How to wear more colour (and why more men should), according to London's leading style experts
In season
“I have a pink blazer - and I wear it a least once every two years,” laughs style consultant Chris Modoo.
“I’ve learnt that often that’s the problem with colour - you have to embrace it throughout your wardrobe, or you get remembered for the one colourful garment you have: ‘Ah, you’re back in the pink blazer, I see…’ But actually it’s a great, useful jacket. Men need to get into colour more”.
And yet they don’t. We live in a culture in which, as Modoo puts it, “in business navy and grey are considered colours”. And in which, outside of work, more rainbow colourful clothing is generally avoided. Men are not the only ones doing so either: there’s a long tradition of the monochromatic being associated with sophistication - from black and white photography to car design, with black, white, grey and silver ones the best-sellers year after year. Bolder colour is, over recent history, associated with superficiality, vulgarity or childishness. Not for nothing are most kids’ toys boldly colourful.
If more men need to get into colour, London's leading style gurus might have the answers to get you started.
Break up with grey
“Better grey than garishness,” as the painter Ingres put it, while Aristotle argued that colour just got in the way of appreciating the ‘truth of form’ beneath. Some people are even chromophobic: they have an irrational fear of colour. OK, so most of us don’t go that far. And yet we’re still inclined to reach for the navy over the cerise almost every time. If we wear colour at all, it’s dabbling with an accessory - a coloured sock, a pocket square, a belt, a suit lining, a watch strap or dial - as though to admit we like it, but fear too much of it would be to challenge the gods of neutrality.
Unavoidably, while colour has no meaning in itself - colour is just a product of how an object absorbs or reflects specific wavelengths of light, how they reach our eyes and are perceived, entirely subjectively - culture means it nonetheless comes pre-loaded with meaning that can be hard to escape. Take red, for example, with its associations with danger, sex and - somewhat contradictorily - Catholicism. No wonder the artist Gerhard Richter once said, approvingly, how “of all colours, only grey has the quality of representing nothing”.
Combat the stereotypes
As points out Karen Haller - colour psychologist and author of The Little Book of Colour (Penguin) - stereotypes also persist.
“Men are still taught to suppress their emotions and colour, which communicates emotion, gets caught up in that,” she argues. “It’s why we’re quick to make subconscious judgments about men wearing colours, even dark and neutral ones.
"Over time men have learnt that the way they express themselves visually is complicated by [brighter] colour - that it might undermine their authority, or ‘acceptable’ ideas of masculinity, since that’s associated with control and restraint. These are traits that society seems to value more than self-expression. No wonder wearing colour is perceived as socially risky”.
It's all in the vocab
This isn’t to say more men shouldn’t try, Haller stresses - women tend to find men in colour more approachable, she suggests, though she’s not recommending this as a dating tactic - nor that the culture won’t again shift in colour’s favour.
After all, prior to the French Revolution, it was more likely the men who wore the colour, which was then seen as an expressions of wealth and power. After the revolution, adherence to the old, flamboyant, seemingly aristocratic and decadent style could get your head under the guillotine. And then came the Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement that, with its goals of freedom and happiness through reason and the scientific method, helped usher in a more rational, practical and affordable style of dress for men. This, in effect, meant darker, plainer, more austere.
Investing in the right colour is important
What’s more, Modoo argues, good colour costs. His dictum is that if you want to wear more colour, you have to invest in it. That’s because while more accessibly priced menswear might dabble in colour, what it often won’t do is make the initial outlay on decent dyes.
The same colour in a ‘cheap’ garment and in pricier one can look entirely different.
Chris Modoo, style consultant
“The fact is that good colour isn’t cheap and it’s the better makers who use the better dyes and the better materials that hold the colour better - those with more texture, so there’s more depth, more richness and a more attractive play with light,” he says.
“The same colour in a ‘cheap’ garment and in pricier one can look entirely different”.
Choose wisely though and there’s a greater diversity of colour in menswear to choose from now, says designer Oliver Spencer - if an economic downturn drives workplace attire towards ever greater conservatism, it also encourages fashion designers to get the paintbox out for your weekend.
Oscar Wilde would have loved it. He wrote to a newspaper to complain about “the uniform black that is worn now [which is] dull and tedious and depressing”, though quite how we experience colour - how it’s represented in the brain or, philosophically, what the nature of colour sensations are or how they map onto the reality of the world outside of us - is not yet understood.
The benefits go beyond the eye
“Wearing colour really does lift your mood,” Spencer insists. “And you really don’t have to go all out. Just flashes of colour are enough to express some personality”. This needn’t mean a searing yellow either. There are, says Spencer, “lovely colours and stupid bright ones”. But brown, he reckons, is a colour; and burnt orange, brick, burgundy, mustard, emerald, are the kind of soft or lush tones that won’t ever suggest you’re fresh from the circus.
“Men are simple creatures and find this colour stuff difficult,” adds Spencer. “I love cobalt blue and pinks, but know what colours not to wear to make my face look redder than it already is. And, really, I look around and I just don’t think that notion that wearing colour isn’t ‘masculine’ holds sway anymore, even if I know a lot of men still think that.
"Of course some other men, being both tribal and brutal, will take the piss out of your colour choices. But you have to believe in colour to make it work - and, in terms of lifting your style, it really does”.
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