Mix and mismatch: if it doesn’t go with anything, it goes with everything

Fashion is a dance between rules and rebellion. Great style requires a bit of both. The rules are essential, because one of the key emotional benefits that a great wardrobe can deliver is a sense of control in a chaotic world. The rules are there to simplify and clarify, lighting our route to a well put-together outfit. That well put-together outfit has the power to help you feel calmer, simply because you look in the mirror and see a competent person and therefore feel like a competent person. Style rules also come in useful for making sense of the world around us. Dress codes, style tribes, the signals we send – whether as blatant as the slogan on a T-shirt, or as subtle as the brand of your rucksack – hold an important social function, making other people legible to us.

But style also needs friction. Fashion dies if it stops moving, because moving with the times is what makes it fashion rather than just pretty clothes. The restless forward energy that moves hemlines and invents new silhouettes is what drives the plot and keeps us interested.

So the sweet spot in fashion is where rules and rebellion meet. Your outfit is telling a story, and a story needs both a comprehensible plotline and a dose of dramatic tension. Great dressers know this instinctively. The pop of red lipstick against a simple dark dress, the vintage jeans worn with a smart blazer and heels. A little artistic licence is what elevates a look from being perfectly nice to being red hot. Like the Boss said, you can’t start a fire without a spark.

So allow me to introduce fashion’s most useful new catchphrase: If It Doesn’t Go With Anything, It Goes With Everything. This is a rule – but at the same time it is a kick against the rules. It does both at once, sort of like a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner. If It Doesn’t Go With Anything, It Goes With Everything is chaos theory, but make it fashion – an anti-match system which gives you an ingenious new way of solving your wardrobe puzzles, because it hands you a new tool to unlock the what-shall-I-wear question.