This week, I’m running a series on how to wear separates well. See also: tip one and tip two.

Tip: To look great in separates, pick a colour theme and wear it from head to toe.

Separates can be used to create practically any colour combination that takes your fancy — but not all of them will look good on you.

Want to get it right? Here’s some tips, and some pictures of real people who’ve done it well.

A dress in a single colour instantly gives you a single line from head to toe, which is really flattering… and if a dress has two or more blocks of colour, they’ve probably been selected by a designer to create a nice effect.

You can create the opposite effect with separates — a separate block of colour for every part of your body. If you do this horizontally, you can end up looking like a bunch of body parts, as each colour block draws attention to itself separately. This is an incredibly unflattering look, especially if each block is wider than it is tall.

The good news is that separates can give you the same flattering effect that a well-designed dress does, you just need to limit your colour combinations a little. Wearing the same colour from top to toe gives the most flattering effect, but coordinating similar colours can work almost as well.

For example, different shades of the same colour create a unified appearance, or you can even mix-and-match different colours with the same tonal value (i.e. how light or dark they are), like Jaana-Mari has here:

In both pictures, her outfit uses one main colour to tie the different pieces all together — black on the left, brown on the right. However, the outfit on the left also uses a secondary colour (i.e. purple) in a fairly close tonal value, so the extra piece still looks related to the rest of the outfit. In a light shade, the purple top wouldn’t work nearly as well!

The advanced version:

Here Marion Eleonora shows a much more intricate, but still harmonious, colour combination.

Interestingly, she’s followed a rule I’ve more often seen used in interior design: the 60-30-10 rule. 60% of her outfit is black; roughly 30% is white; and 10% is red. For some reason, you can use some very unusual colour combinations in these proportions and they look fantastic.

Having this many strong horizontal lines in an outfit is a very tricky thing to pull off. Between the off-the-shoulder top, waist belt, end of the sweater and the band of red around the bottom of the skirt, it would be easy to look very wide in an outfit like this. The reason this works is that black effectively carries through from top to toe — the tights and sweater are visually ‘joined’ by the vertically-oriented black parts of the print on the skirt.
I’d certainly recommend trying this at home… but given the difficulty in getting it right, you’ll probably want to take some photos and make sure you’ve got it right before you leave the house!

Images: Flickr Wardrobe Remix group

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