While I was in Sydney at the AICI conference, I shared a hotel room with my lovely friend and image consultant colleague Jan from New Zealand. She was kind enough to let me take a happy snap of her outfits (missed a couple of days sorry) to share with you here. This was on Saturday This is…
Have you thought about setting yourself a wardrobe capsule challenge? What’s this? Well, it’s where you decide to limit what you wear in your wardrobe to just a few items for a week or longer. Project 333 is the well-known known version of this (where you take 33 items and wear them, and only them…
Whenever I’m going through a wardrobe and sorting it out for a client, I’m always making sure they have a few basics that will make the rest of the wardrobe work. So what is a basic and what am I looking for? To me, a basic is something that you need to make…
How to wear leggings seems to be a highly googled question, and what sorts of shoes work with leggings is a hot topic, so here is my 2c on the subject. Ankle length (left) – work best with high vamp shoes and sandals, either in a colour that is similar or…
How does your lifestyle influence your clothing choices? The first step to discovering this is to do the following exercises to further break down your lifestyle. What do you do with yourself? How do you fill your time? Where do you go? Who do you see? Take some time to answer these questions to help…
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” Gore Vidal In this post you were asked to figure out where you are now with your clothing – it may be a great place and where you want to be, or it may not be. I like…
Yesterday I asked where confidence in appearance comes from – and many commented that lack of confidence can stem from negative comments made during childhood. These comments seem to burn right into us and are often very hard to shake off as we grow up – we take them as gospel truth, rather than just…
Yesterday we talked about giving your wardrobe a good purge. Until you’ve done this stage it’s impossible to work out what you do and don’t have, and if you really do have nothing to wear. Firstly, if your favourites are still wearable, but starting to wear out – put them…
So many women will lament that they have ‘nothing to wear’ yet their significant other may say ‘but you have a wardrobe full of clothes’ – so why the disconnect? Usually this is because they need to do a big closet purge, get rid of what is not working, and discover the holes so…
The other day I posted on breaking the style rules, and I thought that I’d post some more ways to do it. Knowing your rules (or as I like to think of them – as Style Guidelines) is great as you will be more empowered when making choices shopping (hello? how much money have you…
This morning I did a wardrobe audit for a lovely 53 year old client. She’d already thrown out a pile of stuff before I got there, but we managed to get rid of another 5 garbage bags of clothes that were no longer working for her. Like most ‘middle ageless ‘ (thanks Rosina) women,…
After my post on Highlighting Your Assets, some commenters seemed to have trouble working out what their assets are, they’ve spent so long being told about and focussing on their ‘flaws’ but never ‘assets’. I see everything as an asset, and don’t believe in flaws. It’s just that some assets you may want to highlight,…
Focal points are created by detail on clothing – whether it’s colour, shiny fabrics, pockets, distressing on jeans, ruffles, pattern, belts, beading or jewellery. You can use detail to draw attention to your assets and away from areas you’d rather people didn’t notice. You can see from this collection how the details draw…
Recently blogger Embellissiment asked how to choose a watch to go with outfits, and whether watches are ‘jewellery’ or something else. Basically, I think that watches are an accessory but like a shoe, a more basic, every day essential accessory (yes I know that your mobile phone has a clock on it, but a…
No, this is not a movie plot, but a good way of working out what you should wear. With every good movie there is always a hero (this is the non-sexist, all inclusive version of hero, that includes heroines), there is always a Villain, and to make the story cohesive and understandable, some Supporting Acts.…
Metscan asked about Jan’s attitudes to jewellery and jeans – here is her reply – FYI – in New Zealand, jandals are their word for flip-flops which in Australia we know as thongs! “In respect to jeans and jewellery, I think you have to take care when you with putting the two together , it…
Have you ever heard of the term Visual Grouping (we group like with like to make it easier for our brains to work through all the millions of bits of data it has to contend with second by second)? This principle can help you when deciding on a shoe colour to wear with your skirts…
Reader Jamtart asked recently for some ideas on what kind of jewellery would suit her – she’s petite (5’1″) and busty – and wanted some ideas. I suggest some pieces that are larger in scale, but not heavy in dimension – so in all price ranges, here are some ideas. Firstly, from Wendy Brandes…
I’m really struggling at the moment to find spring/summer clothes that don’t look too young for me. I don’t know why but a lot of stuff looks too fancy or ruffled, and that’s just not me 🙁 I always end up feeling too warm in the warmer months, because I never quite get a good…
So, you may be aware that I generally advise against wearing a high neckline when you have a larger bust, as it makes it appear to be even bigger and start just underneath your chin. But sometimes we all want to wear high necklines, for example, it’s winter here at the moment and…
Often, when I’m with a client, they’ll tell me that they have some necklaces that they like, but never wear. When they bring them out to show me, we discover that they’re just not hanging in the right spot for them – and as soon as we put them on one of their ‘balance…
