Vox, your coherence thread is looking pretty good. That is a lot of work.
The pictures are more persuasive for me than the text. I know that you know what you are talking about, but I'm not always sold on how you articulate your ideas.
I'm still not persuaded that it makes a whole lot of sense for me, as an American, to understand British country dress from the early C20. Say I'm a 22 year old Yank who just got a job in an office in a city. Do I really need to know anything about the Duke of Windsor to make coherent combinations? No, of course not. I know that is the way the history has always been done (these last fifty years at least), but that doesn't mean it's right or still so useful.
This text is not really for beginners who want to make combinations but for beginners who want to make combinations and learn about the history of clothes in early C20 England. Two different things. If I want to learn to buy the right car, I don't need to learn about the Model T. I can safely skip that stuff.
And why all the deference to England? There are all these other places in the world. Seriously--there *were* people living in America in nineteenth century. Some of them were quite wealthy. Many had country homes and city homes--the cholera was a real bitch in the summer, and no one wanted to be in the city. And there were wealthy people with lots of nice clothes, living in the US, around 1925 as well. Also there was this place called Canada, and Mexico, and I heard there is a big country called India somewhere. Those places (I suspect) deserve credit for exerting a historic and cultural influence (if such things mattered for noobs at all, and I doubt it does) on how noobs can make coherent combinations.
If I knew how to do a better job, maybe I would. Still my gut says that all the blathering about English countryside vs. London city life is a pretty inefficient way to get noobs to wrap their head around these basic observations of texture and pattern and fabric. Plus there is no reason your basic ideas cannot be applied to casual wear. Why throw your hands up and say that is beyond your expertise? You can pair a wool tie with a tweed jacket and an ecru OCBD, but you can't explain why a track jacket looks stupid with Lands' End Yearrounder office pants and flip flops?
