Style Q&A-How to wear a tiger print skirt?

Jan 4, 2010 by Clueless Fashionista

Happy New Year!!

I hope all of you had a lovely start to 2010 and are looking optimistically towards making this a wonderful year.

I often offer to assist you with any fashion challenges you may encounter.  While I’m not a stylist, I do have an ability to take an objective look at things and offer insight into how you can improve your wardrobe.  I got a wonderful question from a reader and I decided to dedicate a post to it.

Hi,

Taking you up on your kind offer to address readers’ questions, I would like to know if you would have any suggestions on what to wear with a faux-fur tiger print mini-skirt. Yellow is the primary colour, with brown stripes. I was originally thinking of brown tights and shoes with a brown sweater and maybe a brown leather jacket, but that seems like way too much brown. Also, a Google image search reveals that most people seem to pair animal print with black, not brown. Now I’m wondering if I could do some sort of mix-and-match with brown and black. Like maybe a black top and black tights but brown shoes? Or would that look too weird with the skirt?

I absolutely need to find some way to wear this skirt or it will never get worn.

Thanks for your help!

Penny

I’d like to thank Penny for sharing her question.  I think many women have a similar problem wearing animal print.  You don’t want your outfit to clash but you don’t want to look to matchy matchy.  In order to help with visuals, I found a picture of a skirt with a similar print.

Well, this is quite a cute skirt so good choice, Penny, on picking it.  If the dominant dark color is brown, then you could go with a brown pallet for the rest of the outfit.  I would suggest if you do the brown shirt and shoes, you don’t do brown tights, go with bare legs.  However, you could also do something similar to what the model in the picture is doing.  You could do a white or off white shirt and some brown boots or sandals (depending on the time of year you want to wear the skirt).  I wouldn’t do the black shoes and brown tights because it may be hard to pull off confidently.  That doesn’t mean that brown and black won’t go together, because they will, just not in this case.

I hope this insight is helpful for you, Penny, and for any of you other Clueless Fashionistas out there struggling with an animal print piece of clothing.  Don’t put it in the back of your closet never to see the light of day. Pull it out and experiment with it.  Try it with several different pieces and see what works best.  Pull our your full length mirror and give yourself a mini fashion show!

If you have any other questions about fashion and style, please ask away. Let’s make 2010 the year we step outside of our fashion comfort zones and broaden our style horizons!