I really love playing with new colours in clothing. It’s like a fun little exercise in how much you know about what goes with what – how far you’ve come in your menswear journey. 

Yet at the same time, I also find it consistently throws up surprises. You try the combinations that you think will work first, and then somewhere along the line an entirely new one suggests itself – you try that too, and like it more than you thought you would. 

As readers will know, I also don’t wear much colour, at least strong colour. Compare my wardrobe to most of the lookbooks of Drake’s or J Press, and I look extremely sober. So perhaps I enjoy these exercises because it’s a particular challenge to find ways I do like colours.

The new green oxford shirt we’ve done this winter is a case in point. I’ve never owned one because I thought the colour was more suited to those brighter styles – perhaps more straight preppy wardrobes. 

But so many readers asked for a green in the PS cloth (our exclusive one – vintage, tough, made to emulate old Brooks Brothers) that I made a sample earlier this year and had great fun playing with it. 

The most famous reference for a green oxford shirt is Miles Davis, on the cover of the album Milestones (shown above, and also one of my favourite jazz albums – the first great quintet going hard). 

Miles looks great of course, but I was never sure that colour would work on me – being a different skin tone, not sitting in a studio, and most of all not Miles Davis.

But it turns out yes, it can work, particularly in the very muted green of the PS ones (the same as the stripe used previously). Perhaps it’s best to call the colour ‘mint’, as that suggests something of its faded look. 

So what does the mint work well with? Well, first off, it’s great with blue denim. Always helpful given how much we wear it, and nearly always the case with colours like this. It’s my favourite thing to wear with yellow oxfords as well. 

The mint is good with blue and darker denim, but lighter tones work especially well. 

That shot above also shows how good these colours are with tan, like that vintage lizard belt (bought recently at Stella Dallas in New York). Mid-browns are good as well, but again like denims, lighter browns and tan are particularly pleasing.

But what on top? Well, first the green is great with textured greys, like my grey herringbone tweed jacket above. 

And it’s good with navy, like the cashmere jacket in the second image. So navy and grey – two menswear staples, that’s helpful. 

How about the less formal and more rural colours, like brown or green? Green is obviously going to be a challenge, and this does struggle. I tried some tonal green combinations but it always looks rather sickly – browns are a lot easier for that kind of thing. 

But the green is nice with dark browns, like the knit above. I think it helps that the green is so pale and the brown so dark. 

This green is also good with faded black jeans, but perhaps that belongs in the grey category above. 

Lastly, I love this green shade with pops of bright yellow, such as the old Trunk tote I’m carrying in the second image above. Other bright colours like red and purple are nice too, but yellow is my favourite. 

It’s such fun playing with these combinations – and so much easier experimenting with something cheaper like a shirt, rather than a jacket or a cashmere sweater. Men’s outfits often look more elegant this way – with the colour on the inner layer rather than the outer – but it’s also helpful that it’s a cheaper way to experiment. 

The other new oxford colour – the brown stripe above – is more straightforward, but still it’s more useful than I had thought.

(If it seems, by the way, like all our product experiments work out well, that’s only because we don’t write about the failures. After all it’s only the ones that work which people can buy. Although I guess looking at the failures might make for an interesting article some day.)

A brown-striped oxford is not a common or obvious choice, but when you wear a lot of ‘cold colour’ combinations, containing a lot of charcoal, black, cream, dark olive and so on, a brown stripe is useful. 

I often wear black jeans with jackets in dark navy, grey or murky green, for instance. In that combination a white shirt works well, but it’s a little stark against the black jeans (particularly when I take the jacket off). 

So a brown stripe is great, softening the white as well as providing some pattern – something I often lack in such outfits.

That’s what I’m wearing in the outfit shots above, and it’s become a bit of a default for me with black jeans. 

The brown is not a strong colour, like all the PS oxfords. In fact it could even read as a grey – just one with a touch of richness, like a dark navy jacket compared to a black one. 

Of course a pale-blue stripe would work as well, but the brown is a little more interesting and unusual. In fact, the green/mint is the same – a pale blue would always be easier in those colour combinations I listed, but it would also be more normal and everyday. 

I would always recommend a reader to have a blue or blue/white oxford shirt in their wardrobe first, but when they want something different, these are both great options. 

The green and brown-stripe oxford shirts are available here. There will be cloth available in both too, but not for a few weeks, that’s arriving separately. 

Other clothes shown are:

Pictured below: the new ‘natural’ colours in the Arran Scarf and Indulgent Shawl-Collar Cardigan, which were also added to the shop recently