Men's Style Guide: Dress Shirt Colour and Pattern

In previous Men's Fashion posts we discussed how to choose a dress shirt collar and how to pick a shirt that fits. However, colour and pattern also play a big role in what shirt best suits you.

COLOUR

The amount of white in the shirt's background. More white in the background of the shirt makes a shirt more formal. Solid colour shirts are the most formal with white being the most dressy.

Solid blue shirts flatter the face more as white drains the colour from the face. Medium blue brings out the rich tones in a man's face and other items, like a tie, that he might be wearing. When picking a particular hue, find a mirror and figure out which hue of blue highlights the face the most without distracting from it.

Men with high-contrast complexion should pick a deeper tone of blue while those with a more muted complexion should pick lighter blue hues or blues with a white pattern that dampens it.

Men with very little contrast -- typically brown or black skin is needed -- can wear cream or tan shirts.

Pink shirts are perfect for those with a fair, rosy cheeked complexion and looks particularly good with a dark grey tie.

Yellow and orange shirts look good on men with low contrast complexion, but should never be worn by those with sallow skin. They look particularly good with navy and brown suits.

PATTERN

White stripes on a blue background look good on pretty much everyone. Red checks or accents complement those with a ruddier complexion while yellow patterns work well for blond, fair-skinned man.

Shirts with white backgrounds look particularly good with contrasting white collars. Try and find a shirt with a club collar if you're going to go this route. Also, contrast-collar shirts should always have French cuffs -- button cuffs on contrast-collar shirts are the domain of cell-phone salesmen in malls, not classy dressers.

The most important thing is to make sure that the pattern contrasts appropriately with the background based on your complexion. Those with high-contrast complexions should have high-contrast patterns while low-contrast complexions should stick with low-contrast patterns.