As we get older, it gets harder to rebel. Spray painting anti-war slogans seems messy, you can’t really function without that morning cup of tax-dodging coffee, and your place of work sadly doesn’t include mohawks in its acceptable uniform policy.

So what’s the grown-up way – short of becoming a Scientologist – to fight the establishment? Breaking fashion rules, of course. Flouting those now mouldy pieces of age-old ‘wisdom’ on how men should dress, and looking all the more stylish for it. It feels good to be bad.

Never Wear Navy And Black

Navy is great. Black is great. So it stands to reason that pairing the two is – haters take note – great. Like not wearing white after Labor Day (we’ll get to that in a bit), this is a rule that’s fast losing the relevance it once might have had.

That said, there is best practice when bolting these two darker hues together: the trick is in choosing pieces that complement, rather than compete with, one another.

Of course, the beauty of navy and black is their versatility; so although they’re both colors traditionally associated with (and work exceptionally well for) eveningwear, they’re just as easily thrown together for an off-duty weekend look – think a navy polo shirt with black jeans and white trainers.

No Brown In Town

As if modern life wasn’t hard enough – we’re expected to hold down jobs, pay rent on time, not steal food from the office fridge – we also have to make sure we’re not wearing brown shoes in town or (the even stricter version) after 5pm. Why? What’s going to happen? We’re not Cinderella. We’re not going to turn in pumpkins. They’re shoes.

Sure, you could take to carrying around an extra pair of black lace-ups to change into at 4:59pm, or you could adopt the Italian way of living and just respond to prejudice with the word “sprezzatura“. You can’t wear those – “sprezzatura”. We have a dress code – “sprezzatura”. I was saving that tuna sub for lunch – “sprezzatura”. We get that the rule derives from the strict division between brown and black as markers of casualness and formality. But things change. Just look at brown suits – a modern go-to that can look equally if not more stylish and put-together than bog-standard navy or black versions, when worn by the right man.