How To Wear A Bit More Colour This Season.

It’s hard to visit India and NOT want to wear colour. After returning from my recent trip I wanted to empty out all the black, navy and beige from my wardrobe and fill it with hot pink, red, orange and yellow, not that this actually happened obvs, but the sentiment was there. Every woman in Delhi and Jaipur wore bright colours and looked the better for it. I am not a bright colour-wearer at all, but a few more trips to see middleson and that might all change.

How to take the first steps towards a more colourful sartorial life? Well scarves, obviously. I bought a cobalt blue scarf embroidered with sunshine yellow daisies as a gift but it may not make it to the present wrapping stage…

I would also recommend Gudrun Sjödén as a great place to start, indeed she is frequently inspired by India for her always-colourful collections of home and clothes designs. Coincidentally, before my trip away I was walking passed the Monmouth Street store in London and saw this simple tie-front mohair knit on a mannequin and thought it looked useful to throw over a summer dress without looking too wintery. I revisited the store last week in need of some colour therapy and picked up said cardi in yellow, it is £89 and also comes in magenta and sage green.

I am urging you to consider this yellow because it is a quiet version of the colour, it’s gentle on the retina and flirts with being pretty while remaining grown up and elegant. The sceptical ex merchandiser in me (yellow = markdown/sale colour) has had an eyebrow raised at the current Hot Right Now fashion talk on yellow, because a lot of it is searingly unforgiving on older, pale skin. But this is perfect; cheeringly sunny to lift your mood and brilliant at brightening up all that black and navy – it looks great with indigo too.

If a whole cardigan is a brightly-hued step too far, then consider Gudrun’s new reader glasses range. Whenever I’ve met Gudrun (and fessing up, I am a proud brand ambassador for the company) we’ve always chatted about her colourful glasses and where she got them from, as I think there’s a shortage of well priced and designed reading glasses. Fantastic to see then, this small range of turquoise, scarlet and olive frames at £39.

They are a nice size and very comfy so I can easily quite small read type and they are bright enough to stand out among the detritus of my desk and living space so I don’t lose them quite so often as my brown and black-framed ones. BTW, the sooner reading glasses come with a tracking devise so you can locate them around the house/work, the better.

More on Gudrun’s uplifting range here. Are you a bright colour-wearer?

8 Comments

  • Sue Evans says:

    Come on Amanda ! Do a Sue Evans and smash the colour ! Once you do there is no going back ….. x

  • Amanda nicoll says:

    A wonderful website for all things spectacle related is retro peepers.a huge selection from the tame to the wild, reasonably priced and excellent customer service.ps I don’t work for them btw…

  • Sarah P says:

    I find the cool lemony yellows can be flattering, whereas warmer sunshine or mustard yellows look terrible on me. I bought a cool yellow scarf from John Lewis that I’ve been wearing a lot this spring: https://www.johnlewis.com/john-lewis-wool-blend-fringe-scarf-lemon/p3407252 .

  • Amanda, thanks for the tip on glasses and Sarah, I think accessories are the way to go too. Sue, you are a true genius in colour coordination and I do think ‘what would Sue do’ frequently when looking at lovely print and colour combos, but I’m a whimp when it comes down to it. Perhaps we need a post from you on how to do it? #masterclass Ax

  • Sue Evans says:

    The weirdest thing when I was in India was how I thought I would just blend in with the crowd as we’d all be similarly attired in clashing brights but unbelievably wherever we went I got hoards of people all wanting their photo taken with me. It was eventually explained to me it was because they were fascinated that a white European woman was happily wearing Indian-style rainbow colours head to toe ! x

  • Rebecca says:

    More and more, I am finding that if I wear something that makes me feel happy and energetic, it works. Who cares if it (supposedly) clashes with my skin color? Life’s too short. For a long time I was vigilant about avoiding clown clashing, etc., but as I have spent more of my life around people who are anxious, paranoid, judgy, etc., I’ve become a believer in comfort, energy, and brightness: yes to Gudrun, yes to conversations about where I got “those great stockings”, yes to brightening up my classroom and looking welcoming and cheerful to my (teenage and oh-so-self-conscious) students. Some days I’m all about neutrals, but others: look out.

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