Ways to Create Colour & Contrast in Your Looks
One of the main reasons why I believe I am so obsessed with fashion, clothes & design is because it’s art to me! You can seriously do anything with fashion, clothes and your own personal style! For me it’s always been a way I have expressed my love for art and creating! Over the past couple years I have gotten really good at finding my own authentic style, and creating looks that have visual unity and flow! It’s so much fun to play around with different style and looks, but I know sometimes it can be daunting to step out of your comfort zone with clothes! This is how I felt sometimes when I would wear something that was bolder, or with colour! BUT I have fallen in love with adding in dimension and depth into my outfits through colour and contrast! I used to stick to more neutrals, but now that I am getting much more comfortable expressing my personal style, I just follow my inspiration and what I am drawn to! I love unique patterns and fabrics, fun colours, and creating contrast in my looks and I will explain why!
When you add in colour or contrast into your outfits, depending on how it was done of course, it will naturally draw peoples eyes in, because it creates variety and depth and our eyes are naturally drawn to this! When I talk about contrast, I am just meaning the comparative difference between the value of two colours! I think of colour contrast in looks in 3 categories; high contrast, medium contrast and low contrast! High being the value of each colour has a large difference, medium having a moderate difference between values, and low meaning two colours with little difference in value! It’s so fun to play around with this! I would say this outfit is somewhere between low to medium contrast! I’ll get more into this below!
Creating Colour and Contrast in Your Looks
Colour and contrast can help organize your looks, and establishes an overarching theme to your outfit! To me it creates a focal point, and adds in visual interest! Theres no right or wrong way to do this either, and as your play around with your style and colours, creating contrast and colour dimension will happen naturally! I’m so excited to share with you my personal styling tips on adding colour and contrast to your looks!
Just Go For It
More times than not, you already know your sense of style and what you like and how you want to express it, but we can scare ourselves out of it by thinking we are being to bold, or too out of the ordinary when it comes to fashion and what we like! When it comes to creating fun, authentic, and stylish looks you have to just trust yourself and go for it! That’s what I always just tell myself! You will never stick out from the crowd or diverse yourself in anything if you don’t just go for it! If you see something you love, but it’s not typically a colour or pattern you wear, just try it! There is a reason you are being drawn to it, and you just have to trust that! The more you trust your inspiration and your own personal eye in fashion, the more clear you get on your own sense of style, and from there it gets really fun when you know what you love and you can get fully inspired just by seeing one simple thing! So one of my biggest tips when it comes to adding in colour and contrast to your looks is simply just to try it out and go for it!
Utilize Accessories
If your just starting to add in some colour and create and find your own personal style, the best way to add in some depth and fun into your outfits is through accessories! This can be hair pieces, clips, jewelry, bags, purses, sunglasses! These are all smaller and easier ways to begin to add in some colour and contrast into your looks! For example maybe you want to stick to more neutrals for your main clothing pieces, but still want to create a fun bold look, you can do this by contrasting the colour of your actual clothes with some kind of accessory! An easy example I do is when my outfit is all black, I always tend to add in a white accessory because there is a high contrast value between those two shades and it helps add depth to your looks! For this specific outfit I went all out with the colour of my clothes, so I chose this hair wrap as my accessory and used it to pull all the colours in this look together! You definitely don’t need to have this much colour in your looks to make colour and contrast work for you, but sometimes it’s so fun to find pieces that all work under the same colour scheme!
Colour Combination & Contrasting
Adding and combining colours into your outfits does not have to be as scary as it seems, and you even have the option to stick with neutral shades if you prefer that as well! Remember there is no right or wrong way to this! In the fall I love to contrast brown and white, it’s as easy as that! The other example I gave above about the black outfit and a white accessory is also the perfect example of how easy it can be to contrast colours in your outfits. Or you can take this even further and create your entire look around a colour scheme like I did with this specific look! The pink top and purple pants in this outfit obviously are two different colours, but they are more similar then they are different which is why there contrast each other somewhere between the low-medium range. Because the pink and purple colours don’t have a drastic difference in value, the headband really pulls all the colours together while still adding more contrast! I love this look because there is a balance of colour created throughout the entire outfit and it all flows!
Fashion Harmony
One thing to keep in mind when working with colours and contrasting them in your looks is to always hold a higher vision to ensure fashion harmony, or in other words an aesthetic harmony within your overall look! I love this word because I am always thinking about this when I create looks, or even when I’m decorating. Essentially all you want to keep in mind in terms of fashion harmony is that everything should feel like it flows together, creating unity and harmony throughout your look. Maybe everything fits into a certain colour scheme, or the patterns are somehow balanced throughout your look, whatever it is you should feel as though your look creates a visual unity! For me, this comes as a feeling of inspiration!
This was such a fun look, I’m obsessed with it! I love using colour and contrast in my looks and now you know my little tips and tricks on how I like to personally style when it comes to colour! Let me know in the comments below your favourite way to show off your personal style and trends in your own looks!
Talk soon! xx East
