Blue and Green are Never Seen

   It's strange, but I'm reasonably certain that this is a rather uncommon garment colour pairing in menswear, hence the borrowed title. This doesn't have to be the case. The trick is usually to vary shade and manage the intensity that either colour is more than capable of. What I'm demonstrating below is both the tip of the iceberg and starting to approach an extreme where formal looks are concerned. A more sober and perhaps more harmonic take is a navy suit with a more restrained shade of green tie, which I'm also fond of utilising on occasion:

   Additionally, a green odd jacket can work wonders with a blue shirt. This is fairly tone dependent, to be fair - a deep green can handle possibly any variation of blue, but it's best to shy away from particularly bright greens no matter the shirt unless you are pure prep perfection, a la the Hamptons visions of Ralph Lauren's summer ensembles. I've a purple jacket , a burgundy jacket and two light blues , but a mint green hardly tops the next 20 on my wishlist. Nevertheless, my sage green jacket is liked and is also neutral and dull enough that I've gone all the way up to royal blue shirtings, although strong sky blues seem to be the most fun:

   For a look at perhaps the most fun I've experienced with this mixture, a memory lane trip into this column's infancy exhibits my rarely worn "secret weapon" - my green shirt . The shirt actually has blue stripes woven in, which nods to another suggestion - wearing two garments predominantly shaded in blue and green with complementing overtones of one in the other; say, a green pinstriped blue suit with a light green shirt. I don't have a blue suit with a green pattern, but perhaps I have time to find one

   Writing this also begs the question of which comes first - mastery over colour or over pattern? I don't think it's too uninformed to posit that Europe has a great handle on both, due in no small part to the proliferation of coloured, patterned shirts that have cemented the reputations of the likes of Hilditch & Key, Charvet and Turnbull & Asser, further adorning and/or inspiring well dressed men worldwide. At the end of the day, anyone can wear patterns, but not everyone is particularly willing to wear colour. But if the most daring one could go is blue and green, it's far more simple than it may first appear