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Every October the same thing happens. The stores go burgundy, rust and camel overnight, every fashion email says "this season's colour" with a straight face, and I stand in front of my closet wondering if my navy sweater still counts. So this time I went and counted which colours ThreadCurve readers actually love.
Quick refresher if you're new. Under most of the outfit photos on ThreadCurve there's a row of reaction buttons: love it, thumbs-down, meh, save. If you react strongly, we ask you why. Every outfit is also tagged for things like its main colour, its second colour and its print. For this one I pulled August 30 to October 9, 2026. That's 7,056 outfits across 290 articles, 3,998,150 views, 19,572 loves, 13,621 thumbs-downs and 5,674 saves, plus 2,630 answers to our colour polls.
The short version: burgundy earns its spot as the colour of fall. Plain white is the one readers keep thumbing down. And the trendiest colour of the last two years only works if you use a little of it.
The first pass: cream, burgundy and navy
Same simple measure as always. Take every love and every thumbs-down an outfit got and work out what share were loves. Across all 7,056 outfits it's 59%.
Cream (63%) and burgundy (63%) top the list, with navy at 62% right behind them. Black (60%) and camel (58%) sit right around average, which is about what you'd expect from the two colours that make up half of everyone's closet.
At the bottom of the chart, multicolour outfits get 52% loves, and sage (53%) and grey (54%) are lower than I expected. Off the chart because there are too few of them to count properly, metallic outfits got 42% loves. I'm not going to pretend I'm shocked about the sequins.
Is that fair to navy, though?
Here's the thing about colour. Some articles are simply more popular than others, and some colours turn up in the popular ones. Navy, for example, turns up a lot in the site's best-loved articles, the polished, put-together ones, and readers are in a generous mood by the time they get there. So I ran the fair test. Each outfit gets compared only with the other outfits in the same article. Same page, same readers, same mood.
A lot of colours flatten out. Navy goes from 130 on the first pass to 100. Brown goes from 145 to 100, and black from 124 to 101. They're perfectly good colours. They were just sitting in good company.
Burgundy is the one that doesn't budge. It was 111 on the first pass and it's 111 in the fair test, with a range of 102 to 120. It was ahead in both halves of the period too (106, then 113 once fall properly arrived). It also has the highest save rate of any main colour (116), which is the closest thing I have to "I'm going to buy that".
I'll be straight about the sample: take out the "mistakes" and "outfits that age you" articles and burgundy comes in at 108, with a range that runs from 99 to 117. So "burgundy beats everything" overstates it. "Burgundy is the one main colour that holds up every way I test it" is the version I'd defend.
White is the one readers thumb down
At the other end, white outfits index 84 (range 72 to 99) and draw about 20% more thumbs-downs than their neighbours, though the range on that one is wide. And no, it isn't the mistake articles. Take those out and white is still 83.
What's interesting is that readers don't blame the colour. When they thumb down a white outfit, "the colour" is only 7% of the reasons. "Not my style" (22%) and "impractical" (20%) do most of the work, on a small sample of 82 reasons. You don't need a survey to know why. Head-to-toe white looks wonderful on a woman who has never met a coffee, a toddler or a car door.
Cream doesn't have the problem. Cream outfits sit at 99 in the fair test, right on average, and the poll agrees: asked "White or cream?", 63% of readers picked cream.
Sage is an accent, not an outfit
This is the most useful thing in the whole report, so if you skim, skim to here.
Sage and olive were everywhere these last couple of years. On the first pass, sage outfits looked great at 120. In the fair test they fall to 79, one of the lowest main colours on the site. The range runs from 61 to 101, so it only just brushes 100 at the top, but sage was low in both halves of the period (81, then 77).
But look at what happens when sage is the second colour in the outfit instead of the main one: the scarf, the cardigan, the bag, the trousers peeking out under a camel coat. Then it indexes 139, with a range of 111 to 177. That's the strongest accent colour I measured. Readers love sage as a supporting act. They just don't want a sage dress.
Navy (112) and brown (111) also do nicely as the second colour. Blush pink is the one that goes the other way. As an accent it comes in at 85, with a range of 74 to 94, and it draws more thumbs-downs than the outfits around it (134). A pink cardigan thrown over a navy dress apparently reads as a little bit "Easter brunch".
The pairings readers love
Because every outfit has a main colour and a second colour, I could look at pairings too. Cream + camel tops the list at 77% loves, and navy with camel is right behind at 70%. Camel turns up in 6 of the top 7 pairings. It's not a colour readers get excited about on its own, but it makes everything next to it look better. Every closet needs one camel piece. Some of us have twelve.
Which colour leads matters, though. A cream outfit with camel touches gets 77% loves. Flip it, a mostly camel outfit with a bit of cream, and it drops to 53%, near the bottom of the list. My guess is that a lot of camel with a little cream just reads as beige-on-beige. Same colours, very different reviews.
At the bottom, rust + cream gets 52% loves. This one's on love share only, without the fair test, so I'd treat the small gaps as a nudge rather than a rule.
The print readers can't resist
Most outfits on ThreadCurve are solid colours, 5,809 of the 7,056. Of the prints, one stands out a mile. Check and plaid outfits index 126 in the fair test, with a range of 110 to 145, and get 73% loves. Plaid also got stronger as the weather turned (119, then 131). Florals sit at 93, stripes at 101, and geometric prints trail at 76.
Funny thing: in our "Print?" poll, plaid isn't even an option, and 53% of readers picked solid. They say solid. They heart the tartan.
What readers say they wear
The polls mostly line up with the reactions this time, which is a nice change. Asked "Black or navy?", 65% picked navy. Asked for their wardrobe base, 45% said navy, 39% black and 16% camel. Camel beat grey 55% to 45%, but in the reactions camel (103) and grey (104) are neck and neck, so that one's a matter of taste.
Asked to pick a palette, readers spread out: jewel tones 31%, neutrals 29%, earth tones 24% and pastels 15%. Which, if you squint, is burgundy, camel and rust in a trench coat. And when they add a pop of colour, 54% put it in the top, near the face, rather than the bag (27%) or the shoes (19%).
So what should you buy this fall?
If you're buying one new colour this season, readers vote burgundy. A burgundy knit or a burgundy dress, worn with black or camel, is about as safe a bet as this data offers.
If you love sage, keep it, but use it as the second colour. A sage scarf with a camel coat, a sage cardigan over cream, sage trousers under navy.
Swap stark white for cream, especially head to toe. Pair everything with camel. And if you've been eyeing a plaid blazer or skirt, this is your sign.
So yes, fall is burgundy. But the real lesson is how much the second colour matters. The outfit readers love most isn't one bold colour. It's two quiet ones that look good together.
This report first appeared in ThreadCurve on Substack, where Pro members get the full PDF report and the raw data behind it.
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