Shop Your Closet for Pantone SS 2024 Colors - Part 2: Identify and Select Your Print Garments

This post is the second in the series about shopping your closet for the color trends as laid out in the Pantone Spring/Summer 2024 color palette. In the first post, we identified solid items in the 10 "leading colors" (accents) and 5 "new classics" (neutrals) that make up the SS 2024 NYFW palette. (Of course, you don't need to use all 15 colors; you can decide how many of these colors you want to shop in your wardrobe. If there are colors you don't have or aren't feeling this season, you can skip over them.) In today's post, we will identify and choose print garments to complement these pieces. To keep this process manageable, I am focusing on clothing and shoes only at this stage; we will revisit accessories in a later post.

Pantone SS 2024 Color Palette

In my digital closet, I have organized things to make it easier for me to identify which items coordinate with each other, but there really is nothing high-tech-required about this step. You are simply looking at the solid-colored items that you previously pulled from your wardrobe in the Pantone colors and now looking for print clothing that share colors with those pieces.

I personally worked color by color through the 10 "leading colors" (accents), identifying which print garments contain the same or similar color (i.e., "matched"). Some items matched many of the 10 colors, while others matched fewer. I started by pulling all the print items that matched, not trying to hit a certain number or worrying that I was identifying too many.

This is a good place to mention that it's totally up to you what you do with the items you've shopped from your closet. I'm going to work toward building a capsule wardrobe in this series, but you absolutely do not have to do that at all! You could simply identify all the things you have (or some subset of that) in these colors that you would like to wear this spring/summer season and put them in a front-and-center area of your closet so that you see them when getting dressed. You could do outfit planning where you make sure to include these items. You could create outfits entirely from these items or make a goal to include one piece in each outfit or simply start the process of building an outfit by looking at these pieces. There is no wrong way to use/wear the trendy color items you've shopped from your closet.

If you have a small-ish wardrobe, or have relatively few prints with these colors, you may be able at this stage to simply add all the print candidates to your solid pieces and have your selection of trendy color clothes ready to go. If you have a larger wardrobe, or have many candidate items in these colors, you might want to narrow down your candidate list. While doing this, you might make tweaks to the solid pieces you selected previously, too. What counts as too few, too many, or about the right number of pieces is a matter of individual preference. You know best whether you like having a lot of options or get overwhelmed by too much choice, how much storage space you have, what your lifestyle demands are, etc.

If you decide to narrow down your options, there are many different things you could base your decision on. Here are a few possibilities:

-How many pieces you have identified as candidates versus how many you want your wardrobe to have for a given category. If you have 15 candidate skirts but don't wear them often, that's a good place to remove some items. If you have 6 pairs of pants and wear them daily, you might want to keep them all.

-Which colors you want to rely on heavily and which ones will be worn more sparingly. If you wear a lot of neutrals but use accent colors less often, you can make sure your balance across the 15 colors matches how you want to dress. If you love and feel great in Blue-Green tones but are less fond of warm brights, you might keep everything in the Capri Blue color but be more selective about the Orangeade pieces.

-What your desired ratio of solids to prints is. If you wear a lot of print clothes in the warm seasons to add interest to your outfits, you'll select more of them than if you love monochromatic solid outfits or colorblocked solids.

-How much do you like the individual pieces? Favorites are more likely to make the cut than items you like less or feel less excited about wearing.

I narrowed down my selections on the basis of color versatility. Once I had my candidate print pieces pulled out, I went through them one by one, noting which of the 10 colors the piece matched. When I had more than one piece in a category that matched the same group of colors, I could choose the one that matched more colors. If this is hard to picture, don't worry - I will show you what I kept, what I removed, and why in the remainder of this post as an example of the process in action.

Let's get to it!

With the addition of the white floral T and the black botanical print skirt, my Rooibos Tea cluster has a really nice balance: a solid top, bottom, topper, and shoes plus print top and bottom. The prints make two automatic outfits in this cluster, and each piece will work with multiple other colors as well. The floral T consists entirely of colors in the Pantone palette (the Rooibos Tea, Orangeade, Desert Flower, and Brilliant White) while the skirt has colors in and outside the palette. The dominant black neutral, for example, is not in the palette, but that doesn't stop the piece from being a useful addition - it just has some extra colors. This is a way that your print pieces can actually add to the variety in your capsule.

In the Orangeade cluster, I added two tops that contain many colors in our palette, and the button up shirt can do double duty as a top or as a topper layer (shirt-jacket). Button ups that have that flexibility in layering are useful for me in capsule wardrobes. Note that I don't have a solid top in this color; that's OK with me because I don't look great with that much bright orange near my face. These two print tops bring in that color but aren't overwhelming on me. I've also eliminated the coral pants from this grouping because (1) I already have the coral skirt and (2) I recently decided that it was time to remove these pants permanently from my wardrobe as they were wearing out and didn't feel very comfortable any more.

My white-based floral Keds and floral blouse have so much color versatility but will look especially great with the Watercress grouping. You can tell I'm working with my warm season items because 5 of my 6 print pieces so far feature floral motifs (yes, groundbreaking).

Desert Flower (aka sandstone coral) is a major color for my summer wardrobe, so I am happy to have such great representation across all the clothing categories: sleeveless tank top, short-sleeved top, 3/4 sleeve top, skirt, pants (crops), and cardigan. Just adding two prints (one floral shirt, one paisley skirt) to this grouping really expands my mix and match options; I'd wear any of these pieces together except the two new print items. The simple striped T I would readily print mix with either of them.

My Chambray Blue cluster was looking a little weak without any bottom pieces, so I added a lightweight pair of denim ankle pants and a knee-length denim skirt to this grouping. Of course, I consider blue denim the ultimate neutral so they will work with literally anything else in this capsule. I was happy to add two of my summer workhorses when bringing in the prints: the striped linen top is a favorite for hot summer weather and the floral button up shirt can be worn as a top or a topper layer. The metallic blue/silver snakeskin print flats are a really fun addition to this cluster, which really needed some shoes, I thought.

I decided to merge the two purple colors in the Pantone palette into one category because (1) the solid pieces coordinate well tonally and (2) I don't really differentiate between various shades of purple in my wardrobe. Purple is not one of my major wardrobe colors but I did find some prints that incorporate it in a T, button up shirt (a double duty piece), and skirt. Purple is not a dominant accent color in the print skirt but I would readily wear it with the lavender T and/or light purple cardigan. Matching a solid to a low-presence accent color in a print is not the obvious choice, but I like it as an intermediate step between matching to a high-presence accent color (such as the aqua in the skirt) or adding a color not present in the skirt (such as yellow or grey). I love the look of this bolstered purple cluster now; it definitely feels more "me" than the two separate solid clusters did before.

My Lemon Drop cluster is in great shape with the addition of three terrific print pieces: a useful chambray floral print dress (which is actually a different color from the Chambray Blue but would coordinate with it OK), my beloved rabbit/floral print blouse from a Kohls Disney's Alice in Wonderland collection, and the paradigm-busting thrifted Alfred Dunner striped linen jacket (which has a whole story about it here). This grouping makes me really happy to look at.

Another color cluster, another addition of print tops, but this time only one of them is a floral print, haha! I don't gravitate toward the "peasant style" top but I could not resist this one with the tropical bird print (parrots, flamingos, etc., in a variety of cheerful summery colors). The double-duty button up shirt has an interesting shade of green teal that coordinates with a wide range of greenish and teal-ish colors. These tops are especially nice here because they feature the white neutral in our color palette.

Capri is our last accent color in the palette, and I've made a couple of edits from my previous post: I like both the pants and the pencil skirt but they have been removed from my closet like the Orangeade pants earlier. (Both pants are wearing out and all 3 pieces are made from unforgiving material with zero stretch.) This leaves me with a solid sleeveless tank, short-sleeved T, knit skirt, and short-sleeved cardigan, which feels adequate to me. (And yes, in real life these colors coordinate well so I can fully mix and match the pieces.) I brought in a button up aqua-and-white check shirt and a fun linen palm print shirt, both of which work beautifully as lightweight toppers as well as tops.

Now for the neutral colors in the palette, starting with Brilliant White. The only change I made here was editing out the white leather sneakers; I do like them but stylistically I prefer wearing them with full-length jeans/pants, which do not feature strongly in my spring/summer outfits. This cluster looks complete to me; though I know some people find white jeans/crops/pants/shorts a warm weather staple, I have not found a pair that works for me so I stick to my lovely (lined!) white skirt.

Upon reflection, I decided to give the beige colors standing in for Mushroom a boot from this wardrobe because these pieces weren't doing much for me. I actually edited the beige skinners from my wardrobe entirely because they've never been a favorite and I don't ever really want to wear them; I consider them an experiment that helped me decide that yes, I'm still not overly fond of beige pants on myself, even when they're short. (Thrifted for $3.99, worn 10 times for a cost per wear of $0.40; I have no regrets.) I did decide to retain the extremely useful nude-to-me flats, but I moved them to a different cluster.

I combined my rather pitiful Northern Droplet items with my Quiet Shade items to create this more robust and satisfying cluster of pieces that span the range of grey colors from pale to dark. I really like to mix the value (lightness/darkness) of grey pieces in outfits so this way of organizing my pieces is a much better reflection of how I use them.

I find that grey pieces can be quite difficult to wear together because even though theoretically grey is simply black + white mixed together, grey clothing can differ wildly in the undertones; there are yellow greys, and green greys, and blue greys, and more pure greys, let alone all the taupe/greige colors, which look weird when mixed together because some of them are distinctly warm and others are cool. But to my eye, the undertones of the greys clash much less when they differ in value. I think what's going on is that when the greys are the same darkness, all your eye has to notice is the precise shade of the grey, but when one piece is darker than the other, your eye notices that instead and pays less attention to the particular shade of grey.

That's probably actually my number 1 tip for tonal dressing: if in doubt about whether the hues or undertones of the pieces match, vary the value so the eye pays attention to the light/dark difference instead of the difference in color.

Finally, we have my small but mighty Brown cluster that I substituted for the Brush (tan) color. I think it tells you something about my meh feelings toward beige that I moved the nude-to-me shoes from the Mushroom cluster here but chose to ditch the rest rather than combine them with these Brown pieces. I mean, the beige pieces would totally work added to this grouping but I was just not feeling it, especially with so many great Brilliant White pieces in the wardrobe.

So here is my own revised Pantone SS 2024 color palette, down from 15 color categories to 12. This is still a lot of colors by the standards of a typical capsule wardrobe, of course, and more than some women would want to deal with...which I totally understand even though I don't feel that way myself.

My Revised Pantone SS 2024 Color Palette

The total number of pieces in my capsule is also larger than is typical, but it's OK to be atypical! The point of a wardrobe is to serve you, so big, medium, or small, all that matters is that the wardrobe suits you personally.

I mentioned toward the beginning of this post that my process for narrowing down my candidate print pieces was to tally which of the 12 (as it turned out) colors in the palette each piece of clothing would work with and then select those pieces that were most color versatile. Here are the candidate pieces that I pulled but didn't keep in my capsule and why.

First up are two print skirts (bottom row) that are pretty versatile in that they can be worn with 5 palette colors (navy skirt) and 4 palette colors (black skirt). But I also had the black botanical print skirt that can be worn with an amazing 9 of the 12 colors. Note that the each of the other two skirts had colors that were a subset of those for the black skirt. That meant that neither of the other two skirts were adding to my color combining options. Because my capsule was already so large and print skirts were well-represented as a category, I decided that the other two skirts were redundant with the black botanical one. I might have made a different decision if the situation were slightly different - like if one of the other skirts was more highly favored, if one of them had grey or brown in the print to match a different palette neutral, or I thought I needed more print skirts in the wardrobe.

Here I have two blouses in the same style with slightly different colorways. I bought the navy one first and really liked it, so I bought the white one later. I didn't need two such similar tops so I chose the white one that matches 7 palette colors instead of 4, including two of the neutrals (here I'm treating the beige in the print as a form of brown because I would definitely wear them together). Again, the navy blouse's matches are a subset of the white blouse's matches, so it doesn't offer any extra color versatility. I will note that my capsule has a lot of white-based print tops, but that's OK with me; they work well with my light-to-medium coloring. But I could see someone deciding they prefer to have some more darker tops and choosing the navy one (or both!).

The chambray dress was a better choice than the navy one not only on the familiar basis of the colors they match but also because the navy one is more suitable to the shoulder seasons of early spring and late summer while the chambray one can be worn all spring/summer long with proper layering. If I relied more heavily than I do on dresses, though, I could make a case for including both.

The situation with these two tops is quite similar: the striped one matches to more colors and is a lighter material that is more suited to the full range of the spring/summer period. You may recognize the black floral top as the anchor piece for my fall/winter capsule! (I just noticed that I accidentally left off the Brilliant White rectangle for the floral top, but even considering that it matches the white in a way that the ivory striped top doesn't, I'd still make the same choice.)

To wrap up, here are five pieces of print clothing that I identified as candidates but decided not to include because they matched only one or two colors in the revised Pantone palette. This was a pretty easy decision for me because I already had a lot of items in my capsule and a good representation across the colors. If I had fewer items with high color versatility, or if one of my colors was poorly represented...or if one of these was a favorite or otherwise high priority wear piece...it could totally make sense to include one or all of these items.

Whether you create capsule wardrobes or not, I hope you found some inspiration or food for thought in pulling out print clothing in the trendy Pantone SS 2024 colors to incorporate in your outfits this spring/summer season. I find that print garments are especially important to my outfits in the warm seasons because I do less layering and am less likely to add print scarves to jazz up my looks. Print and texture are good ways to add visual interest in an outfit with a small number of pieces.

In my next post in this series, I will turn my attention to accessories, including prints/multi-color pieces, with colors in my revised Pantone palette.

Do you like wearing prints in the spring/summer seasons? Do you have a favorite print you gravitate toward for warm weather? Is there a particular category of clothing (top, skirt, etc.) where you prefer to wear your prints or will you wear prints in any category? How do you like to add interest to warm/hot weather outfits?

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