Ode to navy.

Words I never thought I'd write.

This autumn/winter I am really not on top of my wardrobe. I’m not quite sure what the issue is, but I still haven’t pressed or steamed the winter clothes I took out of summer storage, and in any case I seem to be quite content wearing the same things on repeat. Many of which, it turns out, are navy.

In June and July I made a couple of orders that subsequently pushed me into deciding it was time to curb my clothes acquisition. I ordered recycled cashmere from the archive section of Artknit - a navy cardigan and an oversized navy sweater and then in the Matches closing down sale got a huge navy Raey rollneck, also recycled cashmere. At the time I gave myself a hard time for the sweaters in particular - navy has never been much of a thing in my wardrobe, and because it was summer, I was just putting them into a cupboard crammed with knitwear I wasn’t currently wearing.

But! I should have given myself more credit, because it turns out that these have all been things I’ve been very happy to wear. I never really know if it’s the New Clothes magic dust, or a determination to prove that the new stuff is indeed useful that impels me to make sure it gets an outing, but if feels very much as though this was all very much stuff my wardrobe was waiting for.

You know how something happens to you once when you are young, and then it becomes an unmovable object in your own particular set of rules to live by? The dangers of mis-matching shades of navy was always that for me, with the added knowledge that one could never, ever wear navy and black together. Black always seemed a safer bet in terms of not having horrible clashes between warm and cool undertones. Also, the kicker was really that my mother, known far and wide for always being elegant (she still manages it at the age of 89 in a back harness and a cashmere tracksuit), wore navy all the time. I always loved her style, but felt that mine was a bit more flexible and contemporary (I used to be a punk, you know! I’m genuinely so edgy that sometimes I fall off it!), and if there was a choice between black and navy, black always won out for me.

So if wearing navy = aspirational grown-upness, I’m ready to embrace it (turns out I can bypass the elegant bit). I’m a grey-haired grandmother who likes being a grown-up - I can wear dark blue!

Of course I already had navy pieces, I just didn’t wear them that much because I don’t much like wearing colours with navy (definitely an area to work on), and was always convinced I would need to commit more fully to dark blue in order to wear the (more than adequate) pieces I already had. But last year I became obsessed with the idea of a long knitted skirt set, and when I found the perfect one, I chose navy over black.

Product images from the Artknit website.

I think the merino skirt set shifted my thinking a bit - I loved wearing it, and I enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t black. Sometimes I wore my long navy and white silk shirt under the sweater and over the skirt, and the boxy crewneck sweater meant I had a top to go with my two pairs of cropped wide navy trousers - cool wool Max Mara and velvet Tibi. Navy started to creep into my consciousness, and I liked it.

A navy cardigan had been on my wishlist for several years (mainly to wear with the trousers mentioned above), but I wanted an equivalent to the perfect black one, and didn’t come across it until this summer. This one is shorter than the black one, but it’s more practical, and has the all-important v-neck. As soon as the temperatures dropped, I started wearing it with a number of navy-based silk tops that previously I only wore when I didn’t need layers, and it was really nice to pull out things I had carefully chosen years ago but wear infrequently.

The navy cardigan. Product images from the Artknit website.

Honestly one of my favourite things about cold-weather dressing is discovering which things turn out to be the ones that keep getting worn each winter. Last year my long skirts and my flowery Dries jeans seemed to be on repeat, and this year navy has started strong. I’ve worn my long Liberty shirt more than usual, which is useful as I sometimes wonder if I should get it made shorter - it’s really very oversized. In the end, I think just having more navy to layer it up with is the answer, because I love the proportions of the long shirt over the long skirt.

I don’t align with any one designer or shop, in general, but if any two brands summed up my idea of my style, it would be Liberty and Artknit, the sustainable Italian knitwear label I currently aspire to: I’d like one of everything they make, and I would wear it all with several pairs of Liberty pyjamas.

Silk prints that love hanging out with navy knitwear: Liberty, Liberty, See by Chloe. I've had all of these tops for many years. Fun fact, silk is insulating so it helps keep you warm in winter.

The Raey sweater was one of the things I felt proved I had overdone it on the shopping front, and the Artknit one didn’t help. The Raey is an oversized rollneck, and I happen to have a very nice (if slightly itchy) Filippa K one which I’ve had for years. The Artknit is a crewneck and I have a navy merino crewneck - from the same brand. I felt as though I’d bought impulsively without considering what was already in my closet, and I kind of had. But my subconscious must have been pointing out that buying a shape of knitwear I already had and knew I loved, in a fabric I adore, would make it easier to incorporate a colour I don’t wear that much.

And it worked! The cashmere is so damn soft and thick, in both sweaters, that I keep wearing them. I originally thought that the Raey one was too oversized to wear for work (it’s so huge that if I don’t wear a top under it, I can feel my waist with my elbows), but I have been wearing it with black jeans (navy and black! who even am I??) on days I know I’ll be outside for prolonged periods, and weekends. I love it so much I don’t want to take it off in the evening. A stylish friend sent me a message asking where it was from the other day after she had seen me wearing it, and I was sad to report that the brand no longer exists (I assume?). But if Matches had not closed down, taking Raey with it, I would never have been able to afford their knitwear. The Artknit is just a very ordinary navy cashmere crewneck, slightly oversized - also, I imagined, a weekend only sweater, as I like a bit more boxy crop in my sweaters. But it’s so lovely to wear that it turns out I’m less picky about shape than I thought.

My default when I wake up and can’t think what to wear is a boxy sweater and a pair of wide cropped trousers or black jeans, and now it’s colder, dresses have entered the chat again. All of these options are easy to grab from my closet, and my chunky boots (tall chelsea or lace ups) do the heavy lifting to make the silhouette a bit more interesting than ordinary. There have been many of these no-brainer dressing days, and often I still default to a black base. But I feel as though I have more options with the navy, and less hoops to jump through - I’ve got the pieces now that make it easy to wear the bits I already had.

None of these pieces is me going out on a limb, and none of them is ever going to look in or out of style - they were all safe bets in that sense; I could get the equivalent in any colour and make them fit in with my wardrobe. What was interesting to me was how I embraced the navy: I have always considered navy to be “less than” black. As a child I was always put into blue a lot, and avoided the whole spectrum as an adult, but I have been falling in love with warm mid-blues over the past few years, so maybe this is a natural progression. I’m thrilled that it is making me get more wear out of things I already had in my wardrobe.

Nearing the end of the fourth month of the no-buy and I don’t see an end in sight. The more I don’t buy clothes the more I have to consider the ones I have, and the more I appreciate them. It also is strangely making me consider which clothes I probably don’t need any more. There are clothes I’m not sure I’ll wear this winter, but that’s fine, they will have their day another year. The ones I’m thinking that I might divest myself of are the ones that tried to solve a problem the big navy rollneck has resolved: the days when you just want a huge cosy enveloping sweater. I kept thinking it was a very chunky sweater (I have several), or it needed to be something with cables (still love this idea), but it turns out it’s a plain navy rollneck with outsize armholes, even though I didn’t think I liked navy, don’t much like rollnecks (I prefer funnel necks, as I don’t have much of a neck of my own), and hate armholes that limit coat-wearing.

The other thing I’m realising is how immutable my own style feels, however much I switch up the actual garments. Once you start moving away from trends, you barely notice them, and they stop having any impact on your wardrobe. Is this an age thing, too? I’m not exactly geriatric, but I have seen a million hems rise and fall, colours fade and shine, silhouettes widen and narrow, and everything comes around again, not even changed that much with each iteration.

So sometimes I’ll look as though I’m aware of what is going on in the world of what is fashionable right now, sometimes I’ll look hopelessly out of touch, but it will mainly be purely by accident. I’ll always be wearing what I love, and what works for my body and my life though, and you can bet your bottom dollar it will feel comfortable, and it will feel like me.