Perplexing Patterns

You may have seen the other day when I bemoaned Mr. Wooster’s seemingly out-of-place cordovan boots.  Or not.  Either way, forget the boots at just look at how this man mixes patterns.  I stumbled upon this picture in Men of Habit’s great article on beards, but for our purposes you can forget everything above the collar.

There’s that old adage that within the triangle of shirt-coat-tie you should limit yourself to two patterns and one solid at your wildest.  Throw that adage out the window.  Sure, wearing a Prince of Wales suit with a Butcher Stripe shirt and an oversize houndstooth tie is overdoing it, but the above combo is not.  Wooster, in his recent bout of internet celebrity, has mentioned many times that he loves dressing in a monotone color palate, and that here is the key to his pattern complexity.

If any of his “triangle items” were out of the basic blue palate, the whole thing would fall apart.  The chalk stripes, university stripes, and white dots all seems to emanate from the same blue mass.  The shirt is lighter, but it perfectly sets off the contrast between the precision of the spots and the dustiness of the stripes.  The softness of the chalk stripes pairs nicely with the softness of the shirt’s construction.  We often think of pattern as something simple, like “stripes,” but that’s really just the mouth of the cave.  I’m not advocating you stand in front of the mirror and co-ordinate the yarn-weights of your shirt and coat, but looking beyond stripes, spots, and plains can’t hurt.

This is certainly not for amateurs, but practice does make perfect.  Most people throw on a striped suit, striped shirt, and spotted tie and end up with a cacophony.  This, my friends, is a perfect lesson in harmony.