About

This started with a simple complaint: I did not know which shirt went with which trousers, and every app that promised to help wanted me to photograph my entire wardrobe first.

The problem

A survey of more than a thousand men found that 81 percent have trouble getting dressed for an event, 73 percent have turned up somewhere feeling wrong, and a third have skipped an event altogether because they did not have the right clothes. Separately, 62 percent of women report what one study called wardrobe rage: standing in front of a full cupboard with nothing they want to wear.

The advice exists. It is scattered across a hundred blog posts, and most of it tells you what to wear without telling you why, which means you learn nothing and have to look it up again next time.

Why not another wardrobe app

The established apps are catalogues. You photograph every garment you own, tag it, and then the app suggests combinations. Reviews of those apps are full of people describing a week of evenings spent uploading clothes. Some of them uninstall before finishing.

That is the wrong first step for someone who just wants to know whether the brown shoes work. So this asks three questions and answers in under a second.

How the scoring works

There is no list of pre-written outfits. Twelve trousers against twenty shirts against ten shoes across ten occasions is 48,000 combinations, and nobody writes those by hand.

Instead each item carries its attributes — its actual colour as a hex value, how formal it is, its silhouette — and about fifteen rules compare any two items. The combinations are worked out when you ask. Add one shirt to the catalogue and it is instantly comparable against everything else.

Working from the hex value rather than the word "navy" is what makes the reasoning possible. A colour name tells you nothing about whether silver or gold jewellery will sit with it. The number does.

Where the rules come from

Menswear and womenswear authorities, colour analysis practitioners, and where it exists, peer-reviewed work on how clothing colour interacts with skin. Every rule is checked against published styling charts — the kind that circulate as infographics — and the tool currently agrees with them on every pairing we have tested.

That testing has caught real mistakes. An early version rated navy with cream as a clash, which is wrong and would have been obvious to anyone who dresses properly. The charts found it. We fixed it.

What it will not do

It will not tell you your colour season, because the evidence for those categories is thin. It will not pretend to know about wedding traditions it has not been taught. It will not hand out confident colour advice for deeper skin tones, because the research it would be drawing on was done almost entirely on fair skin.

The full list of limits is on the disclaimer page, written out rather than buried.

What is coming

Photographing a single garment instead of picking it from a list. More occasions, including South Asian wedding events, once someone who actually knows them has checked the rules. Children, teenagers and older adults, who no current app serves properly.

Who made it

Fashion Logic is built and run by NEXA VERT XSOFT in Pakistan.

If the tool tells you something that looks wrong, that is useful to us. Write to info@vertxsoft.com. Most of the improvements so far came from someone pointing at an answer and saying no.