About 12 years ago, I visited Cilento, the oldest menswear store in Naples –perhaps even all of Italy. Founded in 1780, it’s almost as old as the US, although the shop didn’t move to its present location until 1820. When I visited, Mr Ugo Cilento, the eighth generation in his family to run the store, took me to the secondary boutique just a few steps from the main shop. When you go through the back entrance, up the steps and pass through the double doors, you enter a small studio where it feels like time has suddenly stopped.
In this studio, spread through five or six rooms, a private collection of objects reflects the company’s 244-year history. There are wooden tables stacked high with heavy rolls of tweeds and woollen flannels, velvet-covered Victorian furniture, original receipts from the family’s previous business in the shipping industry, battered leather luggage and mid-century scarves the company made for Fiat. Cilento led me to one of the chest-high shelves and opened a giant book. “These,” he told me, “are some fabrics we used to make neckties in the 1930s.” Nearly 100 years old, the colours on these swatches were still brilliant – emerald greens, royal purples and crimson reds, among them.
If you look at images of how men dressed in the past, you may be tricked into thinking that men only wore dark blues, earthy browns and stoic greys, as those are the colours we mentally impose onto black-and-white images. While it’s true that, ever since the days of Mr Beau Brummell, the majority of Western men have relied on sober colour palettes, not all have been so dowdy and tame.
Vintage menswear ads are peppered with descriptions that sound like mouth-watering tasting menus at expensive restaurants: garnet-coloured dressing gowns decorated with Scotch bonnet trims, ultramarine satin ties, umber cotton suits and bone-coloured dress shirts finished with mother-of-pearl buttons. If you look at photographs in the Sotheby’s catalog for its 1997 auction of the Duke of Windsor’s wardrobe, revealed in full colour, your judgement of his status in menswear history may change.
How does one incorporate colour into a wardrobe? Online, there are thousands of guides. Some involve charts showing how to combine specific colours in shirts, pants and shoes. Others have aphorisms, such as “blue and green should never be seen”.
The most widely shared is an audio track of the TV presenter Mr Steve Harvey telling men how they can turn five suits into 75 combinations. The advice is bunk, but it makes for fun TikTok videos.
In reality, using colour in a wardrobe can be as complicated or simple as you’d like. Here are three ways to think about how to use colourful language.
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01. The cultural language of colour
Most colour guides miss an essential point: clothing is unlike other objects. It’s deeply tied to identity and among the most personal things we own, as it literally sits on our skin. You can’t transplant colour theories from art into fashion, as clothing occupies a special place in culture.
To understand how to use colour in an outfit, you must first approach it from the lens of culture. For example, many of our traditions for men’s tailoring derive from early 20th-century Britain, when men of a certain social class had wardrobes divided between city and country.
During this era, men worked in London while wearing dark worsted suits – often navy or grey – with white shirts, dark ties and black Oxford shoes. While in the country, where they would have played sport, they wore brown tweeds, tattersall shirts and brown pebble grain Derbies. For a time, these sections of a man’s wardrobe never crossed, which is how we get the phrase “no brown in town”.
This history is also how we get the cultural meaning of specific colours. When it comes to tailoring, navy and grey are for business, whereas brown and olive are for sport (translated: formal vs casual). Black Oxfords can be worn with navy suits for no other reason than cultural convention.
Nearly every section of your wardrobe will have some cultural history like this. Why do black leather jackets go so well with blue jeans? Because of the history of rebel rockers during the mid-20th century, who struck an anti-establishment pose against the Man in his grey flannel suit.
Why are blue chambray shirts considered more rugged than white poplins? Because of the social history that Mr Upton Sinclair wrote about in his 1919 muckraking exposé The Brass Check, where the class conflict was coded as a struggle between white- and blue-collar workers. Similarly, olive green is the most classic colour for army fatigues and waxed cotton Barbour jackets because of social history.
If you were to change the colours of any of these artefacts – a pink suit instead of navy, red Oxfords instead of black or purple jeans instead of indigo – you would change the cultural meaning of the resulting outfits. So, the first step to understanding how to use colour in a wardrobe is to think about the cultural meaning of clothes and what message you want to create.
02. The emotional language of colour
In the opening episode of the fourth season of Seinfeld, George Costanza explains to Jerry that, while his outfits seemingly look the same from day to day, there are “many subtle variations, only discernible to an acute observer, that reflect the many moods, the many shades, the many sides of George Costanza”. And that morning, his outfit was inspired by a mood he called “morning mist”.
Colours are rich with emotional language. For instance, Victorians gave black a sense of seriousness and sombreness, while ascetic groups such as the Quakers made it the colour of humility. At the same time, black is often used to convey wickedness and rebellion (think: witches and biker gangs). Fashion designers often use this cultural language within their collections. Mr Yohji Yamamoto, who heavily relies on the inky colour, once famously summed it up nicely: “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy, but mysterious. But above all, black says this: ‘I don’t bother you, don’t bother me.’”
Almost every colour has some emotional power. During the warmer months of spring and summer, when the sun is shining bright, it’s easier to incorporate cheerier colours such as lemon yellow, peach and mint green. Conversely, brooding colours such as charcoal, stone and taupe naturally come to the fore during winter.
An easy way to play with colours is to think about how they make you feel. A sport coat with sunflower undertones will pair naturally with other “happy” colours, such as off-white trousers and sage green ties.
Once you understand the emotional power of colours, you can use them to suit your mood and activities. A tan linen suit paired with a light blue shirt and brown loafers may be the perfect outfit for having lunch with friends on a warm, sunny afternoon. However, when nightfall comes, it may be better to switch to a navy wool-mohair suit, white shirt and black Oxfords. Those colours will reflect your mood better in the evening.
03. The visual language of colour
Of course, colour isn’t just about emotional and social language. The more evident and intuitive dimension is how something looks purely as a visual medium. Here are three guidelines to increase your chance of success.
Know the basics
It’s easier to incorporate an unusual colour into your wardrobe when you keep your major pieces to staple colours. Dress shirts are often easier to wear when they’re white or light blue; outerwear in navy, brown or olive green; jeans in black, white or indigo; trousers in grey or tan; and shoes in black or brown. These pieces play well with each other, making it easier to get dressed in the morning.
You can then incorporate an unusual spot of colour – sweaters in burnt ochre or apple green, camp-collar shirts in mauve or scarves and beanies in vermillion. A bright orange coat can still be a great purchase, but maybe don’t make it your first one.
Pay attention to intensity and temperature
NYC-based label Stòffa is particularly good at using unique colours in their collections, such as dusty hues of lemon yellow and eggplant. Founder and designer Mr Agyesh Madan says it’s easier to incorporate a unique colour into an outfit if you tie everything together using some theme, such as texture or intensity.
“Technically, intensity means saturation,” Madan says. “But here, I’m using it to mean a combination of saturation and brightness – how intense a colour appears. So, even if we use a colour such as raspberry, it’ll have a ‘middle intensity’, making it easier to pair with something like a cloud blue. If we have a yellow, the yarn will have a white core. That brings the intensity down and makes it easier to wear with a colour such as taupe. When everything has a similar intensity, the colours feel right with each other, even if they contrast.”
Colours also have a visual temperature. When combining colours in an outfit, it’s often better to stay within the same temperature range. “When I use the term ‘colour temperature’, I’m using it in the way it’s used in photography,” Madan says. “So, the temperature is the movement from candlelight (the warmest colour) to blue sky (the coldest).
“A colour can be either warm or cool depending on how much yellow or blue you add. A warm brown would be something like caramel or tobacco; a cool brown would be like the taupes we often use in our collections. Colours transition well into each other when they have a similar temperature. So, even if we move from ivory to taupe to walnut, the transition feels natural because all the colours are relatively cold.”
Consider texture, fibre and sheen
Outfits often benefit when the pieces contrast, but contrast doesn’t have to come through colour alone. One way to play with colour in an outfit is to work with the same colour – or within a narrow range of colours – and vary things through texture, fibre and sheen. For instance, a black leather jacket paired with a black cashmere knit and black jeans will still have enough contrast in how the different materials drape and reflect light. When combined in these ways, a tonal outfit can look sophisticated and modern.
Ultimately, there’s only one rule: if it looks right, it is right. The best way to play with colour is to pay attention to outfits that inspire you and figure out what makes them work. That often involves thinking about the cultural language of clothing, the emotive power of colour and a bit of colour theory. At the end of the day, go with your eye.
