(Day 4 of W Attitude Style Week)
Welcome to #WAttitude #Styleweek, this week is all about styling and fashion guide for beginners.
The purpose of this is to give you the knowledge on how to select and invest in clothing piece that can elevate your style and it does not necessarily have anything to do with price.
Understanding what clothing pieces to invest and wear is like skincare and understanding how to take care of your skin. Because how we dress affects how others perceive us. It gives the first impression and has a lot to say about you, your character and who you are. If we do not want to give people a wrong impression and want to give a sense of sophistication, classy, savvy women, this is for you.
The intention is to introduce the universal rules on how to choose a high-quality garment, and how to style yourself so you can always look fabulous and classy. I am going to break it down for you and demystify what it means to have a classy style.
#1 It has nothing to do with the price
To be honest, there are ugly pieces that are sold for thousands of dollars simply because it is from a designer brand. I did not realize it before but really: expensive does not necessarily mean that the piece will look good on you. Even a good quality piece does not necessarily mean that it will look good on you. So, what you paid for can have no relation whatsoever to how good it looks on you. A piece can look expensive and ugly at the same time. What matters is to buy quality pieces that fit you.
If we look at the royal family, their clothing pieces are quality fabrics that look good on them but the brand may be priced mid-range. So, the first advice to elevate your style and to look professional, polished, and classy is to buy quality fabrics that look good on you. I would always go for natural fabrics that exist in nature including wool, silk, linen, and cotton, rather than man-made or synthetic materials such as polyester. These natural materials are not only environmentally friendly, but they are better for the skin, softer and easier to carry and wear. So these natural quality fabrics would give you a better return on your investment.
I used to be attracted to the first impression of a clothing piece — whether it looks good in the photos online or on the hanger in the shop. And I wasted a lot of money on buying clothes that look good in the photos but their fabrics were not of high quality. When I shop for skincare products, I would check the ingredients. By the same token, when I started to check the ‘ingredients’ of the clothes, I realized that some clothes look good but they are not durable, not soft in texture, and not easy to wear. And I would wear it once or twice before leaving it in the wardrobe until my annual wardrobe clearance when I donate this piece. It is really a waste of money, time, and space. And I feel like I am producing a lot of waste.
So now, I have changed my shopping strategy to only purchase and invest in those quality pieces that are made of all-natural fabrics that look good on me so I can wear them more often. They are more comfortable, easier to mix and match, and more environmentally friendly. And they fit the body more to give that classy, polished look.
#2 What it means to have a classy style?
To answer this question, we have to look at what is not classy. Sometimes to understand what something is, we have to look at what it is not, right?
Dressing classy and starting to dress in a classy way is going to require you to be very picky. And it’s going to require you to be choosy about what you wear and what you don’t wear.
It is just like being on a diet. What are the benefits of being on a diet? You get healthier, you lose a little weight which you do not need, you feel better, your energy levels go up. But none of these things happen if you are not choosy about what you eat and what you do not eat, right?
I understand that having that discipline can be painful and annoying at first, but the outcomes are that you look great, you look polished, you feel great and you are confident. And once you have mastered the basic classy style, if you want to try something a little more edgy, you can do so then because you would have already established yourself as having a classy style and as a classy, luxurious, sophisticated, savvy-looking women. So, let’s start with master the basics here first.
#2a The mental attitude
When you are being choosy and picky about what you wear or not wear, we want to be conscious of our mental attitude.
Because when we say the word can’t — “I can’t wear this” or “I can’t wear that”, this is a limiting attitude. You are limiting yourself to a particular kind of clothing and it sounds like your body is not good enough to wear other types of clothing.
It’s not that you can’t. You certainly can wear anything. We do not want to have those limiting thoughts, rather we should empower ourselves because it is us picking and wearing the clothes, not the clothes wearing us.
When we start to change our thinking from can’t to don’t, we take the position of control. We wear clothes, we pick the clothes that can best show our character, we make the choice. So standing from an empowering position, It is up to us to choose the clothing pieces that we like that reflects our character and attitude.
#2a Revealing clothes
Dressing too revealing dressing and appropriately dressing overly sexy is not classy.
Looking or wearing overly sexy is not classy. Classy women do not have to rely on showing their skin to be stylish and classy. On the contrary, they most likely are the non-sexy ones but they have the kind of charm that makes them look even better than their sexy counterparts. In fact, one does not have to dress little to be sexy.
I know that some people may think that dressing sexy is a way to be confident because you are confident in your body to dress that way. But what it actually shows people is that you are insecure with who you are, because you have to show off your body to gain attention. Anyhow, if gaining attention is your purpose, you are going to get better results from dressing classy.
Sexiness is an attitude and personality. And when one dress very little it shows insecurity. Even if you are confident of your body and would like to show it off, people would get the wrong type of impression and it would probably the wrong type of attention. So, if you want to look classy, you need to resist the temptation to dress too revealing.
#2b Showing off
The way we dress affects how other people perceive us. How we dress has a lot of say about our character. It is not wrong to buy designer brands because those brands usually have high-quality garments. But what you may want to avoid is to wear a bunch of designer brands just to show people that you have these designer brands.
I have seen people wearing a Fendi dress with a Burberry bag with Prada shoes…this is just overdoing it and too much. It has gone beyond classy and into the regime of showing off and it does not look good because it tells people that you are trying hard to impress. And as we talked about in #1, looking luxurious and polished really has nothing to do with designer brands and price.
to be continued tomorrow…. see you in Classy Style Guide for Beginners Part 2.
