The best advice I can give someone who is searching for their sense of style is to step back and look at fashion from a non – emotional point of view. Just for the time being anyway.   Think about it, fashion houses rehash and release past trends that are reworked with new colours and fabrics and market them successfully into the frenzied world of fashion.  Step back and look around.  What do you see?

Today’s fashion victim who chases every fad is tomorrow’s style guru.  She is a girl that experiments and plays, she is the girl that gets away with extreme colour choices and odd proportion designs, she is the girl that jumps from one look to the next.  With youthful attributes this girl can have fun.

 
This fashion frolicking works for a while, but it can catch up with you. There will come a time (different for all of us) when we change our strategy for choosing our look.  Instead of relying on fads and trends we need to take a bit of the control back.  Find what works for us, and build on that essence.  It is this essence of style that can elude the best of us.

How do we start to find this sense?  Where do we look?  When I first meet a client who is ‘lost’, the first thing I study is their face.  Body shape follows later.  Face, hair, neckline and shoulders set the scene. Try to get a feel of the overall tone and flavor of your appearance.

Try to see if you fit into any of the following style groups.  How natural, classic, feminine, elegant, dramatic, sexy or creative do you feel.  Of course many women fall into more than one catergory, which is fine.  So to help this process along get a hold of as many of your favorite fashion magazines and start a collage of all the looks you like, include hats, bags, hairstyles and shoes.   Are you getting a sense of yourselves yet?  

Hint: If you have selected styles from more than three categories then you may well still be in the fashion frenzy phase.  

But if you made a collage of informal, unpretentious, relaxed approachable images based on natural fibers I would place you in the ‘natural’ category.  Classic women can be tailored, credible, conservative, tidy and and symmetrical.  Feminine women are predominately soft, romantic, delicate and youthful.  Elegant women tend to follow sophisticated, stately well styled smooth lines.  Dramatic women love creating strong, confident, commanding bold looks through contrast.  Sexy women will collect seductive, glamorous, provocative images emphasizing body contoured styles, while the creative lady looks for unconventional, innovative, eclectic pieces.    

Homework; create a collage and find your sense of style.

Coming up:  Applying this to your body silhouette and shape.      

Written By:

Caaren Hulme - Stylizit With background as a costumier, designer and stylist for film, TV and theater, Caaren is now providing the same quality services and expertise to men and women everywhere.