I start thinking about how I want to refresh my style for Autumn & Winter 2018 in July, just before the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale. Days before the NAS, I stumbled across Boden’s early Fall 2018 collection where I saw earth tones like brown and toffee combined with light blue, tomato red, and navy. I thought, YES. I love this, and decided right then and there that’s how I’m going to evolve my colour palette for the upcoming season. It set the mood and strategy for the NAS shop in July, and my shop with Inge in Arnhem in August when I visited my Dad.
I like cinnamon and cognac because they’re orange-y, and I adore Dutch orange. I used to have a little of it in my wardrobe, but the items were passed on. I like shades of toffee because they remind me of my late Mum who wore earth tones with the best of them. I have a stormy relationship with animal print that I love one season, and loathe the next. I seldom gravitate towards dark browns because my high school uniform was brown, and it’s taken me this long to recover from wearing it daily for six years. All this to say that I literally woke up one day — thirty years later — and was feeling shades of brown as the next neutral to add to my wardrobe.
I listened to my feelings and made the brown a reality. I bought three pairs of footwear in various shades of brown at the NAS. A pair of chocolate buckled boots, toffee perforated boots, and cognac flat oxfords. I also threw in a toffee cashmere scarf and a new brown belt to complement the lot. I had two old brown belts that work well with the new shoes too. Here are the exact items.
On my next Fall shop in the Netherlands I planned to add the light blue. I found two pretty woolly scarves from a Dutch store called Purdey that work beautifully with the new pairs of shoes. One is a light blue airbrushed floral, and the other an abstract earthy floral animal print with touches of light blue. I also got a light blue Furla from Greg as an extra, belated birthday present. The scarves work as well with the off-white Furla I got in Italy a couple of months ago. Here are the exact items.
I put in an online Boden order for light blue and brown outerwear. The light blue coat was a bust, but the Modern Retro chocolate brown leopard print Horsell jacket worked well. Here it is with a few of my older scarves and bag, when I feel like wearing brown with Winter whites.
Finally, here’s the brown and light blue complement in full with a good underpinning of shades of white. I will treat the brown leopard print topper like a false plain thereby pattern mixing it with the scarves. The collection shows new and old items from my wardrobe that create the fresh brown and light blue complement.
I’ll add a light blue or pastel turquoise coat and knitwear to the complement if it comes my way. Maybe extremely light blue jeans and toffee or cinnamon knitwear too. I’ll also remix the browns and blues with the tomato red, citron, chartreuse, optical white, navy, ink blue, black, and shocking pink in my wardrobe.
Sam approves of my new brown and light blue capsule. After all, he was sporting this colour combination long before I was.
