I really want to be stylish in 2016 but in a way that involves minimal outlay of money or energy (like ironing, heels, etc). I have no idea how to accomplish this.
We have no replies so i get to reblog this like a weirdo but i have discovered the secret to this. Its wear plainer clothes, layered, with one to two pieces of noticable jewellery. Tbh this seems to con people into thinking that my unwashed face and exploding hair are part of a Look and that If I Put Big Earrings On This Morning, I Must Have A Plan.
Oh NICE. I like it!
if you don’t know how to mix colors (split complimentary is great tho for outfits), stick with black, brown, and grey.
brown and red looks great. brown is about the only color to mix with a bright yellow, otherwise you look like a bee or worse.
grey and orange, pink, or green.
grey and blue is really sober. grey and dull greens is also really sober, but a little more martial and a little less civil service.
black and most colors, excepting orange and yellow (you’ll look like a bee or like halloween).
black and pink is very feminine and very threatening, so wear that if you want to intimidate. black and green drab has about the same emotional effect for a masculine message.
do not balance black equally with colors. wear mostly black, and one color. especially red. equal parts black and red make you look like a ladybug.
blue is generally neutral but make sure to wear shades and hues that are significantly different from one another— the rules for harmonizing similar blues are really fucking arcane to put into words, but if you fuck it up, to some of us, you are like a walking static blot, it’s just horrible. same goes for tweed fabric.
‘clashing’ colors operate on kind of the same principal. if the hue (what color), shade (how dark), or saturation (how intense) of your colors are too close, and you’ve balanced the colors equally, you clash. the colors are fighting each other for a viewer’s attention— think of the spiral of the golden mean, actually.
half your body is one color. a quarter of your body is the next color. an eighth of your body is the next.
anyway if this is too complicated, and you don’t want to deal with any of it, wear black and gray with bright jewelry or makeup. looks great on anyone.
all of the above: as usual Roach hits it out of the park, LISTEN TO THE ARTIST ABOUT COLORS.
and tweeds: either tweed and not-tweed, or (rarely, unless you’re Karl Lagerfeld and nobody can tell you to stop doing it) tweed and significantly-different tweed, NOT tweed and similar tweed. And I love Wanda Maximoff a great deal but I think pink and red together are regrettable even in her case.
I think it’s Coco Chanel who is supposed to have said that after you get ready to go out, you should take off one thing–a necklace, a pair of earrings, a belt, a scarf, etc–and while it’s not always applicable I’ve found it useful more than once.
Finally, makeup: do big eyes or noticeable lips, not both unless you’re really feeling the 80s, and for god’s sake go easy on the blush. Simple eye makeup with a bright lip is the good kind of noticeable; intense eye makeup needs a pretty neutral non-attention-grabbing lip color unless you want people to be like “wow, that person is wearing a ton of makeup”–which, of course, you might be. Really well-done winged eyeliner without bright or intense eyeshadow goes extremely nicely with clear red lips. And try a bunch of shades of red, if possible, before you buy. A red that looks amazing on one person is going to make someone else look ill, no matter what the ads suggest. Once you know what kind of colors work with your skin tone and the clothes you wear, you can spare yourself a lot of “wow, this looks way better in the tube” angst.