How to match nearly any colors within an outfit.

As I stated before in a previous post, men’s fashion rules in Nairobi Kenya are made to be broken.

The aim of dressing up is to look good for yourself. Not to stay in line with a bunch of silly rules set up by a bunch of people that you do not even know.

All you need is the foundational knowledge. Then you can make your own rules as you go. All based upon your personal sense of style.

So with that spirit, today I’d like to teach you how to break another men’s fashion rule. The fashion rule which implies that only very specific color combinations go well together.

And to do that, we will need to take a small lesson in color theory.

Color theory is a very wide subject. There’s is absolutely no way I could cover it all in a single post. What I will cover is just the section relevant to matching colors that are not necessarily believed to be able to match. The section on shade and tint.

And to do so, we’ll need to utilize the simple diagram below.

At the very center, we have the purest form of the color brown. 100% brown. Now if we add white to it, it’ll get lighter right? So let’s do that. The more white we add, the lighter the brown will look to the naked eye. As we add white, the composition of brown goes down.

So what started as 100% brown in the middle will end up as 0.001% brown – 99.999% white. We will end up on the extreme right with a color that is practically white.

The process of making a color appear lighter by adding white to it is called adding tint. So the more tint we add, the lighter the color gets.

Now if we do the same thing we just did but add black instead of white, then what will now happen is we will make the brown darker. This is shown on the diagram with a movement towards the left.

If we continue along that path we end up at the very end with a color that is composed of 99.99% black and 0.01% brown. The process of darkening a color by adding black to it is called adding shade.

So what does this have to do with color matching your outfit? Here’s the thing, colors that have almost the exact same shade go well together. And so do colors that have the exact same tint.

What that means is that you can have two different colors with the same amount of white or black added to them looking good together.

Let me explain with the aid of an example. Red and blue are two colors that ordinarily do not go well together. As soon as I mentioned red and blue together, your mind probably pictured this.

No way you’d ever wear that right? What if I told you that you wear that pretty often without it looking like the eyesore above? Don’t believe me? Well, check out the casual look below of a red shirt and blue jeans.

Because both clothing items seem to have the same level of shade, the entire outfit ends up looking just fine.

The mismatch often occurs because the lightness/darkness of the two colors does not match. Not because the two colors themselves do not match.

Now ideally, I should’ve worn a different shade of blue and executed the color layering look I’m so fond of.

As you can see, that looks a lot better. The red and blue are not a mismatch though. They’re just a combination that doesn’t match as well as two shades of the same color.

The problem only ever arises whenever the shades and tints are greatly mismatched.  

As long as they are perfectly matched or very close to each other, the resultant look will almost always be very easy on the eyes.

This doesn’t mean you should find a way to measure color down to the second decimal percentage point before you wear an outfit. That’s not practical.

This was simply a foundation lesson on color theory to give you the confidence not to avoid certain color combinations that could end up making you look extremely good.

The important thing is always to take your time to try out different looks before you go out for your occasion. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised about how well two items you already own go very well together. So much so that you may not actually have to make the clothing purchase you initially thought you would have to make.

Men’s fashion in Nairobi Kenya has rules that should never apply to you as a King of your world. Fashion faux pas only happens to those men who attempt to break them without being armed with the necessary knowledge to be able to do so gracefully.