How to stay warm and look cool this winter.

“You can’t get too much winter in the winter,” said the poet Mr Robert Frost, and with a name like that he should know. What we think he’s driving at – at least in regard to matters sartorial – is that good winter dressing is a diligent art, with all manner of textures, tones and stabs of enlivening colour brought into multi-layered play, while – not incidentally – ensuring that the depredations of Mr Frost’s close relative Jack are kept at bay. Scroll down for some winter styling tips with both rhyme and reason behind them, and ride out any white-out in style.

Just because the skies are greyer than a grey squirrel convention in Grey County, Ontario, doesn’t mean you have to follow suit. Charcoals, blacks and navies may be the default palette for inclement dressing, but somewhere amid that copious layering – and this season, it’s all about piling it on and peeling it off like, in the immortal words of Mr Marvin Gaye, “a great big onion” – you should showcase the snap and crackle of the strategically placed colour pop. A vibrant knit is the ideal vehicle for this; witness the way this gentleman’s bright red sweater blazes a trail through an ashen afternoon, with the pattern on his scarf raising extra hue and cry. This outfit packs so much heat that we’d be worried about spontaneous combustion, were it not for the jeans’ built-in ventilation.

Monochrome doesn’t have to mean monolithic, let alone monotonous. If you subtly vary the tones and textures, you can elevate a one-colour outfit into – to borrow a phrase beloved of all the vintage vinylheads out there – glorious mono. This gentleman is less a man in black than a man in jet, sable, raven, onyx, and yes, even obsidian, thanks to the way he plays the darker, more tactile wools of the overcoat and sweater off against the sleeker, sheenier shades of the jacket and trousers. And while he varies the proportions – compare and contrast the skinny lapels of the jacket with the chunkier iterations on the coat and the generous heft of the rollneck – he ensures that everything fits like a glove (as doubtless his gloves would, if he’d elected to wear any).

Way back when the shearling trend first started gathering momentum, Britain was still firmly ensconced in the EU and Mr Donald Trump was a humble – OK, make that no-so-humble – star of reality TV. Now, innumerable seasons and wayward exit polls later, the world may have turned upside down, but shearling’s still very much a thing, thanks to its sheer utility – that suede/sheepskin combo is just as effective at keeping out urban chills as it was for its original ovine custodians, as they huddled through a moorland winter – but also for its slouchy, tactile elan. All this gentleman has to add is a sweater and a rakishly knotted scarf, and he’s ready for anything that the elements – not to mention the vagaries of fashion – can throw at him.

Don’t succumb to style hibernation and spend the cooler months buried deep inside a winter coat; it’s actually a time when the suit, like the plushest of Christmas trees, can be dressed to impress. Reinstate the tie, for starters – a woollen number, for example, will not only act as a bulwark against frostbite, it will complement your heavyweight flannels or tweeds. You can also play the suit and tie’s patterns and textures off against a draped scarf – or a pair of draped scarves, in the case of this gentleman, who, being a prime example of Pitti peacock, is never knowingly under-accessorised – before adding a topcoat as a final flourish. Now you’re ready for the suavest of hot toddies – some mulled Châteauneuf-du-Pape, perhaps?

Whatever the opposite of tone-deaf is – tone-scrupulous? Tone-rigorous? – winter is a time to make sweet music with a tonal look, building various contrasting layers into a veritable symphony of shades. Witness the way this gentleman conducts his own sartorial Beethoven’s Fifth by playing off the various browns, whites and navies of his pinstriped suit, cardigan, T-shirt, flecked topcoat, sunglasses and boiled wool scarf. His salt-and-pepper beard and choppy crop bring the whole thing to an allegro con brio crescendo. Follow his lead, and the “bravos”, “maestros” and “encores” should come thick and fast.

Think of the quilted down jacket as the Mini Cooper of cold-weather garments: nippy and sporty, but also reliably efficient and endlessly versatile. You don’t have to be on- or off-piste to appreciate its efficacy when it comes to core insulation, but this gentleman shows that it can do much more than bridge the gap between sportswear and streetwear; it can also add panache (and some tonal fizz) when layered over a more formal look, from a sports jacket and plaid shirt to a flannel suit. In short, it offers peerless performance and handling, whether tooling around town or cruising cross-country. We’re down with that.

At first glance, it seems that this gentleman was so enamoured of our previous suggestions that he’s taken them all on board, from the tonal shifts to the mixture of formal and casual elements to the layering to the strategic deployment of a down jacket. And we can’t blame him for doing so. But what we’d particularly like to draw your attention to is his focus on workwear-inspired pieces, from the French-style indigo artisan’s jacket to the twill coat, with the browns and beiges of the satchel and gloves making a nice counterpoint to the array of blues, and reinforcing an appropriately hardy, military-grade, Bauhaus tutor-or-cutting-edge-architect-style impression.

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The men featured in this story are not associated with and do not endorse MR PORTER or the products shown