I’ve had color on my mind a lot lately, as we creep all too slowly toward fall, and as I embark here on fall wardrobe planning. These past few years have been about rebuilding my wardrobe from scratch following the great clean-out and the shift in awareness and the upheaval of a move to a new climate and life and all of that. For me personally, basics and neutrals are building blocks — the foundation of a room or a wardrobe — so that’s been my focus. And with the emphasis on handmade and investment pieces, it’s been slow going. In the best of ways. But I’m at a point where I feel like my foundation is solid and it’s time to start layering on the fun.
There are two things I mean by that: color/pattern and curve balls, the latter of which I’ll expound on tomorrow.
The clothes I’ve been making or acquiring over this period have been almost exclusively neutral and largely solids. (I count blues as neutral, especially denim/chambray blues on which I heavily rely.) And it’s been wonderful that they all pretty much just go together, like Garanimals. It’s made coming up with outfits or packing lists super simple, which has its obvious merits. Plus there’s the fact that I feel strong and confident and at ease dressed in head-to-toe neutrals. So there’s part of me that doesn’t want to mess with a good thing. But then there’s the other part: the one that is longing for more lightness (at a weird moment of the year, right?) and for color.
I put together a Fall ’17 Mood board at Pinterest yesterday, which is about color as much as (maybe more than) anything else, and it looks almost like a spring mood board. I think I’ve literally said this before, but it has really struck me profoundly lately: My color palette doesn’t change. It is not subject to fashion winds or trends, or to the different ages and eras of my life.
I have an older board at Pinterest, started six or seven years ago, called All Things Lovely. I don’t add to it very often, and it’s super random and undirected — it could be a book cover, a landscape, a portrait, a ceramic bowl. The only thing the images have in common is they give me such a peaceful, happy feeling that I’m moved to add them to that board. I’m not sure I’ve ever just called up the board and scrolled back through it, but I did yesterday, and I realized it’s my lifelong mood board — the mood of my soul, I guess, to be corny about it. It’s black-and-white-and-ivory-and-grey. It’s all the shades of blues and greens, and blue-greens and green-blues, the softer and murkier the better. It’s lilac undertones. It’s burlap and camel and caramel and nut browns. And there are flashes of pink and yellow here and there. Kelly green is as bright as it ever gets for me, and I like it best mixed with softer greens.
Thinking back through the last several decades of dressing myself, that has always been the case. All that ever changes is emphasis. The past few seasons, it leaned heavily on the darker tones, and now I’m feeling the lighter ones. And what I’m wishing for are the colors that have been all but missing lately. But the challenge is to add without complicating — finding ways to make the colors fold in just as effortlessly as the neutrals, like they do in this pinboard.
Interestingly, the colors have been creeping into my closet bit by bit, which I’ll show you in my inventory tomorrow. And I’ll talk about how I love a little sartorial curve ball and why.
Is it fall yet where you are? (Or the start of spring?) It’s still mid-upper 80s here for the foreseeable future …
.
PREVIOUSLY in Wardrobe Planning: Summer wardrobe results
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
