Making Your Accessories Work

Accessories are much more than just shoes & bag and bits & bobs that you carelessly add to your main garment(s). They are among the most important elements of style.

You can make your expensive primary garments last seasons longer if you choose them along classic lines and update them with trending accessories.

For example: Let’s say you have a slender navy sheath dress with long, sleeves and a knee-length hem. It’s one of the ultimate classics. So, you bring it into the moment with something that’s trending.

Right now, I’d wear a bold chain-link necklace and teardrop earrings. Since yellow gold has been hot for the past several years (expensive items like jewelry swing in slower trend cycles than clothing), I’d choose polished silver or white gold.

High-heeled sandals have dominated for the past few seasons, winter and summer. As always happens after a dominant style peaks, the opposite style looks fresher and newer. So, I’d choose open-sided or slingback pumps for our hypothetical outfit.

With a navy dress, red would seem like the intuitive choice, but remember, red with navy is a classic combination and you’ve set out to update a classic, and you can’t do that with another classic. Go with a different primary color, like yellow or bright green. If you’re a little too color conservative for that, beige would also work, but it wouldn’t pack the stylistic punch.

Large to enormous handbags were popular for several seasons, followed by teeny-tiny bags that barely held an iPhone and lipstick. Starting with this Fall/Winter Season, things have settled down and medium-sized bags look fresh again.

Since you’ve already taken a major color stand with your shoes (sorry, no pun intended), I’d match them with my bag. You could use a navy bag, but that would make your brightly colored shoes look less important, particularly since they are way down there on your feet. So, reinforce them with your bag.

You could also carry a patterned bag, but the pattern would have to be primarily yellow to go with your yellow shoes (or green if that’s the color you’re using). 

If you have or could find such a bag, it would be the best look of all because it would introduce the interest of pattern to an outfit that’s all solid colors. I’m not casting aspersions on solid colors they’re the easiest to wear and the most fool-proof.

Next example: Let’s imagine that your classic dress is a shirt-dress in a floral pattern. In this case, our example will be silk with a print of large, tonal pink primary flowers with small, creamy yellow secondary flowers on an ivory background,

Since almost all shirt-dresses have collars, the necklace you choose has to go either above it (choker) or below it (matinee length). In this case, I think I’ll go with a pearl choker and white gold earrings..

About ten years ago, the Chinese wrecked the pearl market by flooding it with cheap and often beautiful, fresh-water pearls. So pearls, that had always been aspirational, became as cheap as beads and were consigned to the outer reaches of fashion. The Chinese finally realized they were damaging their potential markets and became much more conservative with their exports. And, since pearls are too beautiful to stay down for long, they’re back, very back.

Here’s another hint about necklaces with a shirt. If you decide not to wear a choker, make sure that your long necklace has a lot of substance - like pearls or beads. If you wear something like tiny chains, they’ll hang up on the buttons. It would not only look messy (not to be despised in certain applications), but they could actually break if you make a sudden or forceful move like pulling on your coat. (Does that sound like it’s happened to me? Uh-huh, It has).

Back to our floral shirtdress. We’ve got our pearls and earrings. Now it’s time to pick out shoes and bag.

With most florals, there are plenty of colors to choose from. Most floral backgrounds are neutral: white (including ivory & cream), black, navy or beige or less often, a primary color: red, yellow, green or blue. So, you can match your shoes and bag to the background color or choose the color of the most dominant flower in the pattern.

This is where it gets tricky. If your floral is a pastel, go ahead and match your shoes to the color of the background (let’s say cream)  and call out the dominant flower color (let’s say pink) with your bag.

If your floral is a raucous combination of reds, blues, yellows and greens, mismatched shoes and bag are going to start to look like a color riot.

Certain women have the personal presence to dominate overwhelming color, but very few. If you’re not one of them, you could get lost in the visual noise.

So, if you’re wearing a primary color floral, or any boisterously  colored print, go with neutral accessories like black, white or brown.

For our pastel floral shirtdress, I’m going with cream-colored medium or low-heeled pumps (nose-bleed heels are declining) and a pastel pink bag.

And now, a few general guidelines for accessorizing:

• In general, the more formal the occasion or outfit, the more you should match your accessories. If you’re wearing jeans and a sweater, anything goes. As you move up the scale of formality - Day Dress, Skirt or Pantsuit: your accessories should at least be on speaking terms; Evening or Dinner Dress or Suit: accessories should all harmonize, but not necessarily match; Evening Gown: everything should match, unless you wish to introduce one single point of color, say a red satin clutch with a black gown, black shoes and white diamonds.

• You shouldn’t use a discordant color with an already colorful outfit. The other day I saw a picture of a blue and yellow floral dress. The stylist had chosen amber jewelry that echoed the darkest yellow in the flowers, matched the olive green of the foliage with the shoes and then, for some reason I cannot fathom, chose a vibrant purple bag! Huh? She/he must have been trying to make some kind of statement, but if so, it’s not the sort of thing you say in polite company.

• It’s best to only introduce a “pop of color” into an outfit that is, otherwise, all neutrals, like the black evening gown example above. Or, perhaps, a beige and brown outfit with an orange bag and/or shoes. Once you’ve brought in your accent color, don’t bring in a second accent color. It takes your accent from focused to non-sequitur.

• Recently, there has been a trend that encourages the general use of dressy or evening items - high jewelry (or good fake high jewelry) on a cotton day dress; sequined or lace evening pumps with jeans; duchess satin dresses for daywear.

• I have one thing to say about this trend: When you do this sort of thing, you’re cheating your life experience. When nothing is special, nothing is special.

Next Week: Accessories, Part II

 - Gabrielle