Wardrobe Architect #5 – Colour!

I’ve combined weeks 5 & 6 of the Wardrobe Architect.

I’m slightly regretting that I threw away my 15 year old Colour Analysis swatches, because that would really have made these two weeks so much easier. I know “my” colours well enough that I don’t need those swatches, but it would have been a piece of cake to scan those into my puter to come up with the colour palette graphics!

The first part of the exercise, in week 5 was to identify one’s colour palette. This is mine.

My colour palette

I don’t necessarily wear all those colours, I’m strong on black, and I add colour with a range of pinks & purples, or turquoises & teals. There’s very little blue in my wardrobe, and very little red, but  I do wear those colours occasionally. The main colours that are missing are yellows and oranges. I have sallow skin, and those warm yellow-y colours just kill me. In theory I can take a pastel lemon yellow (the kind of yellow you knit baby clothes in when you don’t want to make assumptions about whether it will be born a girl or a boy!), but I’ve never adopted this, and it would only ever be an accent colour, because large blocks of any pale colour make me look vast. In any case I prefer bold strong colours. Pastels have never really done it for me.

Week 6 is about arranging or organising your palette into Neutrals, Near Neutrals, Statement Colours and Metallics. This is where it becomes clear that I’m all about the big bold colours! The true neutrals were your standards: black, greys, navy, brown (has to be a chocolate brown, not too red), camel, white. I don’t tend to wear cream or ivory much, certainly not near my face. If I’m going pale, then it would be white, or camel, or one of the pastels from my statement colours. Overwhelmingly, though, the neutral I wear the most is black.

The Near Neutrals were the darkest versions of the bright colours that I wear- aubergine, deep purple, forest green. I figured that I could happily lump my Neutrals and Nears together, because there’s hardly a lick of difference between them.

My Neutrals and Near Neutrals

My Statement colours are Everything Else. Mostly bright, jewel-toned and cool:

• Blues – French navy, royal blue (shades of my first school uniform!), turquoise.
• Greens – pine green, emerald, teal, mint and chartreuse. Chartreuse is the one colour I am happy to wear that never featured in my Colour Analysis swatch. In theory it shouldn’t work on me, because it’s a yellow green, but I do love it, and it works with the rest of my wardrobe, so it’s in here. Looking at all those colours together, I suppose you could say that the chartreuse is my version of yellow, in that it’s a strongly blue-toned yellow!
• Reds – scarlet and blue-toned reds, as I mentioned above, I avoid the more orange versions.
• Pink – again I tend towards the blue-toned pinks, I tend to avoid the warm peachy tones. But fuchsia, magenta, rose, orchid, all work for me. Maybe I was Barbie in a former life?
• Purple – I love purple! From deep Imperial purple to Lavender, I’d happily wear them all. 
  

My Statement Colours

And finally, the Metallics. I used to only consider silver tones, but I’ve expanded towards the paler tones of gold.

Silver and Gold

Now I’m waiting to see where the Wardrobe Architect takes us next.

In terms of my own wardrobe cleansing, I’ve ditched those clothes that didn’t fit into my colours. I have a tendency to keep things that people give me, even when what they’ve given me isn’t what I would choose for myself, so I’ve tried to be very firm with myself. If something doesn’t fit in with what I’ve already got, if it’s a colour orphan, then it had to go in the charity bag.

I’ve now managed to do both sides of the wardrobe, and it’s made me realise that I really don’t have enough woven tops. All my knit tops are in a chest of drawers, and I’m being a bit cowardly and not attacking that one just yet. I buy a lot of Primark’s stretchy tops, because they’re colourful (or black, which as I’ve said is my commonest neutral), and they’re very useful for layering, and for teaching dance in, so I’ve got a LOT of them, and facing up to exactly how many may be a bit embarrassing. So my aim to make a ton of Renfrews might be unnecessary, and I should perhaps aim more for the wovens. So the wardrobe analysis is helpful for decision-making purposes.

Sewing of the leopard chiffon top has totally stalled. It’s sitting there, looking mournful at me, and even though I know that if I just have another good go at it, it will come together, I just haven’t got the will at the moment. Let’s see how the weekend takes me…