Naughty and Nice

For the sake of clarity I wanted to elaborate on the brown suit/blue shirt and red tie comment I made yesterday where I stated that I thought it was too much in the color department. Immediately after I posted reader "Paul" questioned me on what I had written earlier about a red tie with a brown suit and a blue shirt where I mentioned and pictured a nice combination. I responded in comment that yes I thought it looked nice in the picture (which I will post below) but when the question of red/brown and blue was a good combo came up, I conjured up thoughts of a redder red and a browner brown and in my opinion that was a bad combo.

These red ties when placed with blue and brown are loud garish and poorly matched and call unwanted attention to the wearer. In my opinion they look cheap together.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="Naughty"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="Very Naughty"][/caption]

Here the tie isnt quite as "fire engine scream it out loud" red as the previous two. Almost a blend between red and burgundy.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="Nice!"][/caption]

And since you asked, Paul here is Brown with Burgundy, framed in with a cashmere v-neck sweater from Colombo and accompanied by the brown and burgundy parasol square.





In the words of Borat...



So what do you think? Naughty or nice?

Tis the season! :-)

Upon Request

As I mentioned in the past,  I do take requests.  You are free to email me a link to an Item you would like to see matched up and I can try and find a comparable or better yet if you are local you can drop it off and I will work it up for you.

Utilizing the latter offer, a customer dropped off a Brioni Jacket (part of a suit) that you see below.  Its was a hard  jacket to work with for two reasons.  1) The pronounced windowpane, which was making it hard for the customer. and 2) The actual color which was a grayish blue.  I certainly wouldnt have classifies it as a true navy which would have made it easier to work with.

I was somewhat limited by the shirt color which was to be  white or blue.  Given free reign I would have chosen a shade of grey (And thats tomorrow's photo essay) but alas, word came down from on high (the customer) that he is not a fan of gray shirts.

So here goes:

The color of the jacket lends itself to anything that works with grey/blue, and along with the reddish brownish windowpane check.  You can get a high res to see the colors of the jacket here.

Here in the first shot I paired it with a soft light blue shirt (not on the site), and an orange brown cashmere tie.  The Fabric of the jacket allows for the cashmere tie and the  colors are all right.  The orange tie works with the steely blue as well as with the windowpane which is reddish burgundy.   The square is an orangish brown as well (but not the same color as the tie) which livens the jacket just a bit.  The grey circles in the square only work to enhance the blending together with the jacket.




Due to the burgundy/reddish windowpane in the jacket, its only natural to introduce burgundy into the tie mix (if you own one tie this should be the one) which is what I did with the following results:

(notice that I kept the pattern of the square but substituted the orange for the grey version of it which also has burgundy highlights around the circle.)



Mixing in a blue and burgundy paisley pattern just goes to show that you arent limited to squares and neets patterns in the tie.  Here a uniformly patterened paisley works well with the tie.  I think you might run into trouble with larger and more abstract paisleys, as the size of the pattern will compete with the windowpane.


Now back to a Petronius orange in a neets with a different square which has the orange black blue and another 6 colors to make sure that somehow we match :-).  I like the orange look with this jacket.




Finally, just to prove that we can also do stripes here, I brought back an orangey Brown striped tie that has some blue in it to get this result.  The square looks very busy but of course you will only get a small portion of that visible and then you get the result two pics down.



In this last shot I had paired the tie with a square that looked ok  in real life but bad on the screen so I eliminated the square from the photo (Cropped to the left rather than to the right).  I guess I left the tie since it was there already.  It works.