How I'm Using my Color Analysis
As Someone Who Doesn't Believe in Fashion Rules - Tanna Giles
I’ll be honest, I scoffed at the idea of color seasons when I first heard about it. What’s wrong with just wearing the colors that I like? Winter, spring, summer, autumn - I didn’t care to know. I viewed it as another fashion rule that is used to box in your personal style. However when my mom, a fashion icon, got her color analysis done and was obsessed, I wondered if there was more to it than I thought. Not too long after, we visited her local House of Color and I got the full behind the scenes experience of color analysis.
Once I saw the color wheel and my stylist started talking about color harmonies and roots of color theory, the art historian in me couldn’t help but get a little excited. I have a degree in art history, so after 4 years of doing visual analyses I know that color theory is a very real and important thing. She walked me through the 4 seasons, 2 cool (summer and winter) and 2 warm (spring and autumn). A very fun fact I learned is that true red (think coca cola) is the only color that doesn’t contain any yellow or blue, so it’s a neutral on the color wheel and actually looks good on everyone.
Then comes the process that you see parodied in so many videos - the draping. BUT rather than saying ‘not your color, unflattering, etc’, she simply switched between warm and cool drapes to establish that I was warm before moving on to spring and autumn drapes (spoiler: I’m an autumn). It was all very fun, and I could start to see how the autumn colors made my skin look more even, my lips more pink, and my jawline more accentuated. I left feeling very inspired rather than feeling boxed in by my assigned season (as well as with a color fan full of swatches - who doesn’t love a new toy??)
What next? Time to get rid of everything I own that’s not in my season? Considering black isn’t in my palette, that would have resulted in me clearing out a good third of my closet. For my mom, it was a welcome opportunity to clean out her closet. She had been feeling overwhelmed by options while getting dressed and loved being directed towards colors that she felt beautiful in, as well as guided towards colors in the shopping process. However, I already loved most of the pieces in my closet and had colors, like black, that I felt confident wearing! Knowing that I wasn’t going to overhaul my wardrobe, I started figuring out how I wanted to use this newfound information.