how to look like you’ve bothered no.2

the how to guides

Photo credit. Filipp Romanovski Unsplash

Find your statement piece

What is a statement piece? You may have heard about a ‘statement’ piece of jewellery, but having a key item in your wardrobe that you can put on and wear anywhere will solve a multitude of fashion dilemmas. The trick is to find an item that makes you look and feel good, that is neither too smart or too casual, and with luck is trans-seasonal.

As a designer specialising in ladies tailoring, my advice to you would always be to find a soft jacket or light knee length coat that you can layer over many items in your normal wardrobe to pull your look together. Unfortunately when many people think of tailoring, they still picture a three piece suit or perhaps an elderly lady in tweed. However, fabrics and designs have come so far as to make tailoring unrecognisable to this former way of thinking.

Once you start to look, either within your wardrobe or on a shopping trip, there will be something for you. Whether you choose a soft cardigan style jacket, along the lines of the designs created by Coco Chanel, or something with a longer line, will be a matter of taste and your individual styling preferences. You will find that having a go-to piece that works with your colour schemes means that you don’t need to constantly worry about what to wear. With just one item you can easily elevate any of your trousers, jeans, skirts, or dresses and look like you have taken perhaps more time and effort on your image that you actually have.

Not a fan of jackets? Perhaps your statement piece will be a lovely dress, or a scarf, or some wonderful jewellery? Do you have some great footwear that always makes you feel like you can take on the world? What you choose doesn’t matter as long as it works for you, with the rest of your wardrobe, and results in an image that looks like you have bothered.

tone-on-tone

One very successful way to elevate the ordinary clothes that we all wear most of the time, is to layer tone-on-tone. This isn’t a complicated idea involving clothes you don’t already own, or ending up looking like an over stuffed duvet. It is about wearing different shades of the same colour together, perhaps as a pair of trousers, a shirt, jumper and scarf. Think about using charcoal grey, with mid grey and silver, navy with lighter blue, brown worn with beige and cream, or using different shades of pink, or whatever colours appeal to you.

Tonal dressing is something our cousins in Europe and the USA have adopted to great effect, although they do tend to wear a lot of white, cream and beige. Take this inspiration and adapt it for the real world. You can create all sorts of looks using colour layering from your existing wardrobe, or by adding different accessories. If you think about keeping your styling tonal, it’s an easy place to start to build a look that you can repeat.

Continues in No.3…

All rights reserved. Milly Churchill asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.