shoes Archives

More Beautiful Accent Colors! Pantone London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2026

October 10, 2025

Quick question before I throw a ton of beautiful colors at you: do you wear gym shoes/athletic shoes a lot? More and more, as I search for shoes, I'm finding about half of my results are something sporty. This is particularly true if I'm trying to find a pretty color! But is this the way YOU dress? I don't want to include tons of shoes more suited to sweaty, if you're more interested in sophisticated, or sexy, or simply simple...

Ten more colors! Well, a couple of these are repeats from the New York Fashion Week. Still, a lot of appealing colors:

It comes as a complete surprise to me to realize that Shale Green is my favorite color here!

What's ... View the Post

Need a Fresh Accent Color? Pantone’s New York Fashion Week 2026 Colors

September 29, 2025

One of my favorite posts! Although it takes HOURS to find these things - but if you're going to test-drive a new accent color, it's worth it to get things that work together.

This year's colors are very interesting - I've never seen so many shades of red and pink...

But let's start with this color that looks almost yellow on the Pantone website, but if you follow their digital guidelines, it's actually this moss green. Hmm...

Finding this color was easiest if I searched for moss or lime. Acacia did NOT register, and I'm not surprised.

I quite like Alexandrite, although I can't help but feel that half of the things should be this teal green, and the other half the purple color that Alexandrite turns when ... View the Post

Thinking About Accents? Six Scarves, with “French 5-Piece Accessory Wardrobes”

June 11, 2025

It's been ages since we've really taken a long look at a stack of scarves! When I saw that The Met Store had a few new scarves in, I thought that this was a good time to think about accessories and accent colors.

First up, I chose these six scarves upon which we could focus:

Even if you're not buying a scarf these days - heck, even if you NEVER buy scarves - this exercise might help you focus on what your favorite accent colors are. When you're confronted with a number of items in different colors, even if they're spatulas (!), it's always interesting to see what draws your attention first, and if that initial attention translates into affection or admiration.

I still waffle back and forth between purple, brown ... View the Post

Thinking About Accent Colors? Pantone London Fashion Week, Spring/Summer 2025

December 30, 2024

I always love these, even though they are difficult - just because Pantone says that a color is going to be popular does NOT mean that anybody actually sells something in that color. Maybe I'm just ahead of the curve...

But this is interesting - no pink, no dark or medium blue, and an offensively named (at least to me) shade of brown.

And I must share - on the Pantone website, there's a recurring typographical error that calls this first color Windsor Wind, rather than Windsor Wine! Maybe it will be fixed by the time you read this, but still - someone should be proofreading these things.

Does anyone still proofread?

Let's go!

Why yes, I'm quite smitten with this next color!

I was surprised how ... View the Post

Looking for a Wardrobe Spark? Pantone New York Fashion Week Spring 2025 colors

September 23, 2024

Ah, one of my favorite projects! "New" colors are always fun...

I feel like the Pantone people had a meeting at which they decided that their work needed to be more "green," and that someone misunderstood the assignment. Lots of shades of green in this list!

But let's start with Orangeade, which I kind of interpreted in a more rust direction, for autumn:

I like this warm light brown, but I might have tried harder to give it a more appealing name than Bran...

I don't know why you'd take a nice shade of light camel and give it a slightly greenish cast.... OH WAIT, this is the green season...

I wish I could think of any legitimate reason for me to own this next scarf, but it would be fiction! If ... View the Post

Some Wardrobe Update Ideas – Pantone London Autumn/Winter 2024/25 Fashion Week Colors

June 26, 2024

Some of us are diligently wearing our well-crafted wardrobes regularly, but still have... an itch? a yearning? for just a little bit of an update. Something fresh (for us). A bit of a wake-up call for our usual outfits...

And Pantone delivers, with ten colors that they isolated from what they observed at the London winter fashion week. Does this mean that these colors will be readily available or easy to find? Heck no! But they do give us ideas, and ideas are where all beautifully-dressed women start!

Oddly, there is NO shade of pink here.

Please note that I really don't think anybody will wear ALL five items in these images at one time. I'm not sure that you should buy all five, unless you've got a serious ... View the Post

Looking for a New Accent Color? Part 2 – Pantone London Fashion Week Spring 2024

April 12, 2024

It's always interesting to me how difficult it is to find some of these colors! One would imagine that a reasonable range of ALL colors should be available, given the literally hundreds of thousands of products I see...

Let's jump in and evaluate what I DID find!

The next color on Pantone's list was the beautiful Sun Orange... It wasn't terribly hard to find things, except a scarf that was mostly orange. So I decided that I would share with you this really pretty, bright, versatile and cheery scarf from Echo, which includes the orange and a bunch of other summery colors:

don't you like the way that the pattern of the earrings echoes the pattern of the headband?

They call it Fiesta, but I called it coral. ... View the Post

Looking for a New Accent Color? Part 1 – Pantone London Fashion Week Spring 2024

April 10, 2024

"New" Colors! Or at least we can say "colors that have been identified as being influential for this spring..."

I'm going to confess right now - I'm in a complete muddle about WHICH of the many Pantone seasons I have and have not covered, and further, I'm not 100% sure that this is the most recent! Neither of these facts is really a big deal, when you get right down to it; the big thing to learn from posts like this is to give yourself some room and some time to consider if a new color in your wardrobe might be fun.

Or might be super-useful.

Or might make you happy. Happy is really the bottom line for getting dressed...

Let's jump in with 5 of the 10 colors from London Fashion Week...

This first color? As ... View the Post

A Cool Weather Wardrobe Accent – 10 Sweaters, with Accessories

August 28, 2023

Let's assume, for the sake of fun, that we know what our core neutral wardrobe color will be for upcoming cool weather (in the Northern Hemisphere, of course!).

But most of us are going to want to add something to accent our wardrobes for the upcoming 6+ months of sweater weather...

I've already found mine - I bought the Lands' End Velvet Plum Heather cashmere cardigan THE MINUTE it was available. I didn't wait for it to go on sale, because it had real, serious whappage, and that means grab it now!

I could have purchased the crewneck, but I already have a purple crewneck sweater - in a different purple! - so this filled a wardrobe gap, and also sang sweet songs of cashmere to my heart...

But there are ... View the Post

Accenting Navy with Bright or Deep Colors

This is called: "I have NO IDEA what the day, or date, is this month!" Please understand that I will NOT have another post tomorrow morning!

August 13, 2023

Hi! Someone made a great point in Friday's comments, that I want to address. They pointed out that there are a LOT more ways to mix a neutral and an accent color than just "column of neutral + accent cardigan + accent scarf and shoes."

Of COURSE there are! But I've tried to keep these outfits as similar as possible, with the only variable in the accent color, so we can focus on the effect of the color and not be distracted by things like necklines and drapes and lengths and all of the other dozens of variables in clothing.

I'm always more than happy to approach these ... View the Post

Accenting Navy with Other Neutrals

August 9, 2023

Ah, let's see what kinds of lovely ensembles we can pull together with this as our base:

I'm not going to interject a lot of remarks for this post, because (a) I don't wear navy anymore, and I'm more interested to hear what those of you who DO wear navy have to say, and (b) I'm dashing off to have someone poke a needle in my wrist, after which I shall NOT type for the rest of the day! I'd say I deserve a break after that, eh?

Editorial update: NO SHOT!!! And no more visits unless the pain dictates... Woo hoo!!!

First, an all-navy ensemble, accented with labradorite earrings and a lovely small scarf:

You don't wear scarves? A nice olive necklace will do the trick...

If you want a less "all dark" ... View the Post

Accenting Olive Green with Brights and Strong Colors

August 7, 2023

Ah, back to seeing the possibilities in olive green!

Please note that there were other colors that I wanted to include, but just couldn't find a cardigan that would do... I had to look for a shockingly long time to find a red cardigan! And there wasn't nearly as much pink in the world as one might believe, now in the Barbie times...

But we still have beautiful options!

Rust is my first thought with green; red is technically the compliment color to green (i.e. it is opposite to green in the color wheel), but I really feel like orange/rust is just a natural fit...

Turquoise! I love turquoise so much that I'm going to do another, brighter one below.

My thinking here is that if you're wearing an ... View the Post