Why you need to know your color palette
May 29, 2020
When first I started into minimalist and fashion more broadly one of the biggest gotchas I had to learn the hard way is that while a certain item can be very versatile on own it might not match the rest of your wardrobe, at all.
I was confused, after all, all the blog and articles were pointing out that these articles of clothing were the most versatile and “essential” pieces for a minimalist wardrobe, yet some times my outfits felt quite “off”.
Now I’m wiser and understand that my problem was focusing to much on the individual items rather than my overall wardrobe. Deciding which color palette to go for is an essential first step to solve this problem.
What is a color palette even?
A color palette is a limited set of colors that work well together that are chosen to make the design look cohesive. Notice the emphases on working well together and being cohesive.
So by choosing your color palette you restrict your outfits to color that ALWAYS work well together and can be used interchangeably.
Picking your main and most important color
There are two main choices here, Black or Brown
The rest of your wardrobe should be built around one of these colors.
I highly recommend building your wardrobe around black unless you really know what you’re doing, here’s why:
Building around black is super versatile and on the formality level it can go from super casual to very formal.
Black based outfits tends to look great regardless or skin tone or other features such as hair color.
Black outfits are much harder to do wrong vs brown based ones
Black based palette
Here’s at a black based color palette looks like.
As you can see it’s based on black with various greys and a dark blue and light blue. These should be the base of your wardrobe. I’ll go into specific items in a later post.
You might at this point however be thinking this looks kinda boring and while you can make very good outfits with these alone, I’ll give you 2 extra colors that can be used to add interest to your outfits.
These two colors, burgundy and dark green will add a lot of pop to your outfits and spice up however these should be used sparingly and with caution as to damage the interchangeability and versatility the base colors permit. To do this I recommend to pick one or two max of each colors, and this item must be a top piece such as a T-shirt or sweater (no shirts).
Brown based palette
If you’re building around brown I assume you know what you’re doing and since I don’t recommend this I’ll just give you some food for though and inspiration on what I think are colors that go well together.
That’s all for now, if this feels way to abstract don’t worry, I’ll write more posts with concrete outfits examples in the future to tie all of this together. The main take way here would be that you need to think not just about individual pieces but about how it matches and goes with your wardrobe as a whole.