I wrote a few weeks back about my personal goals for the…uh…school year of 2008-2009. One of those goals was fashion-related—the goal of dressing consciously every day, wearing only the things that make me feel good about how I look.
Over the summer I promised myself that I wouldn’t shop for fall clothing until after the first day of fall, September 22—a promise I broke several times over, mostly thanks to my discovery of an enormous and virtually untouched vintage store within less than a mile of my house. Still, I’m waiting to grab up new (or secondhand) sweaters and jeans until it gets cold enough for me to actually wear them without suffocating (which hasn’t happened yet in New York, save for one day when I ran in my shirtsleeves to H&M to buy a sweater so my teeth would stop chattering). Nothing is worse than having something new to wear and not being able to wear it yet because the weather isn’t cooperating. (Interestingly, this never happens in the springtime, when I’m preparing for warmth!)
Until it gets cold, then, I’m focusing my attention on creating a design inspiration book to use as a personal style guide. Most designers create ongoing data banks of inspiring and useful bits to use as a tool, consulting it as a means to find unexpected answers to problems they’re having in the design process, to keep track of how other designers have approached similar problems, and to serve as a stimulus when the supply of ideas is running low. My good friend , for instance, has a background in architecture and design, and her Flickr account is full of pictures of buildings, text, textiles, and interesting visual compositions that she looks to all the time. Another architect friend of mine works for a firm that has regularly-scheduled magazine-cutting parties, where they cull interesting and inspiring items from magazines of all types. A friend with a background in knitwear and textile design has an enormous stash of drawings and photos, as well as bits of yarn in various textures, materials, colors, and variegations.
What’s in my personal style guide? I have a mix of physical pictures taken from a variety of sources, text copied out by hand, photographs that I took myself, and screengrabs from some of my favorite blogs (both design-oriented and general interest). My medium is multi-fold: I have a large notebook of magazine clippings, a small file of fabric swatches to which I’m constantly adding, a folder on my desktop for digital photos (which will eventually turn into a Flickr tag), and a tag in my RSS reader for anything pretty and inspiring.
Even if you’re not a designer and don’t aspire to be, an inspiration file can help you to find ways to dress more adventurously, keep a running tab of fashion items you might like to buy, and give yourself a new and different style direction. Aspiring to a more finely-attuned aesthetic is an ongoing process, one that you can document yourself in every phase (just look to the number of people uploading photos to Wardrobe Remix, or the number of fashion bloggers who take photos of their outfits every day so they can post them on their blog for feedback).
Here are some tips for putting together your own personal style guide.
Buy yourself a nice big notebook. Everyone I know seems to have a love affair with the Moleskine, but I use Borden and Riley’sTuppence Sketch book. It’s large enough that I can tape in entire pages torn out of larger-sized magazines (like Bazaar or W); the paper is really great quality; and the cover is stiff enough to protect the pages from getting warped or wrinkled. The type of book you choose is important for the sake of longevity; if you want you style guide to last as long as possible, it’s worth choosing one of a decent quality. The Tuppence Sketch has been the best that I’ve found.
Read, read, read. And then read some more. The quality of your style guide is contingent upon the amout of content you can put into it. So it naturally follows that the more fashion- and design-oriented publications you read, the more material you’re likely to have to clip from.
Don’t overdo it on buying contemporary magazines. I love the feel of cracking open a new issue of Bazaar as much as the next fashion fiend, but if I’m not careful, I can stop by a newsstand and come out carrying my weight in glossy pages. And not only is that bad for my wallet. . . it means that I’m spending more on the contents of my style guide than on my wardrobe, and that doesn’t make any sense. If you’re addicted to issues of a certain publication, you should take advantage of the cheaper price of subscribing— you can save up to astonishing amounts off the newsstand price.
Even better. . . use the library. It’s easier on your wallet, and you can grab pictures from contemporary publications for the mere price of a photocopy. Also, you can dip into vintage publications too. I love going and making sketches or copies of ads and fashion spreads from the 60s and 70s.
Fashion books are your friends. You can find great ones in the library—but if you’re looking to buy, look at secondhand shops. When I lived in the midwest, the fashion section of Half Price Books was amazing, and I was able to get some really great books for a pittance (old knitting pattern books with amazing pictures were a quarter, I kid you not). For contemporary fashion books, I especially love the ones published by Taschen on fashion, architecture, and design. For you NYCers, The Strand has them for twenty-five percent off. (Incidentally, they also have a really great series of books filled with pin-up girl pictures. So hot!)
Sketch if you have the skills. This is integral for style items that you see but can’t reasonably shoot pictures of—say, the hobo bag at a boutique where pictures are specifically forbidden, or the odd-colored houndstooth pencil skirt you saw a girl wearing on the train (because do you really want to be that creeptastic person who’s shooting pictures of people she doesn’t know on the train? I don’t think you do). Don’t worry about the quality of your drawings; you don’t have to show them to anyone. The point is to remember an idea that you see, not to convey it completely on paper. Alternately, if you don’t like drawing or are more gifted with words than with images, you can write instead of drawing to describe what you see. I do this a lot: flip through my personal style guide and you’ll see scattered phrases like “bag that says ‘be happy, damn it’”; “rope-handled tote”; “man’s shirt as skirt”; “skinny jeans under thigh-high boots”; and the like. (As a bonus to using the Tuppence Sketch that I mentioned above, the paper quality is really good for making sketches in a variety of different media.)
Add fabric swatches and paint chips. Some people enjoy dressing in a certain color scheme all the time. I’ve never personally done this, but I know some people who have—Nubby does it all the time, as well as these people profiled in an issue of Time Out New York. If you’re looking to restrict your purchases to a certain color family or fabric texture (cashmere, tweed, woolen, twill)or to build a wardrobe with a certain aesthetic theme, paint chips and swatches are a great way to convey this in a style inspiration book.
Don’t just slap together a bunch of pics. . . write down what you like about them. I used to write down information about each item I added, like the designer and where I’d found it. I also specified what I liked about each and what would go well with them. This is helpful when you go back through, especially when you come to a picture of several different outfits or different elements. Going back over items I’d put in my book a year or so back, I often used to think, “OMG! This looks heinous! Why is this in here?” A written description could have really helped me in recalling what I loved about something: “I really hate this tweedy pink fabric of the suit, but the pintucks in the blouse are adorable. Pair this blouse with knee-length knickers and ankle boots and lots of [gold!] jewelry.”
Do it digitally. Come on, you know I can’t be a certified unclutterer and not tell you that you can do it digitally. When I’m reading in my RSS reader, I typically add stars to pictures I like on the fashion blogs I read most. Every couple of weeks, I drag them into a folder on my desktop—and as I said above, I’m eventually going to upload them all to Flickr.
Include pictures of yourself wearing things you love. Gala Darling wrote a great, comprehensive pair of articles about the value of taking daily outfit photos. Anything I wrote on the topic wouldn’t add anything to the discussion. So I won’t. I’ll just say that you need to start doing it. Today. Yeah!
Do any of you guys keep a style inspiration guide? If so, what do you put in it? Link me to images if you have them!
Do you like what you see? Tell someone!
Related posts:
- Inspiration: 9.15.2008
- OMG Shoes: White Leather Bucks, Bass
- How to Do More With the Clothes You Have [Instead of Buying More]
- The Value of Outfit Pics
- Six Items or Less
[...] need there—and more importantly, what you know you won’t. Remember when I wrote about making your own style inspiration guide? Use the same guidelines to make an apartment style guide. Check ApartmentTherapy for inspiration. [...]
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