The Diversion

On Sunday, reader Paul challenged me to find a match for the shirt pictured below. The issue that presents itself as was mentioned in the comments is that the shirt is its bold and wide spaced stripes lend itself to being more to casual and perhaps tieless.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="The Thrown Down Gauntlet (as in "Challenge") Shirt"][/caption]

I cannot argue the fact that the width of the stripes of the tie make the shirt better suited (no pun intended) for casual. There is really no way around that. However it doesn't need to be limited to casual and with the right suit or jacket and tie one can get this in a regular work day as well. Dont get me wrong, this will be far from conservative, but we knew that going in.

The trick here will be to break up the stripes of the shirt by keeping to a toned down tie. Anything with a pattern or design would only serve to cause the eyes to work overtime trying to make heads or tails out of the busy event that is the shirt and the tie. Not having an exact match in the shirt I used a Hickey Freeman His First wide stripe medium blue shirt from a few seasons ago that we had in the kids shop.

The flash may have made it a little more royally looking but here is what I came up with.



(Here is a high res shot, its worth a look)

The blue in the shirt picks up on the blue in the jacket. The blackish pinkish tie (not on the site but in the same family as the linked) gives a complementing color to the blazer as well as the shirt and being a solid is strong enough to garner its own attention yet soft enough to not cause sensory overload. The twill weave of the tie was icing on the cake as it added to the tie without being a pattern. The square, again the parasol in brown.

My digital photography skills didn't do this ensemble justice but when the wife walked by she exclaimed "Gorgeous!".

Thoughts?