RECONTEXTUALIZING

How To Look At Your Clothes Differently

I am a firm believer in the idea that style can be taught. That is, anyone can be taught to consistently put together and wear outfits that suit their personal preferences and point of view. I do this with clients through something I call Outfit Formulas, or tried-and-true combinations based on the types of garments you already prefer e.g. boxy crop tops + wide-legged pants or slinky slip dresses + cropped sweaters. With your Formulas on hand, getting dressed becomes a matter of just plugging in the pieces. The question, though, is how do you get the formulas?

That’s the part that many struggle with: being able to adapt items to your preferences and conceptualize new ways to wear them. That’s what I want to talk about, today.

Most of us know someone with “The Vision,” right? That person who can just look at a garment and tell you how to style it; who can take the plainest, most boring or even ugliest piece of clothing and make it fabulous; who always, to quote Tim Gunn, makes it work.

When I twote this tweet (X’d this xeet?), I specifically had online shopping in mind. When pieces are styled, occasionally altered, and sometimes even edited to make them look their best on a model, and brands craft entire aspirational worlds just to get you to buy as much as possible, it’s important to be able to separate the actual garments from the marketing. However, I’d say this concept/skill is even more imperative when it comes to items being presented at their worst, or, at least their least best: that is, on a rack in a store, or, haphazardly hanging from a door or positioned on a bed in secondhand listings online, or even hanging in your own closet.

It’s being able to look at something that just is, and imagine what it could be. It’s being able to shop by piece and not by outfit, knowing that you can fully incorporate anything you add into what you already have easily.

As trends shift to microtrends and microtrends shift to entire lifestyle trends, though, that skill gets harder and harder to build without a concerted effort. And that’s by design. Fashion would love for you to feel as though that top you bought to go with those pants couldn’t possibly also go with a different pair of pants, or that you need a specific kind of top that comes pre-tied to achieve the look of a tied-up shirt rather instead of just tying up a shirt you already have.

They created these shirts specifically to piss me off.

Now, only wearing something one or two ways is not inherently wasteful, so long as you’re wearing it. But, not being able to get creative with what you have can lead to boredom, which can then lead to impulsive purchases, dissatisfaction with one’s style, or, worst of all: resignation to the idea of not having style at all. But you do have style, everyone does. You just can’t figure it out by buying stuff—you have to, you know, style it.

“It’s Just A ____________!”

I sometimes wonder if people who balk at certain fashion items by reducing them down to their parts—sometimes even going so far as to call them basic or uninspired based on their simplicity—realize just how close they are to running headfirst into a very important fact about fashion and, in fact, art in general: that is, that everything builds upon—and, in many ways, responds to—something else. I’ve written before how this reductionist way of thinking is actually a blatant misunderstanding of how designing garments works:

Social media pages like Diet Prada have been rewarded for being very nitpicky about similarities between different brands/designers, but, as a picky person myself, the most minor of changes can and often do result in an entirely new product with an entirely different appeal. Things as simple as switching out the buttons or rounding off the corners of a collar or shortening the length or changing the fabric content is enough to change the whole look and feel of a garment, but we’ve been trained to always compare the surface value of art (based on our own preferences), rather than really take in what makes it worth existing separately from that other thing you recognize (and like) more readily.

I say all that to say, when it comes to analyzing the merits and beauty of art, especially clothing, removing all the details and breaking it down to its most basic elements—especially for the sake of comparison—is not really the best way to go about understanding a garment. But, when it comes to styling it, that’s exactly what you want to do.

This is something that comes in particularly handy when trying to style statement pieces. It’s easy to get intimidated by that asymmetrical top, or those printed pants, but, they are, at the end of the day, just a tweaked version of a top or pants you’ve seen before, that you already have and wear successfully. All it takes is understanding your go-to Outfit Formulas, and plugging in something different: you wear all your other maxi skirts with T-shirts, why can’t you wear the slightly dressier one with a T-shirt? You’ve worn heels with jeans, why can’t you swap in the platforms you just bought? Sometimes, in our minds, we give garments too many limitations: we decide they’re too formal, too sexy, too weird, too colorful, too something to wear regularly and therefore must be saved for a special occasion. But, at its most base level, even the most fabulous, “unstyleable,” over the top piece is just a piece of fabric, right?

What’s Going On?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Pinterest moodboards get a bad rap because of the way people use them, not because they’re useless. Moodboards exist for inspiration, not as a guide for imitation. So, in order to use them effectively, you have to first make sure you’re focusing on the right thing: the clothes. I’ve written about how to use a moodboard as a jumping off point for building a wardrobe: that process is all about taking in the bigger picture, comparing, noting similarities, and understanding the overarching themes and elements. But, moodboards can also come in handy for helping you wear the wardrobe you’ve already built.

I call this a Piece-First approach because it starts, naturally, with a piece you already have. Let’s try something a lot of us have in our wardrobes: the oversized button up shirt.

In just a few minutes, I found hundreds of images, but I’ve narrowed it down to ten, here. However, these ten images can actually be turned into dozens of outfits, you just have to break it down. What’s on top? What’s on bottom? How is each piece being worn—is it tucked in, tied up, etc.? What is it paired with? Could it be paired with something else the same way? Let’s look at the outfits above.

The piece we want to style is the oversized button up, and regardless of the color, the fabrics, the models, and even the way they’re styled, that oversized shirt and the way it’s styled is the focus: we’ve got it worn as a dress, knotted, open over a skirt, open over a dress, open and tucked in (with visible bra, a look I personally love), tied up, half-tucked, fully tucked, and layered. That’s what matters. What doesn’t matter is what’s on the bottom: you can knot your shirt over a dress just as easily as the model in the example knotted hers over wide-legged pants, and you can layer yours over a turtleneck and tuck it into a skirt just as easily as you could into jeans. The goal here is to take apart the outfit and focus just on a piece of it in order to build our own Outfit Formulas, then plugging in what we have from there.

Now, maybe you can’t imagine yourself in these outfits but, that’s the beauty of starting with something you already own: you don’t have to imagine, you can just get up and try it on right now.

Getting Good

Like any skill, recontextualizing takes practice. And the best time to get that practice is not when your Uber is arriving in four minutes and you’re already thirty minutes late to the function: it’s during those times when you have nothing to do but scroll on your phone. Take all your inspiration—not just the images from your moodboard, but also, evaluate the outfits you love the most, and play around in your closet.

Try new color combinations, try putting on something backwards or upside down, belt something, layer some stuff. Again, it doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine what might work, you can literally throw some things together and determine whether that combo works for you.

To come up with your own formulas, the key is repetition. Most of us own a lot of similar items: that’s not a bad thing. That means you have multiple versions of something that you can mix and match to make outfits. All your miniskirts can probably be styled with the same kinds of tops; all your pants can probably be swapped in instead of jeans. The point of this is not to limit you, it’s to get you out of the rut of “I can only wear a with b and x with y.” And the point of doing this, not when you immediately have somewhere to be, but when you have the time to just play around is to allow you to make mistakes that you don’t then have to wear the whole day.

Getting more comfortable with the clothes you own is the secret to understanding what your style truly is and making better purchases moving forward, and not having to wait until some brand or influencer shows you a perfectly styled look ready to add to cart.