My ultimate guide to combine clothing colours

One thing that used to take a bit of my decision power was picking clothing in a way that the resulting combination was visually appealing (whatever that means). Sometimes I would dress up in a way that some people found outrageous, but to me and a few others it was just the result of randomly picking two pieces of clothing that had colours.

For a while I tried to understand what it was that triggered this repulsion in other people’s taste, but I couldn’t come up with a definite answer. Some of the observations I made were:

• Two bright and distinct colours are often not acceptable
• Two not bright and distinct colours are often acceptable, unless they belong to a mysterious list of non acceptable combinations which is only known to mums/ grandmas
• One bright and one pale colour tend to be acceptable, but the paler colour is preferred as the lower one (this is consistent with the struggle of finding male trousers with colours other than black, brown, white, gray or denim)
• Two shades of the same colour can randomly go together or not go together
• The exact same colour top and bottom is completely not acceptable (unless it’s black or white and you’re dressing for some event)
• Black tends to go well with any colour
• Depending on the mental age of the person judging, socks can be any colour
• Sometimes a given shoe can throw off the whole combination (honestly, wtf?)
• Any of the above rules can have an arbitrary number of exceptions

So after trying to comprehend all this nonsense and painfully memorize what combinations go well together¹, I decided to give up and adopt a much simpler strategy². The strategy comes down to one simple question

Is this combination often found in nature?

If the answer is affirmative, then my suspicion is that both colours go well together and I feel as if I can combine them without feeling guilty³. Examples of this are:

• White over green: clouds on top of grass / snow on top of grass
• Something over black/ dark blue: whatever over rock/ the ocean
• Yellow over brown: Wheat over dirt

There are some exceptions however, for example using blue to refer to the sky is sometimes a bad idea, such as wheat under the sky (you’ll look as the flag of Ukraine, and for some reason this is not acceptable for an adult).

When the colour is hard(ish) to find in nature, such as pink, red, orange, etc. I tend to combine them with either black or white depending on the shade of the first, that is, if I’m wearing a dark red, then I’ll try to combine it with white, while a light pink might go better with black.

So… This is mainly my strategy when combining colours. It is not infallible, as from time to time I get funny comments by mums or grandmas, but the good thing about it is that I don’t have to invest much energy into trying to guess whether or not a colour combination is good anymore; if I can justify it according to nature, then it’s good enough for me. Yes, I couldn’t be fucked adding shoes to the equation, so I just stopped caring.