A Manifesto for Recessionistas: Painting the Town Red.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the best buys, clothing wise, are neutrals you can supposedly wear with everything. According to any piece I’ve read about financially sensible dressing for the cash-strapped, you ought to pick one or two neutrals – say, beige/black, navy/grey, chocolate/cream – and build your entire wardrobe from pieces in these colours, the idea being that you’ll wear an individual item more if it’s in a colour that goes with everything else in your wardrobe.

Well, that’s how it works in theory anyway.

Here’s how it goes in practice: you decide on the above mentioned combination of neutrals. You buy a white shirt, a black skirt, a beige bag and a charcoal sweater. You go home feeling smug, elegant and austere. A week later you are so bored that eating your own head sounds like fun and, like a yo-yo dieter, you race out to buy the first thing you see made from pink polyester with a sequin trim. And faux fur. With feather detailing.

Does this sound as tragic to you as it does to me? I hope so. Nothing upsets me more than the idea that colour, and colourful clothes, are the country bumpkin cousins to the cool and sophisticated neutrals. Not that I don’t like neutrals – far from it. It’s the idea that, if your finances are precarious, you should cut out colour, which bothers me. Just like someone going on a crash diet and cutting out all carbs, cutting out all colour from your tightly budgeted wardrobe will leave you crabby, irritable, and no better off than when you started out. Likewise, if you wear only colours, your wardrobe will end up bloated and flabby, like you will if you live exclusively on pasta.

Neither situation is where we want to end up in these financially troubled times. What we want is a happy medium, and here are my tips for how to achieve that…

Painting The Town Red: when the global economy is in the red, nothing speaks more about your fabulousness than colour – so paint the town red. By some sort of strange symbiotic inversion, the abovementioned tendency for people to choose neutrals in times of economic trouble actually means that adorning yourself with colour makes you look more Recessionista Regal and less Depression Drab. Wearing, say, a pair of red shoes instead of a pair of black ones conveys the message that you have enough money to not care that your shoes aren’t a ‘neutral’ that will ‘go with everything’. Even if those red flats are the only decent shoes you own this season, they won’t look like they were bought with that mindset, like their black or tan cousins would. Red flats, for their very supposed impracticality, suggest that you have dozens of shoes and bought these ones for purely aesthetic reasons, whereas black or tan flats look like you brought them for primarily practical reasons.

Same goes for all the other ‘big ticket’ items in your wardrobe – coats, dresses, boots, everyday bags, skirt and pants. In fact, the more money you spend on an item, and the more you wear it, the more I’d be inclined to argue that it should be brought in a colour, rather than a neutral. It’s all about tricking people to think you are on a bigger budget than you actually are by a few careful manipulations – or, rather, making your clothes look so fabulous that people wouldn’t think that money was a consideration in their purchase. Perhaps this is quite materialistic, and I’m happy to wear that title to a certain extent, but it’s quite nice when people mistake the pauper student for the well paid professional and vice versa.

There are some sage words I’d like to impart about colours, however. As fabulous as dressing colourfully can be, it can also go horribly wrong when you don’t think it through properly. The primary consideration here should, of course and at all times, be about what colours you actually like. If you hate pink, there is no point wearing it, even if makes look a vision of loveliness. It’s also worth pointing out here that certain colours work better on certain complexions – but that, within limits, you can change your complexion with a bit of tweaking. For instance, I don’t look at all good in yellow without my make up on – but with a bit of peachy blush it makes me look and feel great in the summertime, especially if I’ve picked up a bit of a tan.

Fashion gurus – Tinny and Susannah, I’m taking to you here – often delight in grouping people’s complexions into colour categories and prescribing a list of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ colours. I wouldn’t set any stock in these at all. Aside from the fact that no description of a colouring ‘type’ matches what I look like naturally - pale skin, rosy cheeks, dark blonde hair and almost black eyes, if you were wondering, although the hair colour is a law onto itself – they fail to take into account the fact that we can tweak our complexions with make up and that different textures and fabrics can make the exact same shade look totally different. Peach is hideous on me when it’s in a heavy block of fabric, but in sheers it’s lovely. I’m sure you’ve found similar.

So now that we’ve chucked the rules about who can wear what colours out the window, how are we to go about picking what colours work for us? The simple answer, my friends, is a tale of trial, error, and the triumph of instinct over instruction. Try clothes on. Hold colours up to your face. Choose colours you like – there’s probably a good reason why you’re drawn to particular colours, and you shouldn’t fight the feeling. I had an inexplicable attraction to acid green in my early adolescence. When I finally got to wear some, in the form of my very first pashmina, the inexplicable attraction became apparent – it’s one of the best shades for my mixed-up colouring.

Once you let yourself loose to experiment with colour, you’ll gradually find yourself noticing some trends in what looks good on you, and it’s from here that you should go about establishing what ‘does’ and ‘doesn’t’ suit you. In my case, I find that I suit mid-to-bright strength colours, with an emphasis on all the berry tones – the reds, the pinks, and the purples, along with yellows, greens, and greeny blues. You’ll probably find something completely different and idiosyncratic to suit the undoubtedly lovely colouring that the goddess gave you too, so don’t panic if nothing seems to work at first.

And here’s where you really start to feel the hip pocket benefits: once you’ve worked out what colours you look good in, like, and will wear, you can buy those big ticket items in outrageous colours with clarity and confidence that you will actually wear them and look fabulous. Furthermore, you’ll be able to coordinate the colour palette of your wardrobe with much more freshness and vitality than if you had a monochromatic closet. Once you’ve opened your eyes to colour and refined your sense of colour awareness, you’ll realise that colours work brilliantly in the most unexpected partnerships – my favourite combinations, the ones that draw the most compliments, are the ones that you never really see anywhere else – thus eliminating the worry about whether or not that acid green coat will work with your mulberry coloured skirt (it will). Having a closet full of colours, you quickly realise that ‘matching’ isn’t as important as we’ve been taught to believe – because that amazing green bag not only has good feng suei, but goes with everything on account of its merits as a stand alone piece. When your pieces are beautiful enough in their own right, who cares if your bag matches your shoes which match your dress which matches your scarf and coat?

The other thing about colour that makes it fabulous for the budget conscious Recessionista? It lifts your mood like nothing else can, and, in troubled economic times, when every front page of newspaper brings more bad news, we could all use a bit of a lift. Before you pop a Prozac, try popping on a purple dress, and feel the difference – I promise you you’ll almost always feel better immediately. Embrace the rainbow, and no one will be any the wiser that your pot of gold at the end of it is on the smaller side.