Before You Buy a Single Thing, Do This First
Patricia is 80 years young, and she wants to look fabulous again.
After five years as a full-time caregiver, she wrote to me asking where to start. Her words: “By necessity, I fell into lots of bad personal care habits, and now I would like to get back on track to looking my best.”
First things first: there is no age at which caring about how you look becomes silly. Style is not a young person’s game. Moving on.
Patricia’s situation is more common than you’d think. Something big shifts in your life, whether that’s caregiving, having a baby, moving climates and cultures, a career change, retirement, a move, a health wobble, or any other significant life event, and suddenly the wardrobe you had no longer fits who you actually are. Not just physically. Contextually.
So here’s what I told her, and what I’d tell anyone starting over no matter your age.
Don’t go shopping yet.
I mean it. The instinct when you want a fresh start is to buy new things. Resist it. Until you know what you’re buying for, you’ll just accumulate more stuff that doesn’t quite work, and you’ll spend money doing it.
Instead, do this groundwork first.
Step one: Figure out who you are right now
Not who you were five years ago. Not your aspirational self. Right now.
That means your body as it is today, your colouring as it is today (hair changes, skin changes, all of it), and your lifestyle as it actually looks. That last one is crucial. A huge reason why old wardrobes stop working isn’t that the clothes aged badly. It’s that you changed, and the wardrobe didn’t. If you’d like assistance to do this, you can get this inside my 7 Steps to Style program.
Ask yourself:
- What do I actually do most days?
- Where do I go?
- What does a good week look like, practically speaking?
- Which colours make me sparkle?
- What fabrics do I enjoy wearing?
- What styles of clothes make me feel good?
Once you know that, you have the foundation for what I call your personal style guidelines, a clear set of parameters so that anything you consider buying has to pass a simple test: does it work for my body, my colouring, and my life?
Step two: Work out your style recipe
A recipe tells you what ingredients go into a dish. Your style recipe tells you what ingredients go into your look.
And yes, this requires a bit of honest self-reflection. Questions like:
- How comfortable do clothes need to be? (No judgment. Comfort is valid.)
- Do you prefer simple and easy, or do you like a bit more visual interest?
- What kinds of garments do you actually enjoy wearing?
- What have you historically reached for and what have you consistently avoided?
- What do you want people to feel when they see you?
That last question matters more than people realise. Style is communication. You’re always saying something. Better to decide what that is deliberately.
Once you’ve got your recipe, you’re not just shopping, you’re shopping purposefully. You’ll bring things home that actually work together. You’ll get more outfits from fewer pieces. And you’ll know how to accessorise, which is the icing on the sartorial cake, rather than just grabbing things hopefully and hoping for the best.
Step three: Analyse what you have that you love
This can be a really useful activity to figure out elements of your style that you want to add more of, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say.
Here are some examples of 3 of my outfits, so you can get the idea.
What is it about garments or outfits that you love?
Think about:
- colours
- patterns
- fabrics
- texture
- sheen
- scale
- details
- styles
- silhouettes
- construction
Here’s another examples from my own wardrobe
I’ve owned this skirt since the 1990s, yes it got put away (in a sewing box, I think I had plans to shorten it) and then I rediscovered it just as denim maxi skirts came back into fashion and I’ve worn it so frequently as it’s a unique design (one of my criteria of things I love).
A final example from me
My final example here includes a fur bolero, that I wear all the time. I wear it to the supermarket and I wear it out to dinner. It may look fancy and most would only think to wear it on formal occasions. But I get it out for my every day, not only is it warm (as I feel the cold), it’s a lovely texture and allows me to dress up a casual jeans outfit effortlessly.
You may also have noticed that I like some pattern, I like a little quirk, and I like a flippy flappy sleeve detail or a fabric that moves or has a glamorous feel to it.
What’s my style recipe? Glamorous Functional Individualist – it’s based on my 3 criteria that are inside my E3 Masterclass.
What You Need to Know to Find (or Create) Your Style
Know your body. Know your colouring. Know your lifestyle. Know what you actually like wearing and how you want to show up in the world.
Do all of that before you spend a single dollar. It sounds like extra work upfront, but it saves you from the very expensive habit of buying things that don’t quite work.
Patricia, you’ve spent five years pouring yourself into someone else. This is the part where you get to put yourself back together, properly, with a plan.
You’ve got this. And you’re going to look brilliant.
If you want a proper guided process for all of this, my E3 Masterclass was built exactly for this moment. It walks you through creating a style recipe for every area of your life, not just your wardrobe, but how you show up across the board. Think of it as the structured version of everything I’ve described above, with none of the guesswork and all of the clarity. If Patricia’s story sounds a little familiar, this is where to start.
