Clothtober – Finding your style

If you haven’t heard about Clothtober and why I started it yet, you can check out this post to be filled in.

If you’re frustrated with your fashion (or lack thereof!) situation, I think a good first step towards action can be to spend a bit of time thinking about what your style might be. You may have multiple styles, or you may feel that you have no style at all!

There is hope though. I have always found that I can point out very quickly what I DON’T like rather than choosing what I definitely DO like. If you are the same, make that your starting point by using a process of elimination. Check out Pinterest for ideas and start to gather a board of possibilities for you. I have several of these kind of boards on Pinterest, for example, my general weaving board, sewing and feminine dressing. Pinterest is really good at showing you things you are likely to want to pin, so start collecting and use their search functions to your advantage.

I am your typical fashion avoider, in general I hate fashion and don’t follow trends at all. But, once again, we can use available fashion tools to help us know what we want.

I was amazed when I started googling that there are so many free resources out there designed to help women with fashion.

Using free online tools like this one from Visual Therapy can be really handy when determining your style. They usually involve a short quiz with a series of simple questions that place you in a style category.

I got Classic/ Bohemian, which is actually pretty accurate for my tastes and style.

I really like the Birdsnest Style guide function. You do have to register with the website to access this function, but you don’t have to buy anything. They are an Australian company with a huge range of women’s clothing (as a customer I can also tell you their service is great).

The style guide is formed from detailed questions on all kinds of things about you – your lifestyle, body shape, habits, budget etc. Once your style guide is filled out, they give you suggestions for outfits that may be for you. This is a great way to get an idea of clothes that might suit you and that may be your style. If you want to sew clothes to fit you, you can use the suggestions as inspiration to either search for similar sewing patterns or if you’re really clever, to make your own patterns (I’m not that clever.)

My final suggestion is to research clothes that may be suitable for your body shape. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve found an outfit that I like, but looked terrible on me because it didn’t suit my body shape. It’s worth having a basic understanding of your body shape so that you can eliminate clothes that are likely to never look right on you and go for things that are going to flatter your unique shape. Of course, body shape diagrams are a generalisation, they still don’t allow for individual specifics, but you can treat them as a guide. You may want to check out Clothes recommendations according to your body shape.

Next time I’m going to be touching on colour – how to choose the right colours for you and pitfalls to avoid. If most of your wardrobe is currently black (my hand is up!), the colour post is for you. Click here to read that post.

Until next time…

Happy Weaving!