Hi Imogen,
Your northern hemisphere fans need your help. Spring, summer is on it’s way, I’ve searched your incredible archives to find a summer wardrobe capsule featuring your ” column of color” for petites, but alas, I can only find fabulous fall and winter.
Please help! It’s getting warm in Southern California.
A faithful fan,
Pat
When you think about creating a capsule wardrobe using a column of colour in the summer, it can be harder than an autumn/winter capsule as we tend to dislike layering so much. It’s very easy in the cooler months to add the third piece to create an outside column, but in the hot weather, we often only want to wear two pieces not three. The key to doing this, is not to stick totally to exactly the same colour, but just to keep all your pieces in a similar value – such as the one here that is all based around light value colours.
Particularly if you want to elongate yourself with the column of colour, you want to make sure that each of the colours isn’t so different that you cut yourself up into two pieces. Instead when you choose all colours of a similar value (that means lightness or darkness) you will find the eye is more likely to keep moving when the colours are related in value, unlike wearing a high value contrast where the eye will notice the change in color more readily and top at that point and follow that horizontal line.
Don’t forget to accessorize to make the outfits look more different and varied, also remember that wearing necklaces, scarves and earrings up near the face draw attention upwards.
Make sure your shoes blend with your skin or pant color so that you keep the column of colour going.
Did you know that dresses are a great way in summer to get the column of color effect with just one garment!
You can see that these pieces all mix and match, each top and jacket can be worn with each bottom. Keep your third pieces (jackets, waistcoats, vests, cardigans, shrugs) lightweight. You will want a combination of longer and shorter, or sleeveless versions.
You can make 25 outfits here without adding a third piece. If you add the third piece it adds up to 75 outfits! All from these few pieces.
