Accessorizing a Ferguson Weathered

[Karl R]

I wore brown hose with red garter ties, a light blue shirt, a brown patterned tie, and a bottle green jacket. I tried to walk the middle line between complementary and contrasting colors.

Just a word of caution:
While that color combination would not raise any eyebrows in Scotland, it's difficult to coordinate that much color for an American audience. (And just to tie it back to kilts, I'll use tartans to explain what I mean.)

If you want to mix multiple colors, there are things that make it easier, and things that make it harder.

The first is how many "main" colors there are. For example, look at three well know tartans: Royal Stewart, Jacobite, and Caledonia. Which looks the best? If you put it to a vote, I believe that Royal Stewart would be the big winner. Why? All three share almost the exact same color palette....

It's the ratios that make the difference. Royal Stewart has lots of red, somewhat less green, then smaller amounts of blue and yellow (black and white being neutrals). Jacobite has almost equal amounts of yellow, green and red, with a smaller amount of blue (white being a neutral). Caledonia has nearly equal amounts of red, green and blue, with a small amount of yellow (black and white being neutrals). Color coordination is easier if there are only one or two dominant colors. And by dominant, I mean how much real estate the color takes up.

A blue shirt and a green jacket each own a significant amount of real estate. So your tertiary colors become the red stripe in the tartan and the red garters. (Fortunately, the kilt is dominated by neutrals: gray and brown.) It would be a little easier to pull off that much color (again, biasing towards U.S. sensibilities) if you made one of the major pieces a neutral, while making a smaller piece colored. For example, choosing a white shirt with a blue necktie, or a gray jacket with a green necktie.

The second is how bright/muted the colors are. As examples, look at the Isle of Skye tartan, or the Maple Leaf tartan. With Isle of Skye, the green and purple are desaturated (or to explain it another way, they're tones of green and purple). By reducing the amount of color, it's easier to coordinate them. With Maple Leaf, the main colors are darker (or to explain it another way, they're shades of red and green). By making them darker, it's easier to coordinate them.

It's difficult to coordinate multiple intense colors. It's far easier to coordinate with one intense color, where the others are muted.

Why I'm concerned...

As Steve Ashton stated earlier, "color coordination is one of those 'secret girl classes' that guys don't usually get in school." It seems to me that you're one of the majority of men who did not get the class. And I say that because complementary colors are a subset of contrasting colors. They're not two separate categories.

Without seeing a photo, I can't critique your choices. And that's because there are a minority of people who inherently understand the underlying concepts of colors without knowing the language used to describe them. And you don't need to be an Einstein of color to make red, green, blue, brown and gray work together. But you probably have to be scoring about a B+ to make it work better than if you'd dropped one of the colors (blue or green, since it's hard to drop the other colors ... given the kilt).

My caveats:

I'm not an Einstein of color. (I'm about at the B or B+ level.) Due to my limited ability (and my complexion), I tend to play rather conservatively with color in my wardrobe. But I read and research a bit. It's easier to start with fewer colors and work up to more, rather than doing it the other way around. (Since I live in the U.S., I primarily focus on the advice geared toward men living in the U.S. Most of the people who see me out and around won't be assuming that my sartorial choices are acceptable in Scotland.)

If you want to use that much color in your outfits, find someone whose sartorial choices you inherently trust (and whom you trust to be brutally honest with you), then run your ideas past them.

U.S. men's fashion (color-wise) is based around the maxim of "less is more." So if you want to make more more ... you are bucking a long-standing trend. It can be done (and probably should be done), but it won't be easy.