I often leave my house in horrifying yoga pants. I admit it. I have a dog to walk and a crazy schedule, and sometimes fashion strategy means I toss on whatever happens to be lying on the floor next to my bed.
But, I can be ruthless. Truly. And ruthlessness in fashion is necessary. There is no other way to leave your house looking like the 100 percent diva you are.
If you ever hear yourself say any of the below lines about something you see in your mirror, you need to stop, drop, and roll because your pants are on fire.
“That looks okay.”
“I can get away with this.”
“It’s just a little tight.”
“I need to lose five pounds.”
Tape Measures Never Lie
When it comes to fit, there is no halfway. Like love. Like death. Like hot sauce. Either you are in or you are out. Nobody wants their beloved to be a little bit in love with them. There is no such thing as a little dead. And, if you are eating at the right restaurants, you will never, ever encounter the scourge of mild hot sauce—honestly, those words don’t belong anywhere near each other.
If more people realized that someone either loves them or they don’t, there would be happier people. If more people accepted that something either fits or it doesn’t, there would be more stylish people.
You can wear a paper bag, and if it’s cut to fit your body perfectly, you will own the room in a way that the woman who keeps pulling down her skirt that keeps hiking up never will. Whatever you wear must be right before you leave the house or you don’t leave the house—until you change into something that fits.
And, I say this as someone who gets it. What fit great last week might now work better on your Chihuahua. You have to deal in reality; you have to deal in facts, and fit is physics. Pure and simple. All the spandex in the world cannot hide a size or a cut that does not belong on you.
Know Your Worth
Beyond the aesthetic mess that poor fit can cause, there is a far bigger and better reason to pay attention to it: your value. How you see yourself. Are you someone who is okay with wearing something that “is just a little tight?” If so, are you also someone who is okay with someone being a “little bit in love with you” or giving you a “little bit of a promotion”?
We cannot always know someone’s heart or our boss’s mind, but we can know if something fits. And we also know we have paid good money for whatever this sad piece of cloth is that is making us feel less than we are.
To be fashionably true to you, you need to flip the script. What is going through your head in front of that mirror should be: “I do love this dress, but I cannot wear this until it fits.” Life may sell us short in ways we cannot anticipate or control, but we choose what we put on our bodies (most of the time; there are exceptions). When we choose, we must never settle for anything less than what makes us look our best.
Train Your Eye, Ask the Right Questions
But, Julia, you say, how do I know? I will show you. Like most things that we think can be circumvented or done halfway, there is a process for deciding what to wear. Do the work, and you will benefit from it. My process may ultimately be different from your process, but I can help you start to think about what you wear with more deliberation and success to avoid haphazard or soul-sucking outcomes.
There are many things about our appearance that we cannot change—things that we love and things that we don’t, things that are good, and things that are bad. But we can 100 percent change how our clothes look on us and, by extension, how those clothes ultimately make us feel about us. That is power. Are you ready for it?
Clothing and the way it is worn communicates. Pure and simple. If you think otherwise, I am here to do my best to change your mind. What about the hoodie? Acrylic heels? The power tie? There are so many ways we signal to others and to ourselves what we want, who we are, how we feel, and why we are here.
If you doubt this, then think back to those times in your life when you have judged people based on their appearance. Unless they were naked—which is not an impossible, albeit somewhat less likely possibility—part of what formed your opinion at first glance can be directly attributed to what they wore. How they wore it. How they appeared to feel and see themselves while they were wearing it.
Be Who You Are
What do you want to say? It doesn’t have to be the same message every day. Maybe it’s a variation on a theme, or a complete shift related to mood.
This is where ruthlessness comes in. And honesty. I won’t be writing about how to be anything other than what you want to be. That is what fashion should truly be about—another way to express who we are—and a way that we probably have more control over than anything else. What do you want to communicate about who you are? What do you love? Wear that.
I’m not writing because I know any better than you. I am writing to encourage you to know what works for you. It can take time and effort to figure out, and you may be someone who changes looks constantly, but I am not here to tell you to be anything other than what you want to be.
I hope that my journey to discovering what works for me and why I think it does will help you make choices that work for you. At the end of the day, we can have a lot of say about what we wear. If we choose to.