Art of Coordination. Lesson 2: mixing two different patterns

While mixing two different patterns, it is important to remember, which pattern is the first and which is the second. The first pattern should take up the most of your body and the second is to add some accent to your style. If you emphasize two patterns at a time, your style is likely to look rather ambiguous and too difficult for other people’s perception.

Some examples of matching two different patterns are check suits and stripe ties or dress shirts, stripe dress shirts and polka-dot ties, as well as plaid suits and foulard ties.

The art of achieving a soothing effect matching two different patterns presupposes getting the scales of the two patterns as close as possible and this applies mainly to those with bigger and medium-sized scaled patterns. Avoid the situation when the second pattern overwhelms the first one.

Here we can observe that a stripe suit is combined with two types of ties. As we can see from the pictures, the small geometric patterned pink tie overwhelms the suit more than the other Raffaello hand-made wide spaced square patterned tie. It creates a more soothing effect due to the scale of the pattern on the tie, which is good combined with the stripes on the suit. Speaking about colors, dark blue and grey go well together, avoiding creating too difficult combinations. Besides, it is important to remember, that tie is an accent and it shouldn’t take too much attention from the suit.

I’d also mention, that this style variation is rather difficult and is good for those men, who are perfectly sure what and how they should wear. If you are not that confident, give preference to less complicated patterns, like a tattersall check dress shirt and a polka dot tie. See to it, that the spaces between dots and stripes are rather wide.

Combining two patterns, mind that one of them should be more than the other, thus avoiding a very intense and vibrating transition.

Have a look at these three variants of combining Zegna suit with different types of stripe tie. In the first example patterns scales are alike, creating unnecessary tension for the viewer. This ambiguity is omitted in the second variant, where the tie has more space between the stripes. The third stripe tie has big and wide scaled stripes and offers an even nicer counter-balancing from the small patterned.