Style Prompt

I don’t think anyone would disagree that the colors used in an outfit either make or break your look. To prove this point, let’s start with the much celebrated picture of Tilda Swinton at Cannes last week (via zap2it.com):

The first thing that pops into my head is ‘wow, that’s a pretty high contrast outfit for someone with very little contrast in their face.’ What seems to be happening here is that Tilda’s outfit is completely overriding the natural beauty that she’s trying to play up by not wearing any make up. Your gaze is naturally pulled down to the blouse and skirt and away from the face because the colors in her face are so light and the colors of her outfit are dark and contrasting. For starters, the blue skirt she’s wearing is already too dark and having such a light color of blouse only compounds the problem even further.

Thus, if our goal were to bring more attention to her face and less attention focused on her clothes, we would accomplish this in a couple of different ways.  I’ll get to the second part later, but first and foremost, the colors in this outfit need to be changed. I went through the color analysis I’ve recommended in the past, and nowhere in Tilda Swinton’s color palette is such a dark shade of blue found:

Light Summer Color Palette

(Sidenote: If you haven’t done your own color analysis via this site, I highly recommend it as a free alternative to the other options. One word of caution – read every ‘characteristic’ listed, even if you think you have already found a match. Unfortunately when the webpage lost it’s ability to be a straight forward guide from when I had first recommended it.)

What I’ve done below is kept a similar look to what she was doing originally, I’ve simply updated the colors to ones that are in her palette. I think the difference is quite noticeable:

Due to the yellow of her shirt, the first thing I notice is the hair. This is a wonderful accomplishment as it creates a frame around her face which is where we want the attention. You’ll remember before that her dark skirt and light blouse stood out which stole the color from her face. The other thing I noticed before was that her eyes became beady because it was the only part of her face that had dark colors similar to her look. Now with the lighter colored skirt and better coloring around her face, you actually notice her lighter colored lips and cheeks evenly against the darkness of her eyes.

So now that we have the majority of the look fixed, we can continue on in accentuating her features – a piece I will cover in part 2 of this topic.