A quick glance at the photo below and you might surmise that it’s a disorderly riot of colour. But look closer and you’ll see there’s a theme.

The colours represented here are citrus, peach and plum (yep, an exotic, fruity mix). Being derivatives of green, orange and purple they are less saturated versions of secondary colours and as such form a triad – that means they’re evenly spaced around the colour wheel.

“So what?” you may ask. Well the beauty of understanding how the colour wheel works is that you understand what colours naturally co-ordinate. This makes designing an outfit, capsule wardrobe or anything else for that matter, a cinch.

The photo is actually a shot of all the clothes I quickly threw together for a 10 day road trip up the east coast of Australia. Despite having plenty of space in the car for my stuff, I still wanted to ensure every item could be worn together so I didn’t have to think about what became dirty and what was still clean – anything I picked up to wear any day co-ordinated.

There is in fact a smidge more to know than the colour wheel to enable this to work for you – you also need to consider colour temperature, value and saturation levels. In my case, the shades I wear are warm, medium to deep in value and muted.

If I’d selected green, orange and purple in both cool and warm shades that were also a mix of bright and muted tones you would still see some clashes. I threw in some neutrals – chocolate, cream and olive/gold (yep, more food colours!) and a sprinkling of teal to tone things down a bit and I was away!

Wanna learn how to do this for you?

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