Wear What You Love (A Love Letter to Breaking the Rules)
My honest advice…
You're allowed to love what you love. That's kind of all that actually matters.
Last year…
I designed the BFF collection for Galentine's Day. Warm corals, bright pinks, romantic color combinations — the kind of palette that makes you think immediately of flowers and February and something sweet happening. I loved every piece I made. I loved the whole collection.
I'm a True Summer. That palette is not mine.
And I kept two pairs anyway.
I want to be honest with you about something.
Eepecially if you've just taken the seasonal color quiz and are now standing in front of your closet with new eyes. Color analysis is a genuinely useful framework. Understanding your season — your undertones, the colors that make your skin glow, the metals that work with you rather than against you — can simplify getting dressed in a way that feels almost like a superpower. I believe in it. That's why I built a whole series around it.
But it is a framework. Not a law. And there's something important that gets lost when we turn it into one.
Around the same time…
I was sitting with those two BFF pairs, someone gifted me a dress. Bright fuchsia. The kind of color that makes a statement before you even open your mouth. It's not a color I reach for often — fuchsia lives firmly outside my muted, cool Summer palette — but the dress is beautiful and I love it, and one morning I put it on and reached for one of those BFF pairs I'd kept, and that was it. That combination — the dress that wasn't mine, the earrings from a collection made in colors that weren't mine either — became one of my favorite things to wear.
No color analysis algorithm predicted that. No quiz result would have led me there.
I got there because I kept the earrings I loved even when they weren't technically in my season. Because I said yes to the gifted dress even though fuchsia isn't on my palette card. Because I trusted the feeling over the framework.
Here's what I actually think…
About color analysis after spending a long time thinking about it: it's a starting point, not a ceiling.
Your season tells you where you'll almost always look your best — where the colors will work with your natural coloring instead of competing with it. That's genuinely valuable information, especially if you've spent years buying things that looked great on the hanger and flat on you. Knowing your season is a shortcut to fewer mistakes and more confidence.
But your season doesn't know about the dress your mother gave you. It doesn't know about the piece you made yourself, at your own table, in a color that just felt right that evening. It doesn't know about the earrings that make you feel something — not just look right, but feel something — when you put them on.
I have pieces in my wardrobe that lean toward Winter. I have Spring colors that don't technically belong in a True Summer's closet. I wear them anyway, when the mood is right, when something calls me toward them, when they pair with something in a way I didn't plan and couldn't have planned. Color analysis didn't put those combinations together. I did.
The framework is most useful when you're lost —
When you're standing in a dressing room with no idea why nothing looks right, or building a wardrobe from scratch and needing somewhere to start. It gives you a language for what your eye already knows, and it helps you spend less time on things that were never going to work.
But once you have that language, you can start to bend it. You can understand why a color works for you and then make an informed choice to wear the one that doesn't, because you love it. That's different from wearing things randomly and hoping for the best. That's wearing something intentionally, with full knowledge that you're choosing the feeling over the formula.
That's always allowed. That's actually the whole point.
Wear your season when it makes getting dressed easier.
Learn the rules because understanding them makes breaking them more interesting. Keep the earrings that don't technically belong to you if something in you reaches for them anyway.
And if someone gives you a fuchsia dress — wear it. Find the earrings that match. See what happens.
You're allowed to love what you love. That's kind of all that actually matters.