The Psychology of Dressing “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” It’s one of those phrases that’s been repeated so often it’s lost most of its meaning, filed away with other bits of advice nobody quite believes any more. Which is a shame, because there’s genuine psychology behind it, and it’s…
It Was Never the Purchase in the Bag. It Was the Choosing. Here’s a small mystery worth sitting with. You’ve had a rotten day, you’re feeling down. You go shopping, and you feel better. We all know this happens, and most of us are faintly embarrassed by it, because the obvious explanation is a bit…
You have seen the graphic. Five dresses in a row, a tidy little caption underneath, and a confident promise that vertical stripes will make you look taller and horizontal stripes will make you look wider. It gets shared thousands of times. It looks authoritative. It is also, in the most important way, wrong. Not wrong…
The Sale Price Is a Comparison, Not a Saving Here is a sentence that has cost women more money than almost any other: “but it was reduced from $120.” We say it to ourselves in the shop. We say it to our partners at home. We say it, a little defensively, when someone admires the…
It’s Not the Mirror, and It’s Not You You go into a fitting room feeling reasonably good about yourself and the outfit you’re wearing to the shops. You come out twenty minutes later having decided that you have terrible legs, that your stomach has staged some kind of coup, and that you should probably not…
You’re Not Buying the Bag. You’re Buying a Holiday from Yourself. Here’s a question worth sitting with before you tap “confirm purchase” next time: are you buying something because you want it, or because you want a feeling to go away? It sounds confronting. But understanding the difference is one of the most useful things…
The final of my top 10 most Googled personal style questions is “What colours look best on me? I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. In consult rooms, on comment threads, in DMs at 11pm from women standing in front of their wardrobes having what I can only describe as a…
The Most Googled Style Question That Isn’t Really About Style Have you ever typed into Google something on the following lines: How to wear [specific item] (e.g., barrel-leg jeans, sneakers, oversized blazer)… Every day, millions of searches are typed into Google that follow a familiar pattern. How to style a blazer. How to wear an…
The Wardrobe Problem Nobody Warned You About Nobody tells you, when you are building a career, that you will spend a significant portion of your professional life trying to solve a problem that has no official name. It sits somewhere between “what should I wear to work?” and something considerably more complicated, something closer to:…
“What does my clothing say about me?” is the next in the top 10 list of most Googled style questions. Every morning, after deciding what to wear and donning your outfit, before you have said a single word, you have already made a statement. You have communicated something about who you are, what you value,…
You Don’t Need Another Capsule Wardrobe. You Need Your Identity Revealed. You’ve tried the capsule wardrobe. You’ve bought the “investment pieces.” You have a wardrobe of basics. You’ve followed the style rules. So why does getting dressed still feel like such a struggle and you still feel that you lack style? If you’re a woman…
A client once told me she’d been typed as a “Romantic Ingénue.” The words sounded beautiful – delicate, feminine, soft – but she didn’t recognise herself in them. She was warm, confident, decisive, and loved clean lines. The label had left her more puzzled than empowered. That conversation reminded me how easily systems like Kitchener’s…
