I think we’ve got personal style wrong.
For years, we’ve been told that finding our personal style is about discovering what we like to wear and which trends we should be following, but I think there is something much deeper going on, because your relationship with your clothes is not really just about clothes.
It is about identity, confidence, mindset and the relationship you have with yourself.
And once you start looking at it that way, the familiar feeling of standing in front of a wardrobe full of clothes and thinking I have absolutely nothing to wear starts to make a lot more sense.
Because perhaps the problem isn’t that you have nothing to wear. Perhaps the problem is that you have very little to wear that feels like you anymore.
I see this so often with women who feel frustrated with their wardrobes. They have clothes for work, weekends, different occasions, different sizes, different stages of life and sometimes even different versions of themselves, yet getting dressed still feels difficult.
And I think one reason for this is something we don’t talk about nearly enough:
Our identity changes, but our wardrobes often don’t keep up.
Think about how much can change in a woman’s life. You might become a mother, return to work, leave a job, start a business, go through a relationship change, reach a different stage of your career, become more confident or simply realise that the things you once cared about no longer matter in quite the same way.
The woman you were five or ten years ago isn’t necessarily the woman you are now, yet you can still be standing in front of a wardrobe built around an old version of yourself.
That creates what I think of as an identity gap: the space between who you are now and the version of yourself your clothes are still representing.
And sometimes you can actually feel that gap. You put something on and can’t quite explain why you don’t like it.
It fits.
There’s technically nothing wrong with it.
You might even have loved it once. But something just feels off.
I don’t think we should automatically dismiss that as being indecisive or difficult. Sometimes that feeling is information. Sometimes your brain is recognising something you haven’t consciously put into words yet:
This doesn’t feel like me anymore. But there is another side to this too, and that is mindset. Because sometimes it isn’t the clothes that are stopping us from expressing ourselves. It is what we believe about ourselves.
I’m too old for that.
I need to lose weight first.
I’m not stylish enough to pull that off.
People will think I’m trying too hard.
I’ll wear that when I feel more confident.
These thoughts can become so familiar that we stop recognising them as beliefs and start treating them as facts. This is one of the reasons mindset sits at the beginning of my Dressed & Ready System™.
Before we start talking about what belongs in your wardrobe, I want to understand the woman standing in front of it and most importantly, in order to create the perfect wardrobe, she needs to understand herself.
What does her life actually look like?
What has changed?
What is frustrating her?
What does she want to feel when she gets dressed?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who is she becoming?
Because personal style isn’t something you find once and then keep forever. Yeah, some things don’t change, but as people we evolve, your life evolves and your style is allowed to evolve with you.
That doesn’t mean constantly buying new clothes or following every trend. In fact, I think trends are much more useful when we see them as inspiration rather than instruction.
You can love a trend without wearing it. You can ignore something everyone else is wearing. No one will think bad of you. And no, you’re not suddenly going to look older because you’re not hopping on every trend out there.
That is personal style. It’s personal to you. It’s up to you to decide and knowing yourself well enough to decide what belongs in your wardrobe is all part of the process. And this is also why I don’t think the answer to wardrobe frustration is more clothes.
Sometimes it is more clarity. Clarity about who you are. Clarity about your lifestyle.
Clarity about what makes you feel good. And clarity about which beliefs are helping you and which ones are holding you back. Because when your wardrobe is full of disconnected choices, getting dressed can become exhausting. You try something, change again, question yourself and perhaps end up wearing the same safe outfit you always wear. No one wants decision fatigue alongside their morning cuppa and bowl of cereal.
Our wardrobes are not necessarily a clothing problem. Sometimes it is a confidence problem.
Sometimes it is a mindset problem. And sometimes it is simply that your wardrobe hasn’t caught up with you. This is why I believe personal style deserves to be taken more seriously.
Not because clothes are the most important thing in life, but because getting dressed is something we do every single day, and the way we feel while doing it can influence how we show up in the rest of our lives, which is important.
When the inside and outside start to feel more aligned, getting dressed becomes about much more than putting on clothes. It becomes a small daily reminder of who you are. And sometimes, that can be a surprisingly powerful thing.
