Summary: What feels right in your outfit colors shifts with the season, the light, and your own energy. This article covers the major color harmonies, the one that can read as a costume, and what making peace with uncertainty has to do with having fun getting dressed this fall.
Why Do Outfit Colors Change With the Seasons?
Standard color theory assumes that if two swatches harmonize on a color wheel, they will always harmonize when translated into an outfit. In practice, what feels right on you changes with the seasons, and it depends on your own personal coloring.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a way to build your fall outfit colors that flexes with the season, the light, and your own energy on any given day.
Getting outfit colors right without needing a fixed rule frees up the mental energy usually spent overthinking. That energy can go back into showing up fully for the work you’re called to do in the world and the people right in front of you.
What I’ve noticed is that a color combination tips into costume when it’s overtly tied to a season we’re not actually in. We’ll look at the full harmony toolbox, then end with what making peace with a shifting answer has to do with having fun getting dressed this fall.
The Five Basic Color Harmonies
There are five basic ways colors relate to each other on the wheel. There are lots of other color harmonies, and these are the major ones. Each produces a different effect.
Monochromatic is different shades of the same color. It produces a restful, maybe elegant effect.
Complementary is colors directly opposite each other on the wheel. It’s dramatic and intense.
Analogous is colors sitting next to each other on the wheel. It’s friendly and calm.
Triadic is three colors equidistant on the wheel, like the primary colors, or orange, green, and purple. It feels active and playful.
Neutral is an outfit made from two or more neutrals combined, which gives the effect of both stability and sophistication. (Parenthetically, if you’re going to do that, I always recommend wearing a colorful lipstick, so there’s a splash of color and life near your face, or on your face, in that case.)
Evocative Harmony: When Colors Point to Something Else
Another kind of color harmony is evocative harmony, which is defined by reference. A combination points to a specific real-world object or occasion, unintentionally or intentionally. Easter egg colors are one example. Red and green reads as Christmas, and black and orange reads as Halloween. Worn at a different time of year, those combinations can read as a costume or feel somehow uncomfortably off.
Brown pants with a green top is the version that makes you look like a tree, and whether that’s comfortable depends on your personality.
Coloring changes the answer a little. My daughter has auburn hair, so her hair sits on the orange spectrum, and her eyebrows are nearly black. Combinations that get very close to orange and black, which would look completely wrong on me or most other people, look perfectly normal on her year round.
The five wheel-based harmonies describe the relationship between colors. Evocative harmony describes what the colors remind whoever sees them of.
How Season, Light, and Energy Change What Works on You
I can usually tell, by interacting with a person or certainly by looking at her aesthetic images, whether a specific harmony is likely to work for her. That read is based on intuition and inspiration, and it can’t be turned into a rule. Inspiration also shifts with the season, with how a color sits on your inherent coloring in the existing light, and with your energy on any given day.
Light is one example. When the light is bright, in the summer or early fall, I wear bright white. In the winter, when the light is cold and gray, bright white is too much for me. I can wear creamy whites all year round, and bright white only when there’s enough yellow in the light I’m getting.
Energy is another. A more intense color harmony takes more energy to wear.
I usually wear a bright pink lipstick that’s the natural color of my lips, just a little more intense. I used it all up. I still have the lip liner, and I had another lipstick I’d gotten in a gift bag or something that’s a little more toasted. It’s wearable for me right now in early October, but I think it will be too harsh and too brown in the gray light of February.
Cornflower Blue Jeans and the Fall Sky
Last week I wanted to wear my cornflower blue jeans, and every outfit I built with them felt like spring or summer. I was driving down the road in a spring or summer looking outfit, thinking about this, and I looked outside and realized the pants were close to the color of the sky.
I started looking around. The question became: what colors look good on me and look good with the sky in the fall? My favorite thought was a marigold yellow-orange (the video shows the exact color I mean).
A day or two later I was in Marshalls, and there was so much brown. I bought a cropped brown corduroy utility jacket to become a third piece for fall, and a sleeveless merino mockneck, also brown, that can be worn with it or with other things. This colorway is also going to work for me in the fall with the cornflower blue.
Is It Okay to Dress Like a Tree in the Fall?
Brown, and then the blue: that would be a tree, right? I think I’m okay dressing like a tree, but only in the fall. In the fall, the trees are the centerpiece of what’s going on. I realized last year that I was okay wearing my green jacket with my brown barrel-leg jeans.
I’m still working out where the line sits between an evocative color harmony that feels over the top and taking inspiration from nature, which I recommend to almost anyone, and certainly taking inspiration from your aesthetic images as far as how you put colors together. I’ve also noticed that many people send me pictures of nature in the season named by their seasonal energy.
Making Peace With Uncertainty About Outfit Colors
Looking and feeling like who you actually are, I consider a basic human right. Once that piece is settled, in whatever season-shifting way it gets settled, the mental energy it used to take is free for your calling, your work, and the people in your life.
Underneath that are values. A separation worldview runs on scarcity, certainty, perfectionism, and self-interest, and it treats getting dressed as a problem to solve correctly and permanently. A connection worldview runs on abundance, mystery, fallibility, and concern for others. It treats getting dressed as a practice that stays alive because it changes with you.
Depth psychology holds that getting comfortable with uncertainty leaves a lot more energy for personal growth and for the priorities that matter more than what you’re wearing.
The common assumption is that capable, put-together people have color and style figured out permanently, with a formula they apply the same way every time. Certainty about color gets treated as the mark of someone who takes her appearance seriously, and uncertainty gets treated as a sign she hasn’t learned the rules yet.
Why Does Uncertainty Feel Different for Different People?
Certain cognitive functions create uncertainty in different domains of life for different people, and that source is identifiable.
In The Congruence Code, which is where we start, we have a personality profiling conversation that identifies which cognitive functions you’re using and which ones create uncertainty for you specifically. After the personality discovery, it delivers a Personality Style Blueprint and a Seasonal Energy Digital Palette of 48 to 60 colors. That palette is a place to keep testing inspiration month to month. The Style Blueprint gives you the building blocks of your style, and the digital palette gives you the colors to play with.
This is where we work it out one on one. We discover the wiring of your mind, define what truly matters in your style, and align your colors with your energy.
If you’re not quite ready for that, here’s a free Guide to Seasonal Energy & Personality Colors, which covers the four color resonances, the harmony types from this article, and some color psychology.
A Simple Project for Your Fall Outfit Colors
Making peace with uncertainty is the most effective way to overcome overthinking and have fun with your outfit colors this fall.
The color wheel, the sky, the marigold, and the wiring behind your own discomfort all lead to the same place. When getting dressed takes up less mental space, there’s more of you available for whatever you’re here to contribute to the world.
Here’s something simple you can do this week to integrate these principles into your wardrobe: choose one item you want to make into a fall color harmony, and look outside for inspiration. If that doesn’t give you an answer, look inside.
Understanding the color harmonies in this article is one skill, and applying them to the clothes in your actual closet is another. A collaborative, self-discovery call is where we look at what you already know about yourself and figure out what’s missing, so these ideas fit your closet and your coloring. If you’re curious, you can book a free 30 minute Style System Synthesis Call here.