This outfit looks so classy, doesn’t it? Understated, but with an indefinable air of poshness. Effortless, but elevated. But did you spot the best part? It’s in the small print. The clothes are from Uniqlo and the shoes are from Zara. The look is expensive, but the clothes aren’t.
Money isn’t everything, but some pricey clothes look cheap and some inexpensive clothes look luxurious, and I think we all know which side of that divide we’d rather be on. A great way to get it right is by picking the right colours – tonal warm neutrals are what you need for high style without high prices.
What you have to do is seek out exactly those colours you may initially overlook. Faced with a rack of clothes, a default approach is to reach for black or white, because we know those colours are useful and we know where we are with them. Or, on a different day with a different mindset, we are drawn to the prettiest, brightest, most eye-catching colours. An exciting colour makes a piece feel more special, more valuable.
But the best-value colours are not found at the end of the rainbow. Or indeed anywhere on it. They are the soft, muted pieces that have more warmth than the austere minimalism of monochrome, without the cheesiness of brights.
Olive. Terracotta. Putty. Mocha. Plaster. Sand. Butter. The names evoke the good life – chic kitchens, sunny gardens, good food. The sartorial equivalent of Farrow & Ball paint, these are colours that come from nature, not colours that look straight out of a car paint factory. They are nuanced rather than basic. They would scream good taste, except they are much too elegant to scream anything.
Forget black, shift to charcoal. Put down the white, and reach for oatmeal. I’m making it sound really straightforward, which it is. But it can feel challenging, mainly because it is not immediately obvious what these colours go with. Many of us lack confidence in our judgment when putting colours together, so we tend to go with combinations that feel familiar – a flag trio of red, white and blue, for example. Faced with a pair of chocolate trousers, we pick them up and worry: what shoes would I wear with these? Will they go with my coat? And put them down and reach for blue jeans.
The secret to making posh colours work in your wardrobe is to treat them as neutrals. Let them all rub along together. Don’t get hung up on what goes with what. We have wired our brains to think that colours need to stay in their lane, one or two per outfit. If one colour is popping in your outfit – a pink jumper, say – it feels as if everything else must match it. Following this formula can block you from trying out new colours, because it isn’t immediately obvious how they slot into your usual wardrobe formulas.
Soft, warm, earthy tones vibrate on the same colour frequency, so your eye reads them as a match. A butter-yellow shirt under a tan leather jacket. Khaki cargo pants with a deep sea green shirt. Take another look at the outfit here – shades of cream, green and brown, as well as black. The effect is soothing, a blur of neutrals, like gazing out of a train window at an all‑natural landscape.
Incorporating these colours is a useful hack for identifying inexpensive new clothes that look more swank than they really are. But they don’t need to cost you anything at all. Locating the ones you already have, and recognising how strong they look together, is the neatest trick of all. For example: I’ve got a deep wine-red sweatshirt that I rarely wear, because the effect is a little too moody with black trousers and black shoes, and I never quite knew what else to wear it with. Then I tried it with faded French‑blue cotton chinos and caramel suede loafers. And it worked! The best things in life are free. Even better when they look expensive.
Model: Tomiris at Milk. Styling assistant: Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Sam McKnight and Victoria Beckham beauty. Bomber jacket, £69.90, cardigan, £34.90, shirt, £39.90, and trousers, £34.90, all Uniqlo. Sunglasses, £220, Linda Farrow. Shoes, £35.99, Zara. Earrings, £85, Dower and Hall
#posh #budget #colours #Fashion
