Improvability Blog

These are the most useful colours your client will wear and should form the basis of most wardrobes.

They are useful for items that need to last a long time and are timeless in terms of fashion.

Depending on your client’s lifestyle, the following items are where they should invest the bulk of their clothing budget:

• coats
• suits
• jackets
• ‘leather’ goods (handbag, watch strap, briefcase, shoes, and boots) even though some of them may not actually be made from leather!

If your client isn’t sure about what to put alongside a ‘colour’, a neutral is a safe option as they’re useful for co-ordinating an outfit.

If your client has clothes that she really can’t bear to part with, the best neutrals from her seasonal or tonal palette can ‘rescue’ any that may fall into her hard-to-wear colours.  And it’s your job to advise your client which colours make her look her most gorgeous and which ones will make her look rather poorly!

If she still insists on wearing these hard-to-wear colours, show her how to team them with a more flattering colour next to her face, or select a low neckline, or add some jewellery or make-up in her best colours.

If in doubt, I tell my clients:

"Life’s too short to compromise – always wear your best colours
and you’ll look fabulous ALL the time!"

"Hello, I am looking to add some olive / khaki drapes to my collection due to the trend for this season and next.  However I am fairly new to this and am not sure which single drapes I should select to ensure I have a shade for each season, as I can’t actually see the colours. I know I need the dark and light olive, but are these both Autumn? Can you please help?" Ermentrude, Australia

Dear Ermentrude,

We don’t include images of the drapes on the website because every computer monitor produces a different version of the colour depending on how your computer has been set up. Then we’d get people complaining that the drape they’ve received ‘looks nothing like it does on the computer’!

If you really want to see the colours right in front of you:

• You could consider ordering the Colour Fabric Catalogue which contains one of each fabric swatch

• or you could order one each of the paper-backed swatch packs (NB. there are 5 pieces of the same colour in each packet)

OLIVE

• Olive is a kind of muddy green colour
• It’s really a shade of dark yellow produced by adding grey to yellow
• Some darker shades of olive can be made by mixing a darker colour (like brown) with green

Olive is generally considered to be an Autumn colour because it’s dark and warm. 

Personally I’d hate to see either a Winter or Spring wear it near their face; they need bright colours and olive is distinctly muted. And it’s far too yellow for a true Summer.

But then, as we all know, some clients will insist on wearing what’s ‘in fashion’ even if they do look rather poorly. Their choice!

Some ‘olive’ drapes to consider:

• 136 Dark Olive
• 137 Moss Green
• 138 Olive Green
• 139 Green Grey
• 140 Light Green Grey
• 166 Light Moss
  

  NB. Personally I can’t see any useful difference between # 137 Moss Green and # 138 Olive Green so you don’t need both drapes.

It might help you to print off the lists of contents of our swatch wallets from so you can see which are good starter colours to consider for each season and check them with our full-colour photos of the swatch wallets.

ARMANI NEUTRALS

Just in case you’ve not seen it, I put together the ‘Armani’ drape pack a few years ago to take account of the emergence of the blended, neutral look.

This contains 4 neutral drapes that I end up using with virtually every client, even if only to show them what NOT to wear:

• 1x Medium Bronze
• 1x Moss Green
• 1x Green Grey
• 1x Rose Brown

FASHION TRENDS

We also offer client handouts for fashion trends – both print-ready versions or copy and paste to create your own.