Ever felt frustrated that whatever you put on it just doesn’t look right? Ever envied that person who seems to look good in everything? That woman who just seems to know instinctively what suits her, and who always looks put together while not trying too hard?
Chances are we’ve all met someone like that. I know I have. However while some people are born with a God-given inate sense of style, in my experience those people are pretty rare. Most of us just learn the hard way, trial and error, trying different styles, different colours and different shapes over the years. Then at some point it might all come together – or of course it may not…
Want to get into your style mojo and never get out of it again?
Then these five steps are the best place to start. I’ve learnt the hard way and I’ve put these series of easy to follow style guidelines so you don’t have to.
I’ll be following up on each of these tips in future posts with the practical information you will need to apply each step to your wardrobe.
While of course I don’t get it right every day (believe me I would love to!) through applying these key steps I feel I’ve made a lot of progress. If you look at these images you may notice a few things about how I dress that corresponds to the steps above.
- Know your shape: I am a fairly curvy hour glass shape (with shoulders and hips approximately the same width and a relatively narrow waist). This means I look much better in styles that go in at the waist. I wish I suited floaty loose clothing, but I just don’t. Therefore, I either wear an outfit that naturally pulls in at the waist like the dress in the image on the far left, or I belt it to accentuate my waist like in the image on the far right.
- Know your colours : I have a definite colour palette that I use. I rarely stray too far from this. As I have warm and reddish tones in my skin and hair I need to wear colours that have a warm rather than cool tone. If I wear very bright or cool tones – I look really washed out and ill.
- Know your prints and patterns: I very rarely wear very bold prints as although I love looking at them, I’ve realised that my features are too delicate and they just swamp me. I am okay with something like a smallish classic check, but anything too bright and big, and you don’t see me at all, you just see the print.
- Know your proportions: You will notice that all of the outfits in this post are either tight on the top or the bottom, but not both. (The fourth image is fairly body skimming I suppose, but it does have volume sleeves to balance out the lower half.)
- Know your trends: I definitely don’t jump on all the trends, but I am always on the look out for how I can incorporate them into my wardrobe. It’s great that a few of the things I really like, for example, blazers, animal print, and maxi dresses (all featured here) are all on trend this year. This H&M dress is new this Autumn and incorporates a couple of trends – heritage checks and volume sleeves. You can also shop that dress via my post about autumn trends.
They say you should probably steer clear of trends that you wore the first time round. There is definitely some truth in this. For example, scrunchies, Alice bands, crop tops… I’ve donated my original 90’s crop tops to my daughter 🙂
