Style: General Comments

Because any reasonable Style section in any reasonable magazine is going to repeat itself over and over again anyways like a hamster reading out the brand of his spinnywheelthing, mine should not be a real exception to that rule. However, to make my own life and yours as a reader a little bit more interesting and in the long run rewarding, I am going to pre-empt the whole repetition thing by going into some base values of what style is and should be, so I can just allude to the main points later on and safely assume everybody will know what I am talking about. Or wrongly assume everybody knows what I am talking about. Same difference.

Style vs. Fashion

Style is not the same as fashion, although sometimes they do overlap quite a bit. It is entirely possible to be imminently stylish but not at all fashionable, and vice versa. The first, however, is far more likely. It has been said (by me, often) that style is what stays after fashion goes away, and up to a certain level, this is true, providing one takes a very long view of fashion, say a good 1000 years or so. As a rule, style is intricately personal, and uses what is available, where fashion is group-based, and creates availability.

Common sense

Common sense is one of the mayor points in both creating and having (a) style, and both are almost impossible to achieve without it. Obviously, those completely devoid of common sense but still striving for style can hire a stylist, but that would be a sensible thing to do, thus negating the lack of common sense again.
Applying common sense to appearance and wardrobe is actually surprisingly easy to advice, but very hard to do, judging from the amount of utter crap that still lingers despondently unworn on several of the shelves in my own wardrobe.
I will not give a hard and fast line on this topic, as I hope to brush against it often in these bits and most of this column will be heavily based on what I deem common sense anyway.

Size, or “the fact that it fits you does not mean it’s your size”

This particular subject is going to get its own blog, obviously, but bears saying something now. There really is very little more detrimental to looking good than picking a wrong size for your body. This goes both ways; as dressing in things that are too small can be as detracting from your looks as dressing in too over-sized a fabrication. Depressingly enough, a great deal of people have no idea what size they should be wearing, and thus wear things they really should not even have looked at in the first place. As a hint, anything that pushes your body into a shape it does not usually have is probably too small for you, and anything that does not show the shape your body usually has stands a good change of being too big. Neither is flattering in theory, and most certainly neither is stylish. One is almost always best of with things that skim one’s contours but leave some room to move comfortably.

Comfort

As style is dependent not only on you and your body, but also on your environment and personal situation, giving advice concerning comfort is difficult. Slack pants and a big t-shirt certainly are comfortable, but not in a large social gathering, and they certainly won’t make you feel more comfortable in the wrong company. That said; well-cut boot-cuts, good shoes and a fitted shirt can be less easy to move around in, but make you feel a lot more on top of the situation mostly.
All things being equal, however, you will look good in what feels good, and what feels good will show itself when you think for a little bit about the situations you are likely to encounter.

Vibe

A conversation with Boyfriend a little while ago about the way people dress actually prompted this series of solipsistic extravaganza, and most importantly, the fact that a lot of people miss the plank completely when it concerns what they want to show with the way they dress and what it actually shows.
A good example here is the classic comb-over, which generations of men think as shown a full head of hear where it more correctly points out the fact that there actually is no full head of hair. A woman dressing a little too brightly and too small thinking it shows she has a youthful outlook on life stands a better chance of showing not just her real age but going several years over when viewed from outside her own head.
To a certain extent, it is unavoidable that even the most careful planning and attention to detail might sometimes miss its objective, but the likelihood of this situation decreases massively when one puts some effort into staying within the lines of ones ability.


All in all, I have started this Style-section of my blog to put into words my own thoughts on the subject, but also because I have been asked in the past to get some ideas on paper about this. It is in no way meant as a style guide or some such, although I personally think it could become one over time. For now, it is just a showcase for me of mistakes I have seen made and can illustrate, and the wonderful things one sees and can share. And it is all about sharing, off course.