With a clear personal style, you get more out of your wardrobe and spend less time, space and money.

This is the start of a series on finding your personal style, so let’s adress the most basic question at the very start: Why should you even care about your personal style?

Intentionality

If you’ve ever stood in front of a pile of clothes feeling like you had nothing to wear, you understand the problem of having an incoherent, random wardrobe. And what’s our response? We go shopping, spending even more money on new clothes! To add insult to injury, many of the items we buy are just adding to the pile of ‘nothing to wear’. In the end, we waste time, money and space on something that doesn’t make our lives better. But why is it so difficult to buy clothes that we actually want to wear?

I believe intentionality plays a huge role here. By selecting clothes more carefully and with a clear goal in mind, we have a much higher chance of picking something that actually works for us. And here personal style comes into play. A clear personal style can guide your selection towards items you truly want to wear, as well as prevent you from buying something you don’t actually need. You no longer run around headlessly, buying new clothes because they are on sale or trying to keep up with the new styles fast fashion throws at you. Making more intentional choices about what you consume can reduce both your environmental footprint and the chaos, clutter and confusion in your live. By sticking to a personal style, you become the curator of your own wardrobe, building a deeply personal, carefully selected and timeless collection. As a result, you have clothes that make you feel your best and fit your lifestyle.

Functionality

The goal of a every wardrobe should be to make it easy for you to select something to wear, ideally without taking up all of your living space. But how does reality stack up? One main ‘wardrobe functionality indicator’ is the percentage of unused clothes in your wardrobe (which was mentioned above already), another indicator is the time it takes you to get dressed. So how much time do you spend each morning trying to figure out what to wear that day? The average is 15 minutes. What an insane amount of time! You could be sleeping longer, or making a second cup of tea.

There are different concepts aiming to increase wardrobe functionality, the most trending in the last years were ‘uniforms’ and ‘capsule wardrobes’. Having a uniform means having are a wardrobe of similar outfits, which reduce the decision time in the morning on what to wear to zero, because you wear the same thing every day anyway. Capsule wardrobes artificially limit the number of items available to you, with different numbers ranging commonly from 10 to 35, which means you have more carefully curate items that have to combine well. While this may seem extreme, both ideas can definitely improve the functionality of your wardrobe by increasing the percentage of used clothes and reducing selection time. In their core, both concepts are fuelled by personal style. Even if you don’t wear the same outfit every day or only have 20 items in your closet, having a consistent style increases the functionality of your wardrobe, because if you follow a clear personal style everything fits, suits you and it is easier to mix and match. The result: Clothes that work for you, not against you!

Signaling

Last month my boss asked me: “I’m in a meeting with our most important client later, can you join and present your project?” Now with a meeting like this we’re talking giant meeting room, full C-suite and no time to prepare. When I entered the room, everyone sitting there wore a tailored, dark blue suit, white button-down shirt, and black Oxford shoes. There was polite silence silence as I walked in. Never in my life have I been happier about my decision to dress up and go with a suit in the morning. It wasn’t the same dark blue and it wasn’t hand-tailored, but it was enough to make me not feel out of place. This is how the clothes we wear are signaling to both ourself and others how we see ourself and where we (want to) belong in society.

If I had gone to work in blue jeans and a nerd shirt - which I do sometimes - my boss would have been a lot less inclined to ask me to join their meeting spontaneously. But wearing dress shirt and pantsuit signaled her that I could present myself in a high stakes business setting. It also signaled to myself that I was prepared, making me feel less nervous about the impromptu presentation. And lastly, it signaled to everyone at the meeting that I had something to say. That’s the signaling power of personal style - showing yourself and the world who you are.