Home Colour and pattern

Guide

What colour and pattern is that?

Two things decide whether a search for a patterned garment works: the colour word you choose, and whether you say how the pattern is arranged. Most people get the first one roughly right and skip the second one entirely.

Why does a photo show the wrong colour?

Before any of the naming matters, there is a problem underneath it. The photo did not record the colour of the garment. It recorded the light that happened to be falling on it, filtered through whatever the camera decided the white balance should be.

Warm indoor bulbs push everything towards orange. Overcast daylight pulls it towards blue. A shop's own lighting is usually built to make clothes look richer than they are. Then the phone applies its own correction, and then your screen applies its own again, at whatever brightness you happen to have it set to.

The practical effect is that a beige coat can read as pink, grey or light brown in three photos of the same coat. So the first rule of naming a colour from a photo is to name the colour family rather than the exact shade, and let the garment word do the narrowing.

Why does every shop use a different name for the same colour?

Colour words in clothing are marketing language. No standards body decides what taupe means, and nobody is checking. One shop's sand is another's oatmeal and a third's stone, and all three are describing a garment you would call light brown.

This cuts both ways. It means there is no single correct word to find, which is freeing. It also means the plain everyday word is usually the worst thing to search, because it is the one word the shop did not type.

Neutrals are where this bites hardest, because that is where the vocabulary is widest. These are the ones worth knowing, roughly from warmest to coolest.

Black, white, grey and navy are the exception to all of this. Shops write them plainly and consistently, so the ordinary word is the right search and no narrower synonym is needed.

What two things does a pattern name have to cover?

Here is the part almost everyone leaves out, and it costs more results than any colour mistake.

When you name a pattern you are answering what the motif is. Hearts, flowers, stripes, leopard. You are not answering how that motif is arranged on the garment, and those are two different products.

A shirt covered in small repeating hearts and a shirt with one large heart across the chest are both correctly called a heart shirt. They hang in different parts of a shop and they suit different people. A search for a heart shirt returns both, mixed together, and you scroll past dozens of the wrong one.

Snagfit reports the arrangement as its own field on every piece it finds, with three possible values.

Allover

Small motifs repeating across the whole garment.

Shops also write: scattered, repeating, ditsy

Single large graphic

One big motif, usually across the chest or the back.

Shops also write: placement print, front graphic

Plain

No motif at all, which is worth saying out loud.

Shops also write: solid, unprinted

Adding one of those words does more for a patterned search than adding a second colour ever will. "Allover heart print shirt" and "single large heart graphic shirt" separate cleanly. "Heart shirt" never does.

What do you call a pattern that is woven in rather than printed?

Some patterns are not printed on the fabric. They are the way the fabric was made, built into the yarn and the weave, and no printed version of them exists.

Rib, cable, waffle, herringbone and pointelle all fall into this group. If you search for a printed herringbone shirt you will find little, and it is not because the garment is rare. It is because herringbone is a weave, so the listing describes the construction rather than a print.

The tell in a photo is depth. A print sits flat on the surface and the fabric behaves the same everywhere. A woven or knitted pattern casts tiny shadows of its own and changes how the light moves across the cloth. If you can see texture rather than just colour, search the construction word.

How can you check a colour when the lighting is off?

There is a way around the lighting problem, and it costs a few seconds. Find something in the same photo whose real colour you already know, then judge the garment against it rather than against your memory.

A plain white wall, a sheet of paper, the white of an eye, a white trainer sole, a fridge door. All of these are things you know are close to white in real life. If the wall behind the person is running warm and yellow in the photo, then the whole image is running warm, and the beige coat is probably a colder, greyer colour than it looks. If the wall has gone blue, the reverse is true.

This matters most on the neutrals, because that is exactly where a small shift changes the word. The gap between cream and bone is smaller than the gap between two photos of the same jumper taken in different rooms. Judging against a known reference in the frame is the difference between searching taupe and searching pink.

When there is nothing in the frame to judge against, go one step broader. Search the colour family rather than the shade, and let the garment type and the pattern carry the search. Broad and right beats narrow and wrong.

Which pattern word should you search with first?

When a photo has a pattern in it, one of five families almost always covers it. Getting the family right matters more than getting the exact name right, because the family is what a shop files the garment under.

Once the family is settled, the arrangement question from the section above still applies to every one of them, and it is still the word most people leave out.

How many words should a search for a patterned garment have?

Every word you add to a shopping search is a filter. That is useful right up until it is not, because a listing that simply did not happen to use your fourth word disappears from the results even though it is the garment.

A workable shape for a patterned garment is three parts: the dominant colour, the pattern with its arrangement, and the garment type. "Cream allover ditsy floral midi dress" is five words doing five separate jobs, and every one of them is a word a shop plausibly typed.

What breaks it is naming every colour you can see. A print with cream, navy, rust and sage in it is not searched as all four. Name the ground colour, name the print, and let the pictures do the rest of the work.

What does Snagfit tell you about colour and pattern?

Snagfit reports a colour and an arrangement for every garment it finds, in plain words rather than trade names, alongside the search phrase it will use. Reading those two fields is the fastest way to see why a result came back the way it did.

When the colour it reports does not match what you see, that is usually the lighting problem from the top of this page rather than a mistake about the garment. The fix is to try a neighbouring colour word from the neutral list above, since the shape and the pattern are doing most of the work anyway.

It will not always get the arrangement right either. A large motif photographed close up can read as an allover print, because at that crop it genuinely looks like one. That is the case where knowing the three values yourself lets you correct it in one word.

Where do colour and pattern searches usually fail?

Each chapter takes one part of this and goes deep, and each one names the specific failure it prevents. Start wherever your photo is stuck.

The ten colour and pattern traps

The colour names shops use writing in progress

Why is it called ecru and not off-white, and which one finds the garment?

Goes wrong when: Searching a plain colour word returns everything and narrows nothing.

Neutrals writing in progress

What actually separates cream, bone, oatmeal, taupe, camel and stone?

Goes wrong when: Six different garments all come back under one word.

How screens change colour writing in progress

The colour in the photo is wrong. How do you work out the real one?

Goes wrong when: You search for the colour the screen showed, which the garment never was.

Stripes writing in progress

Breton, pinstripe, candy stripe or awning: which one is in the photo?

Goes wrong when: Stripe width and spacing change the product entirely, and the word carries both.

Checks and plaid writing in progress

Is it gingham, houndstooth, windowpane, tartan or madras?

Goes wrong when: Every check reads as plaid, and plaid returns none of them well.

Florals writing in progress

What makes a floral ditsy, and why does that one word change everything?

Goes wrong when: Flower size is the whole search and almost nobody types it.

Animal and abstract writing in progress

How are leopard, zebra, snake and marble described in a listing?

Goes wrong when: The animal is named but the scale and colourway are not.

Allover or one big graphic writing in progress

Same motif, two completely different products. How do you say which you want?

Goes wrong when: One word separates them and leaving it out mixes both into one list.

Texture that reads as pattern writing in progress

Is that a pattern printed on, or is it the way the fabric is made?

Goes wrong when: Searching it as a print finds nothing, because it was never printed.

How many colour words to use writing in progress

Does adding more colour and pattern words make a search better or worse?

Goes wrong when: Past a certain point every extra word removes the garment you wanted.

Questions about colour and pattern

Why does the colour in a photo never match the real garment?

A photo records the light in the room, not the colour of the cloth. Warm indoor bulbs push a garment orange, overcast daylight pushes it blue, and a phone camera then guesses a white balance on top of that. Two photos of one jumper can look like two different products, which is why a colour word taken straight off a screen so often finds nothing.

What is the difference between cream, ecru and bone?

All three are off-whites, and shops treat them as different products. Cream leans yellow, ecru leans grey or beige, and bone is the coolest and closest to plain white. Searching plain white for any of them buries the garment under thousands of true whites, so the narrower word is almost always the better search.

What does allover print mean?

Allover print means small motifs repeating across the whole garment rather than one large motif in one place. Snagfit reports this as a layout value on every piece it finds, using allover, single large graphic or plain. Shops also write scattered, repeating or ditsy for the same idea, and adding any of those words separates two products that otherwise share a name.

What is a ditsy floral?

A ditsy floral is a print of small flowers scattered densely across the fabric, usually with no clear direction to the arrangement. It is the opposite of a large placed floral, where a few big blooms sit deliberately across the garment. Flower size is what separates them, and it changes the result more than the colour of the flowers does.

Is plaid the same thing as check?

Check is the broad family and plaid is one part of it, so searching plaid for every checked garment is what buries the one you want. Gingham is an even two-colour square, windowpane is thin widely spaced lines on a plain ground, houndstooth is a broken jagged shape, and tartan is a specific multi-colour crossing pattern. Each of those words finds a different rail.

How many colour words should a search include?

One or two, and rarely three. Each extra colour word removes every listing whose title happens not to include it, so a four-colour description usually returns less than a two-colour one. Name the dominant colour, then the pattern, then stop, and add the second colour only if the first search came back too broad.

What colour does Snagfit report for a patterned garment?

The primary colour, described in plain words, alongside a separate field for how the motif is arranged. A shirt with small navy flowers on white is reported by its dominant ground colour rather than by every colour present in the print. That is deliberate, because a listing title is usually written the same way.

Why do two shops give the same colour different names?

Colour names in clothing are marketing language, not a standard, so one shop's sand is another's oatmeal and a third's stone. There is no body that rules on which is correct. This is why describing the colour family plus the garment beats chasing one exact colour word, and why swapping the colour word is a fast fix when a search returns nothing.

Can you tell a fabric from a photo by its pattern?

Sometimes, because some patterns only exist as a weave rather than a print. Herringbone, cable, rib and waffle are made by how the yarn is constructed, so they never appear as a flat printed design. If a search for a printed version of one of those returns nothing, that is the reason, and the fix is to search the construction word instead.

Does a black garment need a colour word at all?

Yes, because leaving it out lets every other colour of the same garment into the results. Black is also one of the few colour words shops write consistently, unlike the neutral family where naming varies widely. For black, grey, navy and white, the plain word is usually the right one and no narrower synonym is needed.

What is a colourway?

A colourway is one specific combination of colours that a single design is produced in. The same striped shirt might be sold in a navy and white colourway and a red and cream one, under one product name. Knowing the term helps because searching the design plus the two colours you can see is often how you reach the exact version in the photo.

Why did my search for a colour I could clearly see fail?

Usually because the word you used is not the word the shop typed. Plain colour words like beige, off-white and light brown are rarely what a listing says, since shops reach for narrower names such as taupe, ecru or camel. Try the narrower neighbours of the colour you saw before assuming the garment is not for sale.

The other half of naming a garment is its shape rather than its surface. That is a hub of its own.

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