how to find your personal style

and why a focus on flattering will keep you from discovering it

Having a sense of your personal style is an important piece of getting dressed. Before you can clean out your closet or buy anything, you need to have a vision for how you want to look and feel. Like an organization devising a mission statement, it serves as a measuring stick for future decisions. Whether or not you should keep, buy, or wear things gets measured against your vision and if it doesn't fit into the image, you don't keep/buy/wear it. This doesn't mean that you always have to stick with that one vision, it just means it'll be easier to create a wardrobe that works with itself.

With my clients, I help them through the process by looking at images, seeing what’s in their closets, listening to them talk about their clothes, and trying different styles. If you're working through this on your own, it can be hard to figure out your personal style for a few reasons.

• Some of us have a hard time seeing ourselves as someone with a personal style because of the shape or size of our bodies. We’ve been conditioned to think that only tall, thin women are “allowed” to be stylish because those are the only images we see in media. 

• Those of us socialized as female are used to valuing others’ opinions and advice over our own intuition. This goes for many areas in life, which is why I like to think this process is good practice in listening to your inner voice. 

• Many people haven’t been able to participate in the experimental phase of developing their style because of size availability or financial scarcity. 

Here are some ways to move past those barriers and uncover your style:

Explore and research. Many people don’t know what their style is because they’ve only been exposed to a few ideas. Without seeing what’s out there, it’s hard to know what you like. Follow a few fashion social media accounts, look online at what stores are offering, look at images of fashion throughout the 20th and 21st century, notice what the people in your life are wearing and start listening to your gut reactions (in a non-judgmental way) about things you see.

Collect inspiration, part 1. When creating a mood board or Pinterest board (a necessary step in defining your style), go based on your gut instinct of how you feel about the image. Does it look cool to you? Does it resonate for you? Do you just like it? That’s all you need, you don’t even have to know why. No thought, no judgment, just instinct. All the thinking brain stuff, like analyzing the collection of images and translating it to your body or your life can come later. The first step is to create a collection of images that you just like the look of, no justifications needed. 

Collect inspiration, part 2. When collecting inspiration, you have to keep from allowing the negative voices in your head to censor your preferences. Many of us are used to seeing something that we have some positive emotional reaction to and then immediately shutting it down as a possibility for ourselves, i.e. “I love that, but it wouldn’t look good on me/I couldn’t pull it off/I couldn’t afford it/I have nowhere to wear that”. It’s important to reject those negative comments and go with your initial reaction, the positive emotional connection, the fact that something about the image or outfit resonated with you on some level.

Analyze your inspiration. Once you collect twenty or thirty of these images, you can then look at them as a collection and look to see what similarities might exist among them. Are there any themes throughout? Do you like bright colors or neutrals? Do you like patterns or prints? Do you like straight lines or flowing edges? Do you like clothes that fit close to the body or flow away? Do you like or hate frills and frou-frou? I can’t tell you how many people who thought they didn’t have a style take a look at their Pinterest boards and say, oh, ok, I guess I *do*.

Inspiration, part 3. Rework your inspiration board with a diversity of bodies. Unfortunately, all the looks you like will probably be presented on thin white bodies.¹ After creating a collection of looks you love and figuring out what drew you to them, the next step is to create another collection with those same styles on bodies like yours or at least a diversity of bodies. Even if you’re in a straight sized body, this is important. We are all conditioned from birth to view those higher up the ladder of body hierarchy as more attractive, worthy, and stylish. We have to retrain our eye to see people of all shapes and sizes as able to express their personal style. The way we do this is by looking at images of bodies of various sizes over and over again. We have years of looking at thin bodies to counter. You can do this on Pinterest² and in your social media feeds. Normalize looking at a diversity of bodies.

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Experiment. Unfortunately, there’s no prescription for style. Even if you can tell you’re visually drawn to certain looks, you have to try the things that you like the look of and see how they feel. Maybe you appreciate bright colors and bold prints on someone else, but feel uncomfortable in them yourself. Conversely, maybe you appreciate clean lines and neutral palettes, but really don’t feel yourself unless you’re wearing a bit of fun color. This is my concept of looking at style like art in a museum - you can see it and appreciate it, but it doesn’t need to hang in your home. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to experiment. You can spend time trying things on at various stores, or thrift secondhand items to give them more of a long-term try.

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Translate your personal style to your body and your lifestyle. Maybe you love dark academia but you feel restricted in blazers. Maybe you love bright colors but feel a bit self conscious in them. Maybe you love a good retro style dress but you’re actually on the floor with toddlers most of the day. How can you make the styles you like aesthetically work for you? Can you search out blazers with stretch? Can you add bright colors in your accessories? Can you come up with a good enough everyday uniform and make sure to plan fun nights out where you get to wear your beautiful dresses, knowing that one day your toddler days will be over and you’ll be able to wear non-machine-washable items again? Big disclaimer here that sometimes you just can’t. If your style actually isn’t available in your size, this is a reflection of a larger systemic issue and not one I’m going to pretend I can solve with a pithy piece of advice. The rest of us can do our best to support brands that are size inclusive. 

yep, I’m at the I-need-two-pairs-of-glasses-to-function stage of life

Having outlined all of those steps, I want to quickly show you why focusing on what you think or have been taught will be flattering on your body will be detrimental to finding your style.

Imagine you only select inspiration that you’ve been told by an “expert” that’s “flattering” for your body.³ 

You try to find images that you’re drawn to for inspiration, but you reject many of the things you come across because they wouldn’t flatter your body. What are you going to miss out on with that approach? What arbitrary messages are you going to reinforce? Where is your opinion in all of this? What about what you like? 

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What if you have bigger hips in relation to your shoulders and upper body? In conventional wardrobe advice, this would classify you as “pear-shaped” and many would say that your most flattering silhouette is a high-waisted full skirt or dress. But what if your personal style is not girly or retro or overly feminine? If you prioritize flattering over your personal preferences, you’ll end up wearing things that don’t feel like you. 

What if you love flowy bohemian styles, but you’ve been told your body would appear larger in (or drown in, I’ve heard both, we just can’t win) those styles? Do you resign yourself to wearing things you don’t love because they’re more flattering? I really hope not, while also acknowledging that sometimes it just isn’t safe to reject these ideals.

Here are a few phrases you can say to yourself to reinforce focusing on style instead of what’s flattering:

• I choose to wear this garment because it expresses my style even if it doesn’t show the smallest part of my body.

• This may not be the most conventionally flattering item on me, but it make me feel like *me*, it’s comfortable, and my body feels good in it.

• This clothing item expresses my personal style and that is more important to me than appearing as small as possible to others. 

• I choose to prioritize my own expression and comfort over what society has dictated I should wear. 

When you censor yourself from taking in inspiration you think isn’t meant for your body, you prevent yourself from exploring styles that you might love. You go through life thinking there are certain items and styles that you’re excluded from. None of that is true. You get to decide what you love and want to wear. 

Have you kept yourself from discovering your personal style by excluding certain items because of your body? What clothing items are you holding onto because you’ve been told they’re flattering even though they don’t express your personal style? 

P.S. If you’d like to dive even deeper into this, I’ll be launching an asynchronous course next week that covers defining your style, editing your closet, and learning to shop mindfully. Since I’ve never done an asynchronous version, it is heavily discounted. More info here.

1. While Pinterest used to be and currently still is skewed towards thin, white bodies, they are taking some action in this area: https://newsroom.pinterest.com/news/pinterest-announces-industry-first-body-type-technology/

2. See footnote #1

3. If you’re new here, let’s break down this concept of flattering. In the most common usage of the word, something that’s flattering means something that makes your body appear as small as possible. In this sense, the whole concept of flattering is anti-fat because it places a higher value on appearing smaller. In addition, who gets to decide what’s flattering? Often patriarchal ideals meant to objectify women and please the male gaze. And don’t come at me with comments about how flattering doesn’t have to be related to body size, I know that, but that’s the way it’s commonly used.