French 5-Piece Archives

Five Accent Colors with Winter White and with Beige

September 30, 2022

Why yes, Pantone found additional colors at New York Fashion Week...

Which is fine with me, because I could look at accessories 'til the cows come home! And since I live in the city, that would be forever, right?

Let's start with this classic red; yes, this scarf is an investment. But you could wear it at least once a week during cool weather, for the rest of your life. I'm finding that I have some scarves that 20+ years old, and that I still adore.

I've chosen ivory (Winter White?) and beige as our wardrobe core colors to "test drive" this batch of accent colors. While I wouldn't wear white pumps in this lifetime, I know a LOT of women who wear them through the year and look just lovely.

And ... View the Post

Five Accent Colors with Navy

September 21, 2022

As we have come to expect, Pantone "discovered" 10 "new" fashion colors from the London Spring/Summer 2022/23 Fashion Week.

Bizarrely enough, they seem to have arranged them almost like a (weird) rainbow! So to look at these colors as suggestions for wardrobe accents, I'm going to take the first 5 colors and pair them all with a tiny number of navy pieces...

I chose navy because it looks good with all 5 colors - which makes sense. Navy is opposite to orange on the color wheel, and these colors are all on that side of the wheel!

It sounds strange, but it seems to work...

First up - how often are you looking for something in a true, "not blue, not yellowish" red color, and everything you see is really on ... View the Post

Start with Nature: The Spinning Pulsar of the Crab Nebula

August 29, 2022 Staying at the Observatory Until the Autumnal Equinox

There are all kinds of interesting things to observe and photograph near the equinox; she's going to stay until then, to have everything ready!

She will be alone most of the time, and it will get quite cool before she comes home...

So she starts her small travel wardrobe with some warm things, in the navy of the night sky:

There's laundry in the housing facility at the base of the tower, so she doesn't need much at all for clothing; these 9 pieces will go a long way!

But she realizes that if she takes a few more shirts and sweaters, she won't have to do laundry as often! So she turns to one of her favorite recent astronomy ... View the Post

Start With Art: Winter Solstice by Dame Barbara Hepworth

August 24, 2022

It seems a bit premature to be looking at art entitled Winter Solstice, but our heroine loves pastels!

She doesn't much care what anybody else wears - she's not interested in dark colors! She feels beautiful in pink, and lovely in sky blue...

The core of her wardrobe for cooler weather is gray, with a bit of denim and chambray tossed in for practicality:

please note - everybody's "Common Wardrobe" will be different - what I'm looking for are the core, neutral garments that form the base for the more expressive and statement garments and accessories in our wardrobes.

On those days, our heroine knows that she doesn't have to look any farther than these 9 pieces to get her dressed and out the ... View the Post

Start with Art: A Mother’s Love: The Polar Bear Family by Jason Carter

August 22, 2022

She loved his art the first minute she saw it! The clarity, simplicity, beautiful colors - all of it!

And she knew that this painting would be useful in helping her focus her ever-shrinking wardrobe:

She knows that the core of her wardrobe will be black, white and denim - this painting seems just right!

She start her autumn wardrobe planning with A Common Wardrobe. It's not called "common" because the clothes are cheap or run of the mill - it's called common because these are clothes that a LOT of people have in common!

That's a good thing - you can easily find them, they fit in easily when you're not sure what to wear, but best of all, the serve as a neutral background for whatever accents you wish to ... View the Post

Start with Art: The Fan by Marie Laurencin, and Test-Driving a New Neutral

November 8, 2019

Her favorite neutral is navy, too. But her approach is a bit different from our last heroine!

She's just plain and simply a more dressy woman. It's her style...

Yes, she has a simple tee shirt, but her button-front is in silk, and instead of jeans, she plans to pack velvet pants... Still, because of her disciplined color palette, she has just as many outfit options as her more... vivid friends!

Her favorite painting dictated pink as an accent color. Nothing else is acceptable!

She already can see so many ways to wear her new additions... touring museums, sitting in a cafe, perhaps an opera or ballet?

She really, really, REALLY wanted to find that bluish-purple color that's on the left ... View the Post

Start with Art: The Sunshade by William John Leech, and Working with Accent Colors

November 6, 2019

She loves this painting...

And so she decides that when she goes on vacation this autumn, she will use this painting as the inspiration for her accent colors! Her core wardrobe is navy and white...

She knows that she could travel with just these pieces and do just fine; she might want a couple more shirts (although she remembers that she could certainly wear her crewneck sweater without something underneath it, for more options...)

But she sticks to her heart, and starts to search for green. She decides that she doesn't needs to wear her green tops together, which gives her quite a bit more freedom than if she were going to try to get 2 matching garments! (2 green pieces at once feels, to her, like a ... View the Post

New Colors? The Pantone Colors for Spring/Summer 2020

October 18, 2019

Oh hurrah, new colors.... Which of course is absurd, but it always give us a chance to look at a whole bunch of French 5-Piece Wardrobes (which is also absurd...)

These are little ensembles of a sweater and some accessories, based loosely upon the colors that Pantone has chosen to feature for the upcoming Spring and Summer. The items that I've chosen do NOT match the Pantone colors exactly, because that's the road to madness!

First up - RED! Always available, and a color that you either love or just never wear...

Saffron is the "Color of the Year" for 2020. If you can wear it, jump in and stand out in the crowd - the rest of us will just stand back and admire...

This looks like a muted navy ... View the Post

What Can You Do With a Weekly Timeless Wardrobe? Add an Accent!

October 16, 2019

The Weekly Timeless Wardrobe is enough clothing for a lot of us - enough different garments, and enough colors. But what if you bump into an accent color that you can't resist?

For demonstration purposes, I'm going to start with the Week 16 Wardrobe...

And then let's imagine that our heroine sees this shade of blue on the L.L.Bean website. And she recognizes the value of true "whappage" - that feeling when you walk away, and are still thinking about something hours or days later. It takes a while to really know the difference between a crush and real love, and in the same way you have to cultivate your sense of "I could wear the dickens out of that color" vs "gosh, that's pretty..."

She realizes that her ... View the Post

April Showers Bring May Flowers…

May 8, 2019

And sometimes, flowers are what inspire you to update your warm-weather wardrobe...

Many of us have a pretty decent core wardrobe to carry us into the warm weather...

Many people could get through quite a bit of the summer with just these 9 garments - especially if you have to dress for work every day, and this is your leisure wardrobe.

But maybe you want to brighten up your core wardrobe with some pretty colors?

Even just one "French 5-Piece Wardrobe" in an accent color can give you quite a few new outfit options:

Maybe you're in the mood for orange?

Lace is fun for summer - not insanely dressy, just a pretty way to update a tee shirt...

The nice thing about getting a ... View the Post

Ready for a Warm-Weather Wardrobe Update? How about a French 5-Piece Wardrobe?

April 3, 2019

Of course these aren't an entire wardrobe - I hope that's clear. But, to me, the idea of a "French 5-Piece Wardrobe" is the 5 pieces that you plan, and carefully choose, and use to update your normal seasonal wardrobe of classic, neutral clothes.

Let's start here - these are about as basic as you can get!

While this isn't a really exciting wardrobe, it's versatile; you can get two dozen combinations from these 9 garments. That's a working wardrobe, I'd say!

When I thought about doing some French 5-Piece Wardrobes, I was thinking specifically about that Hedge Green color that is so uncommon, and really delightful. But I figured that I might as well work my way through the rainbow... Red, Orange, Yellow, ... View the Post

Accenting Winter White with 4 Pantone Spring 2019 Colors

November 28, 2018

Of course I'm going to have to see how a couple of the remaining Pantone Spring 2019 colors look with black, but first let's try something completely different - Winter White!

One thing to remember with this color - all of your clothes don't have to be "dye-lot matched" to look good together - especially if the fabrics and textures are different. Shades of the same neutral can look lovely!

Of course, it's perfectly beautiful to wear an outfit in just these colors:

I'm coming back to Turmeric again with black... this color is fine, but level of dressiness here is a little bit "off." The shoes might be okay with jeans - it depends on the woman!

I think these outfits are fun - certainly at this time ... View the Post