How to Find Your Personal Style: Start Here

You have a wardrobe full of clothes.

You’re intelligent. Capable. You make complex decisions every day.

So why can getting dressed sometimes feel ridiculously difficult?

Perhaps your body has changed and the clothes or formulas you once relied on no longer work. Maybe you’ve lost touch with what you actually like.

Perhaps you know what suits you in theory, yet your wardrobe still doesn’t feel like you.Or you may simply be tired of being told what women your age should and shouldn’t wear.

Here’s the good news: you don’t need more fashion rules.

You need to understand what’s creating the problem for you.

That’s where we’ll start.

Style isn't one problem

When women tell me, “I have nothing to wear”, the problem is rarely a lack of clothes.

Over more than two decades working with women and teaching image consultants, I’ve found that style struggles usually come from one or more of eight areas.

01 Colour

You’re unsure which colours harmonise with you, or how to combine them.

02 Body

Your body or proportions have changed, and you’re not sure how to dress the body you have today.

03 Identity

You’ve changed, but your wardrobe is still expressing an earlier version of you.

04 Personality

Clothes may technically suit you, but somehow they feel wrong.

05 Wardrobe

You own plenty of clothes, but they don’t work together.

06 Shopping

You keep buying things that seem promising in the shop but become wardrobe orphans at home.

06 Confidence

You’ve become so accustomed to judging yourself that it’s hard to separate the clothes from how you feel about your body.

08 Outfit

You can pick good pieces, but pulling them together into a finished outfit is the part that stalls.

Different problems require different solutions.

So rather than trying to fix everything at once, start with the one that’s loudest.

What is frustrating you most about your style right now?

“I don’t know what my style is anymore”

Perhaps you once knew exactly what you liked. Then life changed. Your career evolved. Your body changed. Your children grew up. Your lifestyle shifted. You reached a different stage of life and realised that the person looking back from your wardrobe wasn’t quite you anymore.

This isn’t necessarily a style crisis. It may simply mean you’ve evolved faster than your wardrobe has.

Personal style isn’t something you discover once and keep forever. It evolves because you evolve.

Start by exploring

How to Define Your Personal Style →

Discover Your Personality Style →

Explore Visualise Your Style →

“I don’t know what suits my body anymore”

Bodies change. Yet we often continue judging the body we have today by the expectations we formed around a body we had years ago.

Instead of asking

How can I hide what’s wrong with my body?

I want you to ask

What visual effect do I want my clothes to create?

Clothing changes what the eye notices through line, proportion, scale, contrast, volume and focal points. Understanding these principles gives you choices — what to emphasise, where the eye travels, how your proportions appear — without making your body the problem.

Start by exploring

Understand Your Body Shape →

Discover Your Body Proportions →

Learn How Clothing Creates Visual Illusions →

“I have no idea which colours suit me”

Have you ever put on a colour and suddenly looked vibrant, then tried another and wondered why you looked tired? Colour influences how we perceive your skin, eyes, hair and features.

Personal colour analysis is more sophisticated than simply asking whether you’re warm or cool.

Your most harmonious colours are influenced by undertone, value and intensity, as well as the contrast created by your natural colouring. Understanding these characteristics makes choosing clothes, accessories, makeup and even hair colour considerably easier.

Start by exploring

Learn How Personal Colour Analysis Works →

Discover Colour Contrast →

Explore the Absolute Colour System →

Get Your Personal Colour Analysis →

“My clothes suit me, but they still don’t feel like me”

This is one of the most interesting style problems. You can wear the “right” colour. The proportions can work beautifully. The garment can fit. And you can still look in the mirror and think:

No. That’s just not me.

Because there is a person inside the clothes. Your personality influences what you find beautiful, comfortable, appropriate and authentic. Your need for creativity, authority, ease, drama, harmony or individuality matters. This is where style moves beyond aesthetics and into psychology.

Start by exploring

Discover How Personality Influences Style →

Take the Personality Style Quiz →

Explore 16 Style Types →

“I have plenty of clothes, but nothing to wear”

This is rarely solved by buying more clothes. Often the wardrobe contains individual garments rather than a functioning system. Too many statement pieces and not enough supporting players. Clothes that belong to different versions of your life. The same types of garments bought again and again while the pieces you actually need are overlooked.

A useful wardrobe isn’t measured by how many garments it contains. It’s measured by how well those garments help you live your actual life.

Start by exploring

How to Identify Your Wardrobe Gaps →

How to Create More Outfits From Your Clothes →

Discover Evolve Your Style →

“I keep buying clothes I don’t wear”

Do you have clothes with tags still attached? Shoes that seemed like a great idea? Sale purchases that were irresistible because they were “such good value”? Or garments you’re saving for some hypothetical future version of your life?

Shopping mistakes aren’t always about poor taste. Our brains are influenced by novelty, scarcity, aspiration, habits, emotions and cognitive biases. Learning to recognise why you buy what you buy is considerably more useful than another list of shopping rules.

Start by exploring

Why We Buy Clothes We Never Wear →

How to Shop for Your Real Life →

Create a Personal Shopping Strategy →

“I know all the rules. I just don’t feel confident”

Sometimes more information isn’t the answer. You may already know your body shape. You may know your colours. You may understand proportion. Yet every outfit becomes another opportunity to find something wrong with yourself.

Style confidence doesn’t come from a perfect body or a perfect wardrobe. It grows when you make conscious choices, experiment without judging yourself, and recognise that clothes are tools for expression, not a test you have to pass.

You are allowed to decide what you want your clothes to communicate.

Start by exploring

Rebuilding Style Confidence →

Experiment With Evolve Your Style →

Explore the Psychology of Personal Style →

Not Sure Which One Is You?

That’s completely normal. These problems overlap.

A wardrobe problem may actually be a colour problem. A shopping problem may be an identity problem. A body-confidence problem may make you believe nothing suits you. And sometimes you’ve simply accumulated so much conflicting style advice that you no longer trust your own judgement.

IF YOU’RE UNSURE WHERE TO BEGIN

Take the “What’s Holding Back Your Style Confidence?” Quiz

Answer a few questions and discover which part of your style puzzle deserves your attention first.

Want to Understand the Whole Picture?

THE PROGRAMME

Style isn’t created by one characteristic.

That’s why I created 7 Steps to Style. It brings together the elements I believe are essential to developing authentic personal style, including your colouring, body, proportions, personality, wardrobe and lifestyle.

Instead of giving you a formula to copy, it gives you the knowledge to make your own decisions.

Because ultimately, my goal isn’t for you to need a stylist forever. It’s for you to understand yourself well enough to become your own style expert.

Your best wardrobe sits at the intersection of:

01Who you are

02How you look

03How you live

04How you want to be seen

Explore the Inside Out Style Encyclopaedia

Want to keep exploring?

Inside Out Style contains more than 17 years of articles answering the questions women ask me about colour, clothes, bodies, wardrobes, shopping, personality and style.

Choose the subject you’re curious about today:

There is no perfect place to begin. Start with the question that’s bothering you today.

Understanding one small piece of your style puzzle often makes the next piece much easier to see.