Dress for you, not trend
It’s hard finding your own style, and it can be even tougher to hold on to your individuality when the world finds your style too, writes
Lisa Armstrong.
Hey, that’s MY look. When your favourite looks become ubiquitous, is it time to move on? You spend years honing your style, appraising your good and not-quite-so-good features, working out exactly what feels and looks right on you. And suddenly (at least it always feels sudden when it happens) you notice all those tricks and tips you’ve assiduously absorbed into your personal armoury have become a global trend, worn by everyone from a future queen to a Kardashian.
Just a quarter into 2018, checks, animal prints, trench coats, pastels, kitten heels, slingbacks, white footwear, and floaty dresses are everywhere – across social media, the plate glass windows of the high street and the covers of magazines.
For women who like their clothes to look modern and relevant rather than slavishly ontrend, that’s an issue, especially those who’ve come to rely on those particular assets as part of their stable of ‘‘me’’ pieces.
Admittedly this is in the ‘‘First World’’ category of problems. But since we’re in the First World, on a style page, let’s explore it fully. After all, this is a process that cuts through everything we do, from finding a paint colour that makes us feel happy, to a recipe we’ve refined and perfected over decades.
‘‘It’s annoying, I won’t lie,’’ says Carolyn Asome who, as a freelance style and interiors journalist/consultant, has always been an early adopter of finds that eventually become mainstream. She painted her house varying shades of ochre and teal way before they became fixtures on Dulux colour charts, wore maxis and ruffles aeons ahead of Zara pumping them out, and was probably the second woman in London to wear The Vampire’s Wife, after the designer.
This is the label from former model Susie Bick, which Rachel Weiss wore to the Baftas recently. Asome beat her by at least a year.
While Asome – and others like her – have ideas to spare and can afford to jettison one set of core beliefs for the next with the changing seasons, at some point the relentless acquire-and-discard cycle starts to feel uncomfortable.
‘‘When I was younger I would run in the opposite direction once something hit critical mass,’’ says Asome. ‘‘But that seems very wasteful now. It’s not just the money you’ve invested, but the time. The more you wear something, the more it becomes a part of your personal picture’’.
Asome is comparatively Spartan in her conspicuous consumption these days. ‘‘I have very few clothes at any one time and I wear them to death. That means, hopefully, that when people see me they don’t think, ‘Oh, Carolyn’s doing a trend’, but, ‘I like those shoes’, or ‘that dress really suits her’.’’
As a stylist who helps professional women find classic but edgy ways of dressing that work for them, Annabel Hodin is one of the most clever shoppers you could hope to come across – and all too aware of the challenges of a trend that’s on its way to exhaustion.
‘‘It’s tempting to ignore popular items at a certain point. But if it’s something that really suits you, why not embrace it in the best version you can find?’’
Hodin’s exhaustive knowledge of what’s on the rails (from House of Fraser to House of Givenchy) meant that for the rest of the evening after I called her about this feature, she emailed bullet points on precisely where the best versions of the current trends are. Take checks (a personal favourite, or at least they were until I typed the word into polyvore.com, the online shopping aggregator, and thousands of results came up).
Hodin suggests keeping checks really classic ‘‘but in interesting versions. I’d avoid neon checks or gimmicky colours. It comes down to cut and fabric. I wouldn’t do checks in a stretch material.
‘‘They need to be very sharp – a cigarette pant or a tailored jacket for instance – or very floppy. Clashing them with geometric patterned blouses would look strong and distinctive. Or you could mix and match different scale checks – Prince of Wales with dogtooth, for instance.’’
Bottom line, checks are too useful to discard just because everyone else is wearing them.
They break up an outfit and allow you to draw attention to, or away from, pivotal points, as well as providing more latitude for coordinationsince any check has at least two, sometimes three colours – it’s far easier to match a black houndstooth jacket with black trousers than a plain jacket, which might not be the exact shade.
Another advantage of houndstooth, dogtooth and Prince of Wales is that they are the Holy Triptych of checks: strict and impeccably classic (think Christian Dior), which allows you to be playful with the rest of your outfit.
Then again, polka dots do a similar job – although they’re about to explode on to the horizon, too. Avril Mair, fashion director of Harper’s Bazaar (the April subscribers’ issue featured Lily James in checked Burberry) takes a similarly phlegmatic line on checks and leopard print – she intends to keep wearing them.
She also recently acquired a polka dot dress. ‘‘I don’t dress in an especially trend driven way so I never feel victim-y.’’
It just so happens that monochrome has also come back into focus on the catwalks recently.
So why have we become so dismissive of trends, while being simultaneously susceptible to them? Perhaps there’s a degree of snobbery involved – rapid ubiquity is both the joy and frustration of a democratic fashion system.
The laws of communication mean that whatever you love will, at some point, feature in the windows of Zara and Topshop. Being precious about these things is a losing game.
Carry on regardless – you should know the great from the mediocre by now and what fits with your style.
Instead of diving into the sea of fluffy coats next season, how about one fabulous animal print skirt in brocade or a thick intarsia instead?
If you’re only tempted because you keep on seeing it, ignore it – and the fashion experts who tell you there’s a way for ‘‘everyone’’ to wear yellow/leopard print/ head-to-toe white. There isn’t, so why force yourself into a trend that’s ‘‘tricky’’ for you?
Focus instead on the classic trends that do work and invest accordingly. You really shouldn’t keep a good check (stripe, trench etc) down. – The Telegraph
"It's tempting to ignore popular items at a certain point. But if it's something that really suits you, why not embrace it?"
Stylist Annabel Hodin