I wrote about dressing using the hue-saturation-brightness (HSB) color model a couple of months ago. In it, I explained briefly how dressing tonally is sort of a next-level skill, because noticing and mixing color undertones well takes practice. That’s one reason it’s easier to wear gray trousers—they have no color undertones and thus can match everything.
Photographing at Pitti a couple weeks ago, one of my tasks was to do street style photography in and around the show. Primarily I stood near the entrance as people came in each morning. Finding and then photographing stylish people in the crowd could be difficult because the sun was shining directly into your face at a low angle, they tended to come in fairly dense groups, and scanning a large number of people for cool, subtle details and then set up to take their pic is difficult (usually for any given wave of people you’d have about 10-20 seconds). This is why you see some of the same people over and over again (both in my photos as well as others’—if you recognize their face, you can safely assume they’re dressed well), and it’s why the loudest or most striking outfits get photographed.
One person who caught my eye every day was Alex Pirounis of Anglo-Italian. He almost always had on a navy top coat—either their own Martingale coat or a belted single breasted coat—over a dark jacket or suit. One day, he wore almost entirely navy: navy turtleneck, navy blazer, navy coat, and charcoal trousers. If his business partner Jake Grantham tends to dress in a way that embodies the “country” end of the old city-country menswear continuum with his brown tweed sport coats and Barbour jackets, Alex tends to embody the “city” end.
There’s a lot of joy to be had in mixing colors and contrasting brightness values: one reason I love my beige-brown gun check jacket with orange over-check is because I can bring out different colors in the fabric by pairing it with different items; olive five pocket pants to bring out the greens, navy flannels to highlight the blues and complement the orange check, or charcoal to let the jacket shine on its own. Jake did this well at Pitti by wearing a light brown sport coat with charcoal trousers, which he paired with a restrained, conservative light blue bengal stripe shirt and solid dark tie. Even when he wore dark suits or jackets, he put on his well-worn Barbour jacket over it.
But in those challenging conditions of head-on sunshine, thick crowds of people and not much time, more than once I’d spot Alex, snap his photo, then notice Jake walking right next to him only after the fact (usually too late to be able to get a photo of him). His dark, tonal outfits got my attention—not loud or flashy, but striking.
In the winter months especially, that type of dressing is what’s appealing to me more and more. Dark, restrained, usually navy. It makes me feel more cool, it’s more flattering, it feels classier somehow.
How do you feel about darker tonal dressing? Do you prefer to mix colors, tones and brightness values in your outfits for maximum visual appeal, or are you going darker more often like me?
If your professional interactions are anything like mine ( I too work closely with a NPO international religious organization) the norm is to see quite conservative style at larger gatherings. Perhaps to a fault (sometimes it can feel a bit funeral home like) only to be broken up members of more traditionally stylish regions. It is easy to find oneself stripping soul and expression out of an outfit in these scenarios to keep from standing out too much. Not that this is something that bothers me, but more out of respect to others I feel.
It is because of this that I tend to stay a little further from the darker colors on a regular basis when I can. I too like a nice sophisticated dark tonal outfit which a few coworkers also appreciate. Additionally I feel that this aesthetic can lend itself to less stylistically attuned to give you the wow you are so dressed up comments. A bit annoying at times but not all of us can care this much.