If navy is your black, its a marathon not a sprint.

This is important, so you have an obligation to Style into Action to read it.

I was recently chatting to a lady around my age, who has fair colouring & low contrast between hair & skin. She was wearing black and indicated she wears a lot of black.

I asked her if she has considered navy as it is softer & flatters light complexions better.

She agreed with me, but went into bit of a spiel about how navy is very hard to find.  

Hhhm.

If you want something in navy today, yes it may be hard to find.

If you want to build up the navy component of your wardrobe, its not something where you wave your navy wand & its done. You need to keep your eyes & ears open over a number of seasons.

As someone very clever said about fashion “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

If you expect to plug most of your wardrobe gaps in 1 or 2 shopping sprees, you are destined for disappointment. Every time I hear a stylist offer the “shopping option for re-building the wardrobe” I shake my head. Off the rack is too unpredictable to be able to re-build anyone’s wardrobe in a day to two of spreeing. 

So if you want to plus some navy gaps for year round wear & its winter? You may have better luck waiting until spring for transeasonal pieces – too many stylists will encourage you to buy the navy pieces that are on offer at the time of the sprint – eg: a heavy sweater, a roll neck (but you are busty) or a tealy-navy which is all the rage this winter (even though you look better in grey based navys). After all, the items did look OK on you & we are out shopping, & its navy-ish, so lets go for it. 

Wrong. OK is not good enough and just because its navy, doesn’t mean its right. For you. By remembering that effective wardrobe building can only be done over a long stretch, you can hold back here. With confidence.

So how long does it take? It depends on how grand your requirements are. If you want a couple of navy tops it may only take 1-2 seasons & often less than that. If you want a selection of capsule pieces in navy to replace the black component of your wardrobe, it will take 4 seasons (two summers & two winters) in my opinion, to get to a workable collection. Plus it would continue to be an ongoing thing part that.

The lady I was talking to wasn’t a 16 year old who loves to turn over her wardrobe with fast fashion trends every week. She was a mature woman who favours classics. She liked to shop. 

But she didn’t think that there was any navy which she had missed in the last few years. I beg to differ. Navy wasn’t there last season, but it was there for a couple of seasons about three years ago - & that’s just as a distinct trend (in addition to navy bits & pieces along the way).

Like I said:
If navy is your black, its a marathon not a sprint. 

PS: The runway is Preen SS 2013. In navy of course.