April 16, 2011 at 7:51 am and is filed under current fashion, personal style. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.