How to match color in your occasion outfit

The number of times I get asked what matches with what is truly surprising. Matching color in an outfit seems to be a challenge for quite a few Kenyan men out there.

So I thought I’d go ahead and write this post and help as many of you men look exceptional and earn the respect you deserve on whichever important occasion you choose to attend.

Let’s get right into it.

Matching colour within your outfit requires basic knowledge of colour theory. Colour theory is the knowledge of colour in theory. The emotions they evoke. Which colours tend to go better with which ones, et cetera.

Colour theory can get very advanced. It’s impossible for me to cover even just the basics in a singular post. What I will do, however, is give you 2-3 guidelines that you can then use to get creative and match the colour within your special occasion outfit.

Take a look at these three colours.

Black, white and grey are neutral colours. What that means is that they will match any other colour within your outfit. Black goes with everything. As does white. Those are self-explanatory and I’m sure you’ve seen multiple examples of those so I won’t bother to show them here.

What you probably may not have realized before is that grey, being a neutral colour, also goes with everything. And it does so particularly well at times with brighter colours. 

How can this information be used to help you colour match your occasion outfit? It’s easy. Simply get trousers and shirts in neutral colours. This frees up your jacket to be any colour you’d like. As soon as you see it and you like it, go ahead and pick it up.

When the staples (trousers, shirts) are in neutral colours, any colour you wear for the jacket will match nicely and fit well into the entire palette. As a matter of fact, a fancy blazer will pop out very nicely in that setup, as seen below.

If the neutral colours are a bit too dull for your taste, a powerful technique I always use is to go with a different shade of the same colour. It’s called the art of the monochromatic outfit and it works very well with special occasion outfits for men.

Let me explain briefly with the aid of the video below.

What I’ve given you above are guidelines. They’re not rules. If you’re an avid reader of this blog, then you know how much I hate fashion rules. I hate fashion rules so much that I occasionally spend time tearing them down as seen in this post on how to match colour in any outfit.

Because I know you’ve probably been googling and now you’re thinking, “But Google says I shouldn’t do this!” Let’s take a minute and dispel one or two myths with regard to colour matching for male special occasion outfits.

2 Untrue colour matching myths

Oh really? Then explain this.

Or this.

As I explained earlier, black is a neutral colour. It goes with anything. All you’ve got to do is be sharp in your execution.

The rule that the colours you wear in your outfit should be opposite to each other on the color wheel is one that really irks me personally. Because it’s one of those statements that’s not rooted in common sense in any way. It’s thrown out there just for the sake of sounding fancy.

Let me illustrate. Here’s the colour wheel.

Tell me the last time blue and yellow looked good together on an outfit? What about purple and yellow? For a cheerleading mascot, yes. For a man looking to get taken extremely seriously at an important function, are you kidding me?

You’ve got to realize something. A colour combination that looks good on a company logo or a movie poster will not necessarily look good on an outfit. The settings could not be more different.

So the next time someone tells you the following

• You shouldn’t wear colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel.
• You shouldn’t wear colours that are close to your skin tone.

Show them this picture of Mvita MP Abdulswamad Shariff Nassir looking exceptional despite all those ‘rule breaks.’

And let them know that Kings like you are guided by knowledge, not fear.