Would you like to know my go-to rules, as an online personal stylist, for putting an outfit together?🤗
What if I told you that you could learn how to put together an outfit and how to look put together on a budget with only three simple steps!
Don’t believe me? (Yes, it’s true, as an online personal stylist I have picked up a few tricks on how to put together a good outfit over the years...)
But let my daughter, Freja, give us some help. Stay with me- I promise it will all make sense! Freja is in year 2 and is learning punctuation at the moment.
I asked her to write this sentence for me:
But Freja is only learning, and as you can see she made lots of mistakes: there are quite a few extra commas and random speech marks.
This makes it quite hard for me to absorb the meaning of the sentence.
So I’ve asked her to re-write it for me:
This time it’s much easier to move from reading it to thinking about what it means.
And this is exactly what we are trying to do with the outfit:
We are helping the person next to us to move as quickly as possible from looking at us to listening to what we have to say.
I’m going to share with you 3 GOLDEN RULES I use to build an outfit.
And before I begin, I’d just like to add that I used some of the TED speakers to describe my points and I want to note that I watched them talk and I respect them deeply, before I launch into sharing my thoughts on their outfits.
1. STICK TO AS FEW ACCENTS PER OUTFIT AS POSSIBLE.
Look at this picture here:
What comes up for you when you squint? My eyes keep jumping from the earrings - to the necklace - to the white trim of the jacket - to the broche - to the ring. I can’t concentrate. I’d prefer to take away all the white elements except for the earrings. The outfit would become much more digestible then.
Now look at Temple Grandin in this picture:
Even though her outfit is busy, there is a definite element which catches the eye when you squint. It’s the red scarf. So the shirt embroidery fades in comparison to the scarf.
2. MAKE SURE THE OUTFIT FITS YOU PROPERLY.
What does it mean that the outfit fits us properly?
It’s when there aren’t many unnecessary lines in it.
Let’s look at this picture:
I keep wanting to move the ribbon and tidy up the top, to make it smoother.
This, in comparison, is so easy to look at, there are no distractions.
3. BREAK IT UP IN AS FEW PLACES AS POSSIBLE.
I see this so often, and yet, this mistake is so easy to avoid.
Let’s look at the two women below:
Can you see the woman on the left broke her outfit in 3 places? If she wore black tights, the outfit would flow much easier as it wouldn’t be broken in so many places.
Similarly, the person on the left, has broken her outfit in 4 places. Without the belt and the massive pendant this outfit would flow much easier.
Our main aim here is to close the time gap between the person looking at us and hearing us.
I hope this has been helpful! Want more advice on how to put together a good outfit? Why not sample one of my online personal styling services with a free 20 minute consultation- no strings attached!
