How to Express a Style That Is Functional, Genuine and Unique
A lovely reader emailed me: how do I express a style that is functional, genuine and unique? It’s a great question, and it has a slightly annoying answer. You have to go back to the beginning. Not to the shops, not to your wardrobe, not to a list of “10 pieces every woman needs”. Back to who you actually are and what you genuinely, aesthetically love.
This is one of the biggest issues women have, particularly those of us who don’t have a body that walks a catwalk and can wear anything the industry throws at us. With age and experience, we quietly limit ourselves to a few things we’ve figured out work. And then we stop looking.
The style rut is made of your own rules
Here is what happens. Over years of shopping, you develop a private rulebook. No sleeveless. Never that neckline. Not that colour, someone said it washed me out in 1998. Nothing tucked in, obviously.
You are no longer choosing what to try on. Your rules are choosing for you, and most of them were written by a version of you who was standing in bad-fitting room lighting, having a rough day.
So you stop looking beyond the safe zone, and you get stuck in what I call a style rut.
The rut is comfortable. But it quickly becomes dull and boring. It is also the reason you stand in front of a full wardrobe and feel like you have nothing to wear.
Why I take you out of clothes first
In my Visualise Your Style program, I deliberately start you somewhere that has nothing to do with clothing.
Before you think about a single garment, I want you to understand your aesthetic. What you love. What draws your eye. Your essence, if you like, except you are the one defining it. Not a magazine, not an algorithm, not the woman at the shop who told you what suits you.
Why outside of clothes? Because the moment we look at clothes, we start overlaying body image on top of everything. Plus all the messages around personal style, what you should-and-shouldn’t wear, what is appropriate, that have all been subconsciously internalised over the years. And most of the time we don’t even notice we’re doing it. It is subconscious. You think you’re deciding “I don’t like that jacket” when what you’re actually deciding is “I don’t like my upper arms.”
Get outside of clothing and that filter drops away. You can find out what you genuinely love. Then, and only then, can we work out how to express that in what you wear.
Genuine means genuinely yours
Genuine is another word for authentic, and authenticity is one of the most important parts of personal style. It is also one of those things that has to come from you rather than be laid on top of you by somebody else.
There is decent research behind this. Consumer psychologists call it self-congruity: the closer the fit between a product’s image and a person’s own self-image, the more positively they evaluate it and the more attached to it they become. M. Joseph Sirgy has spent more than three decades mapping this (Sirgy, 2018, Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science). In plain language, we love the things that feel like us, and we quietly resent the things that don’t, even when they’re perfectly nice things.
Which is exactly why “every woman needs a white shirt and a trench coat” makes me twitch.
Wardrobes are personal. Your lifestyle is personal. What you enjoy wearing is personal. Whether you run hot or cold is personal. What you find comfortable is personal. There are so many things we have to layer in before we can say what works for you, which is why those lists don’t work, and why copying someone else’s style will never make you feel stylish or confident. It can’t. They are not you. You are two unique people.
The client who couldn’t do Project 333
I always remember a client who decided to try Project 333, the challenge where you wear 33 garments for 3 months.
She told me it was all going brilliantly until she realised it was 33 garments, not 333. She had genuinely misread it. And she said, quite plainly, “I could not wear 33 garments for 3 months, I’d be bored out of my skull.”
She was right. She had a very creative style. Variety is oxygen to her.
And here is the part I love. Some of her clothes were 30 years old. They didn’t look dated for a second, because she was constantly reinventing how she wore them in a creative way. Fresh, interesting, and far more sustainable than the woman who wears the same three outfits on repeat, gets bored, throws it all out and buys a whole new wardrobe each season.
Minimalism is a preference, not a virtue
Some people want a small, streamlined wardrobe and it makes them genuinely happy. Others want options, mixing, playing, changing it up. Neither is morally superior. They are just different wiring.
I know which one I am. Even when I travel for a short time with a small capsule, it doesn’t take long before I get home and think I don’t want to see those clothes for a good while. I’ve been looking at them for days. Going minimalist permanently would send me round the bend. I like variety. I like thinking about wearing my clothes in different ways. It’s creative expression and a bit of fun in my day.
I’ve watched too many people throw everything out chasing a minimalist ideal that was never theirs, and regret it terribly.
Even the research on “less is better” is shakier than the internet suggests. The famous jam study, where shoppers bought more when offered 6 flavours instead of 24 (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000), gets quoted constantly. What gets quoted far less is the meta-analysis of 63 conditions across 50 experiments that found the average effect of too much choice was virtually zero, with enormous variation between people and situations (Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd, 2010, Journal of Consumer Research).
Translation: fewer options genuinely paralyses some people and genuinely liberates others. Which is you matters far more than which is fashionable.
So what are the one, two, three steps?
I get asked for the quick version constantly, and I’ll be honest with you.
Whenever I see something that is very simple, I think, lovely, and it will work for the handful of people who happen to be exactly like the person who invented it. Usually someone has solved their own style puzzle and is now handing you their answer sheet. It fits their body, their colouring, their personality, their climate and their life. Not yours.
You are a complex human. Complex humans need answers with some depth to them.
That said, here is the shape of it, which is what I walk through in 7 Steps to Style:
Your aesthetic. What you actually love, established outside of clothing first.
Your physicality. Colour, body shape, proportions, variations. The bits that are simply true about you.
Your personality. How you want to express yourself, and how your traits influence every single style choice you make.
Your lifestyle. How you spend your time and what your wardrobe genuinely needs to do.
Each of those is a multi-stage process, not a checkbox. You can’t leap from the start to the end. There is a set of steps in between, and skipping them is why so many people end up with a wardrobe full of perfectly nice clothes that feel like a costume.
What this actually buys you
Once you have your own personal criteria, shopping gets dramatically easier.
It stops being “will I, won’t I, I’m not sure, it’s on sale though.” It becomes a clean yes or no. It’s me, or it’s not me. That’s it.
Because this is what we lose over time. It is so easy to drift into buying whatever the local shops happen to be serving up this season, rather than pausing to ask, is this really me? There is nothing wrong with the current fashions if they are you. But if they’re not, there is no point spending a cent on them.
Start with what you love. The clothes come after.
