Own Your Look: A Practical Guide to Defining Your Personal Style

Who are you, like, right now?

The first thing that you are going to want to consider while negotiating the definition of your style is the reality of your life and its functions. Are you a stay-at-home mom? A teacher? A corporate employee? A yoga teacher? While many of us might have an idea of what we want our style to be, the reality is it may not always align with what actually makes sense for what we need to be dressing ourselves for on a daily basis. For example, while a stay-at-home mom may need some casual and comfortable outfits for transitioning from one errand to the next, someone who works in a corporate office may have a more formal dress code, sporting a suit set and stilettos.

Where do you spend your time, and when?

Now that we have defined who you are in your day-to-day, let’s take it a step further. What other hats do you wear in your life that might require different outfits or clothing pieces. For example, if you are a corporate employee who works a nine to five in your day-to-day (which means you spend most of the week at work as many of us do) what does your life look like outside of work?

Do you usually meet friends for drinks afterwards? Do you go to the gym before or after, and how many times a week do you go? Do you attend church on Sundays or any other day during the week? What kinds of hobbies do you take part in during your free time, and do you partake in those hobbies at home or in a different environment like outdoors or at particular facility?

The reality is, when we are not working there are going to be other areas of our life that dictate what is truly necessary to have in our closets, and while they may have different items that comprise of these outfits such as formality, comfort, etc., the goal is that we still want every outfit you create to be something you love, feel comfortable in, and dare I say, reflects your personal style.

With that being said, I want you to make a list of all the areas of your life that you may need clothing for– and try to be very specific, including what you might where at home or even to sleep.

Some categories you might want to consider are:

• Work/School
• Exercise
• Home/Leisure
• Casual outings (running errands, getting coffee, etc.)
• Dates/Elevated Outings (nice restaurants, clubbing, birthday parties of close friends, etc.)
• Church
• Formal gatherings (galas/benefit fundraiser events, etc.)
• Other hobbies or areas that are relevant to you

Once you’ve done that, give a general idea of how much time you spend in each area that you have identified. It doesn’t have to be exact.

What are your uniforms?

With this list of your life categories and how often you spend in those areas, let’s start auditing what you already wear, or as I like to call them, your life uniforms. What are your go-to outfits for each of these categories that you always seem to reach for time and time again?

Let’s start with where you spend most of your time. For example, say I am a corporate employee who works in an office five days a week with a business casual dress code, so my go-to look is a matching pant suit with a plain t-shirt underneath and white sneakers. Then maybe I go to the gym after work and my uniform for that is sweatpants, a sports bra and a big-old t-shirt with the same sneakers I wore to work.

Whether or not it is a combination you like or reflects the style you want is not important at this stage. I just want you to identify what you already gravitate towards on a regular basis.

Once you have identified your uniforms, think about why you tend to gravitate towards this particular outfit combination. Perhaps you wear sweatpants and a big t-shirt to the gym because you feel the most comfortable or if that isn’t the case, maybe you just haven’t had the time to invest in gym clothes that feel more like you.

Next to your uniforms for each category, identify why you tend to make these choices– whether the reasons are good or bad. Is there something about the pieces you feel actually reflect what you want to wear, or are you reaching for them out of convenience?

What are your favorites?

Once you have all your uniforms listed or laid out in front of you, make a separate section of your favorite pieces in your wardrobe. These should be the pieces that make you feel the most confident or comfortable version of yourself. The items you gravitate towards or that make you feel pure joy when you see them or wear them, even if you don’t actually incorporate them into your outfits as often as you might wish.

Think about what it is about these pieces that make you feel this way about them. Is it the color, fabric, print, texture, fit, or silhouette of the item? Is it sentimental to you because it was gifted by someone you love?

When you are done creating these two categories: Life uniforms and Personal favorites, I want you to ask yourself, “Are there consistencies between the two?” If some of these items are already part of your uniforms, that’s great! Leave them there.

If not, that’s okay too; however, I want you to ask yourself, “Why not?” and “If you don’t like these items, why do you still wear them as part of your uniform?” Are there ways we can swap some of the uniform pieces that we aren’t as fond of with a version that aligns more with our favorites? Using the data we collected previously about our uniform and what works/doesn’t work, as well as the data we just collected regarding our favorite items, ponder whether or not you are able to make these swaps.

For example, when I first started my corporate job, I thought I had to dress like all the other corporate girls I was seeing on my social media feed. I bought the “must have” pieces for the office, but I had no idea how to actually style them, nor did they make me feel confident since it was so different than my own personal style. It felt like wearing someone else’s skin. By doing this exercise with my own wardrobe, I was able to identify that while I did like the fit of the pieces I had bought, the beige and pink colors I had purchased while trying to emulate the other corporate girls styles were just not consistent with my own favorite pieces, which were mostly black with pops of red.

This information helped me realize that in a corporate setting, wearing all black made me feel the most comfortable, put together, and confident in the office so I was able to make those swaps to my uniform by exchanging the items for ones that combined my preferred qualities from both categories: the fit of the original pieces with the color scheme of my favorites.

What is your personal style name?

From these steps, you should have been able to identify your current reality categories and needs, your life uniforms, your personal favorite pieces, as well as a long list of information detailing your likes and dislikes about each of the pieces in these categories and what they mean to you.

Now all that’s truly left is to give your personal style a name– something unique that isn’t broadly used and that encompasses how you would describe your individual being at its highest stylistic point. Your ultimate aesthetic.

If you need help coming up with ideas, ask ChatGPT to generate some ideas for you using this template and the details from the data you have collected:

“Give me ideas for a name for my personal style. The main elements are [identify particular favorites that are also in your uniforms, i.e. structured leather jackets and midi skirts or matching sets with a hoodie]. My main color palette is [insert colors you gravitate towards the most, i.e. neutrals, rainbow colors, pink] and it incorporates [insert other defining features or other words that are consistent with how you feel, i.e. fabrics you prefer, patterns, “bold”, “feminine”, etc.]”

What did you come up with? Let me know in the comments!

Keep Sparkling,

Jezrah