Why Black & Blue Actually Go Together (With Examples)

Joshua Miller
Sep 7
5 min read

Updated: Sep 14

Video Description

Hi everyone!

For today's video, I want to debunk one of the first fashion rules I learned: black and blue don't go together.

By understanding color and design theory, specifically undertones and balances, you'll learn why black and blue often don't go together, and how they CAN go together.

I hope you enjoy this video and have a wonderful day! : )))

Thumbnail image of Joshua Miller shrugging with a playful smile, wearing glasses, a patterned shirt, tie, and blue cardigan. Behind him is a repeated blurred background of similar poses. Across the front is a bold orange banner with the text: “TRUST ME: THEY GO TOGETHER.”

Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm Joshua Miller and welcome to my YouTube channel. If you're new here, I make videos about fashion, pop music, and psychology so that way you can live with style, confidence, and enthusiasm. And since style is my favorite subject, today I want to tackle a fashion rule that I've been unable to escape since I was a kid. And that's the rule that black and blue don't go together.

Hopefully, by discussing why people think that black and blue usually don't go together and the visual principles behind why this happens, you'll be able to understand why they actually can go together and be able to apply this to your own outfits moving forward.

Growing up, I always loved math because everything followed rules. 2 + 2 would always equal 4 and 2 + 3 would always equal 5. Which is why when I was learning to get dressed, I clung to the rules that my father taught me. And among the many rules that I was taught, one of them was that black and blue do not go together. As a kid, I didn’t really understand why this was. I just knew that because it was something I shouldn't be doing, I stopped doing it altogether.

But as I began to develop my own sense of style, I started to realize that black and blue actually did go together, even if I didn’t understand why they worked together in some cases and why they didn’t in others. It wasn’t until I was in college and took a class in color theory that I eventually understood why.

In order to understand this, we need to start with a simple color theory term called undertones. To explain undertones, I think it's best to use an old printing press as an example. Before modern printers existed, printers had to print by putting one color on top of another to reach the desired color. While modern printers don't work like this anymore, this imagery is a very efficient way to understand what an undertone is.

When the eye perceives color, it is not just perceiving one color. It is perceiving the primary color on top and all of the colors that are below it. Because black and blue tend to have a variety of different undertones depending on the material, environment, and lighting, it can be really easy to mismatch undertones when pairing these colors together. This is why I think the rule started in the first place.

To understand how to best pair undertones together, we need to look at another fundamental visual design concept: balance. Put simply, balance is a visual component of design concerned with making sure that objects are arranged in a way that's easy to understand based on where they are located. Likewise, in fashion, balance is important because it helps us understand where things start and end.

If we look at an outfit and aren’t able to easily grasp where the jacket starts and ends or where the tie starts and ends, it can be easy to see it as a confusing mess and write it off as bad. With respect to blue and black, I believe that when pairing their undertones, you usually want to have a white and a black undertone between the two colors, or two white undertones.

To illustrate this, I’ll show some examples.

For my first outfit, I have a classic suit and tie pairing. I really like the way these colors sit together. Despite the age-old rule that black and blue don’t go together, here they fit together because the undertones balance each other out. The thread on the jacket was probably coated to give it a unique finish that balances out the very deep black undertone of the tie perfectly. When you look at this outfit, it’s very easy to understand the geometry of everything. And if black and blue don’t go together, why are the buttons on almost every piece of dark blue men’s attire black?

Here’s another example of black and blue pairing well, but this time I’m mixing print with print. Because of the old rule, it can be easy to shy away from mixing black and blue prints—you’re already committing one fashion “sin,” so why commit another? But I think it’s because of this rule that you should wear black and blue prints together. Mixing prints brings in a lot of unique textures and colors that balance out black and blue’s traditional clash.

The black striped sweater from Express has a black undertone based on how it reacts to light—when you look at it, you don’t really see color underneath, just black on top of black. This balances out the shirt, which has a clear white undertone in both the blue ground color and the rose floral. Overall, I love this outfit, and I’ve written a blog post on why I think print-on-print goes together so well. You can check that out at joshuamillerstyle.com.

For my last example, I wanted to show how all white undertones can pair together nicely with blue and black. Here, every single color I’m wearing—the black, the white, the rose, the blue, and the green—all have white undertones. Because of that, it works. The rose gold tie, being the warmest color, functions as the dark undertone in the outfit. It draws the eye inward, creating balance and visual harmony. When you look at this outfit, it’s very easy to understand how all the elements sit together because the rose gold tie balances everything out.

So the next time someone tells you that blue and black don’t go together, show them this video. They can in fact go together. I’m a huge advocate for making the most of your closet and the clothes you already have, and that starts with debunking the rules and assumptions you’ve been told.

If you liked this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up, subscribe, and hit the bell icon to be notified every time I upload a video. For now, I’m planning to upload every other Sunday, but I might surprise you here and there. If you want to see this in text format, subscribe to my email list at joshuamillerstyle.com/subscribe —I’ll be posting it on my blog later this week.

And lastly, if no one has told you this yet, make sure to have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for watching.

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