Last night, I went to a largish Christmas party. Twas a very preppy crowd. I wore this Blackish burgundy suit in a super 150s cloth with a  disappointingly hard to see red dotted zigzag. A black open collared shirt with a specially designed 70s collar and an all over dotted paisley pattern and a pair of black suede  Chelsea boots and a Pucci pocket square.  When I arrived, all the male guests were wearing either drab tweed jackets or navy blazers with some sort of plain pale shirt and a nondescript tie. The host had on a tweed Scottish jacket that went with his tartan kilt.  I stood out like lounge lizard Larry. But all the girls found their way to me. Sometimes being a failure in the eyes of some is pretty good.

There is always going to be tension in clothes. If you live in fear or are restricted by your pocket book, then wear the navy blazer for everything. The problem is that I see lip service paid to the spirit of the aristocracy but choices made by the blandest most conventional imaginably unimaginable middle class.

I came to Ivy via a dangerous flirtation with i-gentism.  So I have lots of stuff in my wardrobe which I no longer like to wear very much (e.g. jackets with waist suppression, slanted pockets and/or ticket pockets).  It's an expensive way to learn from one's mistakes.

Last edited by formby (2012-12-15 16:50:14)

Oldfruit:
My two cents worth- and they are really worth two cents.
FNB has (seems to me) very clear and stimulating ideas about clothing, your surroundings and the interaction between them. Formby, on the other hand, comes from a very stable base of knowledge about what is right for him. That is one of the reasons I love this forum, because it is just fascinating to see how people think about what they wear, not necessarily what they wear.

My choice of clothing comes from two sources.
The first is emotional memories. They are tied up with smells, feel of the fabric, and an attitude that I saw amongst my father's peers growing up. As I have come to understand now this was all italian influenced, and I try to recapture that world by purchasing items that hit one of those memories head on.
The second comes from leaving the island and spending time in the US and different parts of Europe during my professional training. Clothing as an instrument to fit in, or give cues to what you're up to.
So what I think is important is not necessarily the items you get, but using your wardrobe to explore certain conceptions about the world that are knocking around in your brain, and to "ping" the world around you.
If you don't mind flailing about and falling on your face once in a while it can be a lot of fun but more importantly, you will get some outfits that really sing about the best of you.

''But still...like most men l never knew how to co-ordinate colours well for years. Why don't men combine colours well? Because it is a right brained activity and most of us use the left side of the brain primarily. Professional jobs, stress, materialism and cooked animal foods cause us to predominantly use the left side of our brain,''

The corpus callosum allows both hemisphere of the brain's frontal lobes to communicate. Left being systematic, the right being holistic.

Your ability for your own brain to communicate with both sides, is mainly decided before you're born in the womb due to testosterone exposure, the more testosterone, the smaller the corpus callosum, and the larger the amygdala.

Only 20% of men are born with bridge brains, ie. A brain that uses both sides effectively. As to which side become dominant is again down to formation in the womb, and the reason why most other men concentrate on one specific interest, those that are dominated by the left part of their brain do become systematic in their thoughts, but this does not mean they become our masters and babylonian overlords, there are many other factors that come into play for people to become, in your eyes Shooey, 'evil'.

The only way a person with brain with little hemisphere communication to improve this is to eat omega 3 oils, as this increases the connections between both hemispheres.

There is also an argument to suggest men have less need for colour recognition than women, and also that men's sensitivity to colour is less than women due to lower serotonin levels, anyone that has every taken MDMA will understand the increased appreciation of colour that comes with the serotonin boosting drug.

COlour matching then is something better suited for women, and or men that have female type brains, in fact, no wonder then that some of the world's best designers, and artists have been gay. As typically gay men have a female type brain.

Anyway, my brain is pretty much cut off from the left hemisphere, I have little organisational skills, I was number blind up until my 20's when I began to take EPAs to improve my brain function.

I would argue though sense and reasoning is equally available to a right brain thinker as it is a left, I'm a very reasoned person, maybe because I can see the big picture, where as detail distract people from other outcomes that were not foreseen through their lack of imagination? 

Anyway my point is, if you aren't a troll SHoo, I really do worry about your mental health.

I'm sure you do cosmic knowledge a world of justice by using it to thumb your nose Shoo.

Only men can be colourblind apparently. There is some cheap man made knowledge for you. I don't have direct communication with the angels yet.

The thing with colour is that is something we are not taught to use so it remains a mystery, music has a clear system, well many systems, language has many systems, colour as it was so hard to observe before we had the technology of the last century is held up to so many subjective points that no one really has a model.

Which is why I use my music theory over the top of a colour wheel split into 12 segments or notes, I then adopted the Jazz theory of stacking thirds to get colour harmonies that are not really talked about with traditional colour theorieos, all design is observed mathematics, art is when you put your heart into it, you can express yourself better when you've learnt a language. Which is what I always intended to do, I can now match colour a lot better because I've become conscious of it and have studied it, same as how I learnt to play the guitar. I really don't see it as being much different, but still it gets shrouded in mystery.

It doesn't need to be talked of in a flighty way like FNB does with jewel tones and earth tones, although grouping colours into tints and shades can help, the hues all remain the same, and it is those that have the harmonic relations.

Last edited by My Grandfather's Pants (2012-12-26 07:45:12)

Culture, age, place, taste &c

Your theory takes none of these into consideration.

Your mechanistic approach may provide colour combinations that whilst 'mathematically' correct, are actually revolting to the eye.