How To Find Your Personal Style [2024]

How to find your style? Billion dollar question, isn’t?

Let’s have an honest moment here.

To all those reading this now, you are probably here for one of three reasons:

• You would like to gain a sense of your personal fashion style.
• You do have a sense of style but want to refine it. (Like me)
• I sent you the link and you were left with no other choice but to read it.

No matter what the reason is, I’m glad to have you all here.

Finding your personal fashion style is something we all struggle with at some point in our lives. Whether your fashion style feels like it’s changing a little bit or you just can’t find a true thing you can go to that suits you or your personality and your everyday lifestyle.

Gaining a sense of your personal fashion style is a journey. If you’re lucky it can start great and continue so but if you’re like me it starts from being a fashion disaster to becoming a fashionable disaster.

Therefore, in this article, we shall look at 8 effective steps to find your fashion style so that you can directly jump to being a fashionable disaster and above all turn fashion into something that makes you happy instead of being a dreadful routine.

Let’s begin this journey with,

STEP 1: Assess Your Wardrobe

It can be rather intimidating to just dive right into it and try to find your personal fashion style from scratch. So, it is easier to start by looking at the clothes you already wear and that you already love as that’s going to give you good a hint of what you feel confident in.

We all have those few pieces that we love, that kind of point us in the direction of our style but we just haven’t brought the rest of our wardrobe around those few pieces that we love. And also maintain your wardrobe in good quality

This brings us to,

STEP 2: Track Your Clothing

In the initial 2 weeks try tracking all the clothes that you actually wear. There a couple of ways to do this.

Firstly, you could move the frequently worn pieces onto a clothing rack or assemble them towards one side of your cupboard. In addition, you could hanger them, that way you can differentiate them from the rest of your wardrobe.

Once you have a sample of the clothes that you actually wear the second thing to do is to ASSESS WHAT YOU LIKE, what I mean by this is to start looking for what those clothes have in common.

Are they a certain fit? What color scheme do they gravitate towards? Is it light pastel shades or darker shades? Is there a certain brand whose quality and fit you find yourself wearing a lot? Lastly, an essential aspect most of us overlook is the comfort level of that clothing?

Be it in a bodycon dress or a loose sweatshirt, you must take into consideration how comfortable you feel in that clothing.

Similarly, ASSESS WHAT YOU DON’T LIKE.  You can do this by identifying what it is you don’t like about certain pieces in your wardrobe. 

Does it not fit right on you? Is the colour not something you’re drawn to? Do you not feel comfortable in it?

Write down all your responses in a diary or you could make a note of it on your phone. This will help you shop better.

For instance, the next time you go shopping and you come across a certain print that you like but then you identify that that fit hasn’t worked for you in the past. It is best not to waste your money on that piece.

Once you have assessed your likes and dislikes. The next step to find your fashion style is

STEP 3: Finding Inspiration

This is the fun part where you can get your phone or laptop out and scroll through the following platforms to gain inspiration:

Pinterest:

Search for ‘colour pallets’ and all you have to do next is scroll until you find pallets that appeal to you.  Make a separate folder on your Pinterest and save all those colour pallets in that folder.

Instagram:

Use your saved color pallets as a reference to search for clothing styles in similar colors. Furthermore, save the styles that appeal to you into a separate folder.

Note: If you don’t have an Instagram account, you may search for clothing styles on Pinterest itself.

For those of you who swear and live by Google, here is what you can do 

• Scan through celebrity styles: Thanks to Papparazi there are a lot of pictures of celebrity styles available online. In addition, celebrities have personal stylists. So, you know you can look at their styles and select the ones that are close to your body type.

Celebrities whose styles you must scan: Harry styles and Kendal Jenner

However, it isn’t necessary for you to like everything that they wear. It could be an outfit from a particular event or maybe just a shirt.

Here are more platforms for you to find your inspirations from.

STEP 4: Create a Mood Board

Bring all your chosen styles into one single place. You can do this in 2 ways:

• Use PowerPoint: Copy paste all your clothing style images onto an empty slide and arrange them in a manner that makes sense to you.

• Cutouts: Cut out the styles you like from magazines or printouts and pin them onto a board or chart paper.

Doing this helps you zoom out beyond just one or two outfits or trends and see what style you are genuinely drawn to.

From here it could go one of two ways:

1. The styles have aligned and you have been able to successfully find your fashion style or,
2. It’s a mix of things.

If you chose 2, the next thing I suggest you do is

(Learn how to create a fashion mood board on power point.)

STEP 5: Redefine Your Board

In other words, go through each individual photo that you have saved or cut out and really ask yourself is this something that reflects my personality? Is this something I could see myself wearing? Does this fit into my lifestyle?

From there you can zoom out again and see if it’s a little more cohesive. 

In my honest opinion. You do not have to box yourself into one style. The mood board helps point towards a general direction to see if you have a mature style or more of a trendy style. In addition, are you drawn to bold colours or something more minimalistic?

Experiment by combining styles and that’s how you can come up with something just for you, a unique personal style. This brings us to our next step.

STEP 6: Shop With a List

This is the part we’ve all been waiting for!

Even though you are excited about your new style and probably want to buy a whole new wardrobe. I would recommend not to do that. Impulsively buying yourself a whole new wardrobe is how you end up with clothes you don’t want to wear and a hole through your bank account.

 I’d recommend choosing Top 5 pieces on your mood board that appear the most and that you think are the most vital to your style. List out these 5 pieces before you go shopping. This helps you to not get distracted by flashy sale items and stick to the mission of buying just those 5 pieces.

After that, take these 5 pieces home and try them with your current wardrobe. Pair them with different items and see what looks good on you. In addition, keep working on your mood board so that 3 months later you can shop for the next 5 pieces and build your wardrobe in this manner.

This brings me to my next step.

STEP 7: Practice and Practice.

Do not think of being stylish as something that you are born with, like any other skill it requires practice. Don’t expect yourself to have a celebrity level of style without giving yourself any time to practice.

Dedicate 10-20 minutes every day to try on different pairs of clothing. It doesn’t matter if it comes out wrong because through trial and error is how you develop the essence of your personal style.

Wake up, try on something you pictured in your head. If it doesn’t look right, switch some of the pieces until the outfit looks put together.

In relation to this, it is important that you do the next step.

STEP 8: Give Yourself Time to Shop

 I do not mean that you spend more time buying more clothes. It means that you’re giving yourself extra time to find the perfect pieces.

This where all that time you’ve spent shopping with your mother, sister or friend and cursed them for taking so long, comes to use.

Conclusion

There is no definite end to this. Finding your personal style is a process over months and years as you continue to exercise your critical eye for outfits to really see what suits you and what doesn’t. You will develop your unique style and above all learn to have fun with fashion.

Let me know in the comments below if you found this helpful.

Hear from a professional stylist on how to find your personal fashion style.