In today’s post-hypebeast era, famous men are no strangers to unusual, flamboyant getups. Remember Timothée’s halter top? Or Harry Styles’s harlequin phase? When it comes to Travis Kelce, noted fashion fan and weekly podcast host, few men offer a more consistently confounding and surprising sense of style. He clearly loves luxury labels and emerging designers, for example, but he doesn’t seem desperate for their validation. Nor does he seem concerned about playing by the GQ cool-guy rules or seeming relatable. He’s always loved to peacock.
But this off-season, somewhere between the clubs of Las Vegas and the Miami Grand Prix, Kelce has turned up the volume on his personal style. Or, at least, the saturation: Electric blue and turquoise polka dots, school-bus yellow, Matrix green. When he pops up for dinner at Carbone or a romantic boat ride on Lake Como, every checked sweater and pin-striped zoot suit surprises and confounds us. The louder the better. Oh, it comes with matching shorts? Kelce says, “Add to cart.” And often what makes his colorful outfits so striking are the colors themselves. They can seem, well, discordant. Or, further to the point, he seems to choose them because they are discordant.
To check out my suspicions, I did what any reasonable person would do and asked a color-analysis expert to evaluate Kelce. Annie Sosnov, one-half of the color-analysis duo known as the Color Key, examines skin tone and hair and eye color and identifies which shades flatter or overwhelm them.
After reviewing Kelce’s many public photographs, Sosnov posits that Kelce is in fact a warm autumn. Which means he looks best in earthy shades with yellow undertones like olive or deep moss, camel, medium burnt orange, candy-apple red, eggplant purple and warm blush pink. Creamy white T-shirts instead of pure white ones. Chocolate brown instead of black. Gold instead of silver jewelry. “Kind of Madewell’s palette,” Sosnov explains. (Swift herself, however, is more of a light spring.)
When Kelce embraces his ideal color palette, Sosnov says his eyes and skin brighten, his teeth look whiter. She points me to his most perfect warm autumn outfit from back in December before a game at Arrowhead Stadium. That day, Kelce wore a mossy-green beanie with a checked Elder Statesman corduroy jacket in browns and dark greens, and fuzzy camel flared Amiri pants. “It doesn’t overwhelm,” Sosnov says, adding that Kelce often wears warm autumn colors when he is styled and photographed for major magazines. She points me to another standout Kelce warm autumn look, worn on a low-key date with Swift in Los Angeles in April. He chose a matching olive-green ribbed long-sleeved tee and shorts. When Kelce dresses in his palette, there’s a visual harmony, Sosnov says. He wears the outfit; the outfit doesn’t wear him. “You’re not going to notice him right away. He’s not screaming for attention.”
But Kelce “likes attention,” as his mother told ABC. And more often than not, he seems unconcerned with highlighting his best features, abandoning olive greens and earthy reds for non-harmonious, electric colors. Like the bright seafoam-green silk Hawaiian shirt and shorts, designed by Givenchy, that he wore to the Formula One Grand Prix in Miami in early May. Or the turquoise and bright-blue Louis Vuitton T-shirts and shorts set, covered in Yayoi Kusama polka dots, that he wore to the Eras Tour in Sydney in February. Sosnov and I agree that on these occasions, Kelce seems to take a cue from the late Queen Elizabeth, who was said to dress in head-to-toe neon greens and pinks so that people could spot her from a distance during her crowded royal walkabouts and garden parties. Perhaps the same logic applies when Kelce wears a bright-yellow Hawaiian shirt to a club in Kentucky, even though the color was so glaring it made him look sunburned.
“You’re up in the stands, and you can be like, ‘There he is up in the box or the VIP tent at the Eras Tour,’” says Sosnov. “If you really want to see him in a crowd, you really need those electric colors. If that’s the intent, it’s very effective.”
I ask Sosnov if Kelce can dress in his ideal autumnal color palette and still be visible from outer space, as seems to be his wish. She says “yes” and recommends he focus on candy-apple reds, burnt oranges, split-pea-soup greens, and rich, warm teals. High-contrast mixes of those colors would be especially effective. She also points me to a patchwork suit by Kid Super that Kelce wore recently to Carbone. While some of the patches are bright white, others are creamy, and at a distance, the whole look reads off-white. “It works well enough because there is so much warmth in these whites,” she says. And it’s not every day that you see a six-five man in a matching patchwork shirts and trousers. Or, as he wore this past weekend to the NBA Playoffs, jeans completely covered in tiny crisscrossed slashes. (One commenter suggested Taylor’s cats got to them.) No amount of color analysis can explain those Heron Preston jeans. But at least the shiny red apple on his shirt is warm and earthy.
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Chantal Fernandez , 2024-05-30 14:00:19
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