The fifth and penultimate strategy for creating your perfect wardrobe revolves around communication.
How does the garment or accessory communicate? Does it communicate:
- The right message for the occasion
- The right message for your life
- The right message for your personality
- The right message for your environment
- The right message for your body
Let's break these elements down.
The Occasion
What's the occasion? Is if formal or informal? Is it business or social?
These require quite different clothing styles, fabrics, patterns, outfits and accessories. Formal business wear is very different from formal social wear!
Your wardrobe needs to have clothes that work for different occasions. So often I've heard from clients that they don't have anything to wear. Most often they have a bunch of clothes, they just don't have anything that is suitable for the occasion. Think about creating some wardrobe capsules around the different common occasions you experience in your life.
For some areas you may want to create a few capsules as you spend lots of time in those kinds of clothes. For other aspects, then you may only want a small capsule, but one that makes you feel confident and comfortable should you need to wear clothing that suits that kind of occasion.
Your Life
What stage of life are you in? 20s? 30s? 40s? 50s? 60s? 70s? 80s? These are all different life stages that need different attire. What may have been perfect formal social wear in your 20s would most likely look very out of place when you are in your 50s. And the opposite is true too. Dressing too old for your life stage is not a good move either.
This is why it's important to update your wardrobe and cull what no longer works. We change as we age. We mature. Our personalities shift and move and our clothes should do the same, rather than holding us back in the past for an age we are no longer, or for a life we no longer live.
Your Personality
Are your clothes communicating your personality? Do they represent who you are? Do they give you confidence because they are an authentic expression of the unique you?
If your clothes aren't an expression of you you are, you will never communicate the confidence you could.
Only buy clothes that resonate with you. That represent you and your beliefs, attitudes and aesthetics.
Make sure when you shop that you take your Style Recipe with you, don't buy anything that isn't reflective of it.
Your Environment
Big city or small village? Europe, Asia, Australia, South America - where are you located in the world and what are the cultural expectations? Tropics or snowbound? The weather may have a big affect on what is right for where you live.
Your environment may have a big impact on what you wear and how your clothes communicate. Wearing a pair of shorts in the snow? You will be communicating that you are foolish. Wearing those same shorts down the streets of Abu Dhabi? You will be communicating that you are unaware of cultural norms and at risk of offending the locals. Wearing those same shorts on a beach in Florida? Then you are communicating that your clothing is appropriate and you are aware of the environment and dressed to suit it.
Your Body
Do your clothes communicate that you understand the body you have today?
That you know how to dress and flatter that body and colouring?
That you are not holding onto the body you had in the past or the one that you are wishing you had?
Clothes that are too tight and don't fit (as I talked about in part 1) communicate that you are kidding yourself about your weight and size.
Clothes that are too loose communicate that you either have very little confidence and want to hide, or that you think you're much bigger than you are.
Wearing clothes that fit your body today is important as it communicates that you understand who you are. You are aware. You are in touch with yourself and what suits you. That you take care of yourself and value yourself. It communicates confidence.
Clothes that with the colouring that you have today (and let me remind you, your natural hair colour is the colour that is currently sprouting out of your head today, not the colour it was at 20 or 30 and it works with the skin you have today, keeping on dying your hair to a colour you once had and now no longer flatters your skin tone, communicates that you are desperately trying to hold onto your youth and are having trouble with ageing), is also important. You want to wear the colour rather than have it wear you.
Where to from here?
Creating your perfect wardrobe requires thought, introspection and an understanding of who you are now. Are you holding onto clothes that no longer communicate what you want? Let them go so you can really see what you have in your wardrobe so you can build yourself your perfect wardrobe for you, the you you are - today.
Read part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this series on creating the perfect wardrobe.
