The best way to find your personal style is to figure out what best suits you and what makes you feel comfortable and confident. But how exactly do you do this? Here are three tips to help you find your personal style and create cute fits every time!
- Find your favourite style aesthetics and colour palette
Start by creating a mood board of style aesthetics that you love on Pinterest! Pick 3 to 5 aesthetics that tend to go well together so that you can mix styles and create your own unique look. The key to finding a group of aesthetics that mash well is to find key elements of each style that are also present in the others. For example, the Soft Girl, Light Academia and ‘Old Money’ aesthetics are a good combination as they all feature a relatively neutral colour palette. Key staples such as the oversized sweater vest and cardigans are featured in both Light Academia and ‘Old Money’ aesthetics. You might also want to experiment around with different groupings of styles before committing to a set group as what might look good on others might not look good on you. Once you’ve figured out the vibe you’re going for, it is much easier to coordinate outfits as you have a definitive idea of how you would preferably like your outfits to look. If you’re feeling overwhelmed when you first start out and are unsure of how to put together outfits, try copying outfits from your mood board. As you get more comfortable, you can experiment by swapping certain pieces for others to change things up.
Deciding on a colour scheme will help you along the way as you discover your own style by picking. Not only would it make it easier to create outfits, but it will also give you a signature colour palette that makes you easily recognisable. A good way to figure out your colour palette would be to recall when you got the most compliments for wearing a particular colour. From there, you’ll be able to figure out the colours that suit you best.
- Find your favourite silhouette
Your personal style is not just about looking good, but also feeling comfortable in your own skin. However, while that may be a dreamy idealistic vision, it’s not always possible as it’s difficult to not feel insecure all the time. A way to feel more confident in your clothes is to find pieces that flatter your body type and enhance parts of your body that you love.
Be honest with yourself and ask what your bodily insecurities are and what you like to hide or accentuate. Personally, I don’t enjoy tank tops that much as I feel insecure about my arms and shoulders. I tend to opt for tops with sleeves or layer pieces on top of my sleeveless tops. I prefer wearing tighter tops and high waisted bottoms as they accentuate my waistline. Maybe you like wearing high waisted pants that make your legs look longer. If you feel insecure about your hips being small, opt for skirts that flare out to create the illusion of wider hips.
If you’re unclear about your preferences, reflect back on or try on your favourite outfits and think about how those outfits hide or enhance certain parts of your body. From there, you can select pieces that not only flatter you, but also make you feel confident wearing them.
- Be practical about the pieces you buy
It is hard to develop a good sense of style when you’re working with pieces that aren’t practical. While revamping your wardrobe and style, be economically and seasonally practical about the pieces in your wardrobe.
By being economically practical, I mean purchasing pieces that will give you the best return on investment. Basics often give you the highest wearability out of them. It’s much harder to re-wear statement pieces as they are easily recognisable and also much harder to style. So, to increase their wearability, try to find clothes that fit into your preferred aesthetics, rather than just pieces that are bold on their own and good for one occasion. So, if you’re looking at buying a particular piece for a party, try to find a bold piece that you can also dress down with the current clothes that you own. This way, you are more likely to re-wear that statement piece if you already have other clothing that also goes with it.
Now, most people believe that it is much harder to be fashionable when you live in a tropical climate like Singapore’s as it is much harder to play around with layers and textures. But that’s not always the case. You can still do so, but just with more warm-weather-friendly pieces. So, as lovely as a leather jacket is, how often are you actually gonna wear it when the sun is blazing down 1837% of the time? Layering is still possible when creating cute outfits for hot weather, you’ll just need to use pieces with lighter fabrics and opt for looser fits. Besides that, you can also pick pieces that have unique textures and details that will keep your outfit fresh.
These tips are not the absolute way to develop your own style, but just those that I found personally useful! The one thing I hope you’ll take with you from the article is to continue experimenting to find what makes you feel your best self.