Imagine a bright yellow blouse paired with a deep blue blouse, which technically should ‘go’ together, but the intensity of the two cool colors could produce an overpowering blast of color that’s just too bright! So sometimes the key to getting the best look from colors you should not normally wear together is to just add a touch of the other bright color to your outfit, with a scarf or bag or shoes.
Viva Magenta! Here’s How To Style Magenta For 2023
Last year was about dopamine dressing, adding bold brights to your wardrobe to boost your mood. And as Pantone announced viva magenta as this year’s colour, it seems the trend isn’t going away anytime soon.
In this style guide, we’re picking apart viva magenta and offering our top recommendations on embracing and styling this energetic and vibrant colour. Featuring some of our most stylish, on-trend coats, jackets and accessories, get ready to add magenta to your wardrobe and step out in style!
Table of Contents:
Magenta is categorised as a mixture of pink, purple and red and is located on colour wheels midway between red and blue.
Viva magenta descends from the red family and expresses strength and energy.
Full of optimism, it’s a perfect shade to add to your wardrobe as it’s on trend but also wearable and timeless.
Magenta provides many versatile dressing options, working with neutrals such as whites, blacks and creams, and other bold brights, including electric blues, vibrant greens and yellows.
Is magenta pink or purple?
As viva magenta sits halfway between red and blue on colour wheels, it can be recognised as pink or purple, so there is no clear, definitive answer to this question.
Magenta can be categorised as a pink-purple red colour, a reddish purple and pink, or a mauve-crimson shade.
However you view magenta, one thing’s for certain, it’s a colour that’s vibrant and playful and a great one to have fun with.
Adding magenta to your wardrobe can help you make a bold colour statement, brighten up your otherwise neutral outfits, or provide a fun and colourful contrast to a selection of bright looks.
Classic clashes
But other times, a new fashion just turns out to be a horrendous mistake – like the fashion for re-decorating bars in bright orange and purple in the 1970’s! That was a classic warm clashes with cool color disaster. And a couple of years ago, a fashion stylist dressed Meghan Markle in an attention-grabbing outfit of a purple dress under a red coat. It’s just too much color intensity, even though both are cool colors, so it’s tiring on the eyes.
Tones and shades
However, it’s difficult to set hard and fast rules for what colors you should not wear together, as everything depends on the tones and shades of the colors you try to match. Fabric tinting includes a lot of color mixing between warm and cool colors, to create new tones and shades. And really you need to be able to use your own observation of which colors don’t go together on other women, to inform your own choices.
For example, you wouldn’t normally wear a pink blouse with an orange skirt, but one of the fashion world’s favorite new colors has been salmon-pink and a similar color, coral. These two shades are produced by mixing pink and orange in varying quantities, and so they are a fine balance between warm and cool colors!
Match the ‘undertones’
Generally speaking, women have a better understanding of which colors look good together and frequently have to advise their male partners about stylish color matching. And there are basic rules like matching contrasting and complementary colors successfully by choosing the same ‘undertones’ and intensity of color.
For instance, black can have a variety of undertones, including brown, green, blue and purple. So you wouldn’t want to wear a brown blouse with a black skirt or trousers, if the black fabric had a blue or purple undertone. This is because brown is a warm color, which would not look good with blue or purple, which are cool colors.
