Summary: Most people look for style inspiration inside the domain of clothing, and that’s exactly why they end up looking like everyone else. This article is about a different approach, one that interior designers use, that I use with every woman I work with, and that you can start using this week.
So I want to tell you about a dress.
Last summer I found a white Italian linen dress at a thrift store. It was beautiful. It also presented a problem: it was sheer enough that I couldn’t just wear it on its own.
I’d been sitting with this image for a while. A white plaster arch, swimming pool water underneath, sea in the background. The feeling is relaxed. Summery. A little luminous.
The image is what solved the dress problem.
I went looking for an underlayer, and I found a long tank dress in exactly the right color: a light, clear pool blue. Not navy. Not sky blue. Pool blue. The color came directly from the image.
When I put the two pieces together, the outfit felt like the picture. That’s the whole principle.
What does style inspiration actually look like?
Most of us were taught to find style inspiration by looking at other outfits. Pinterest boards full of women wearing things we want to wear. Instagram accounts dedicated to a particular aesthetic. Lookbooks. Shopping sites.
The problem isn’t that those sources are useless. The problem is they put you inside someone else’s aesthetic from the start.
You’re not asking “what do I love?” You’re asking “could I pull that off?” Those are completely different questions, and only one of them leads to a signature style.
When your style inspiration comes from outside the domain of clothing, you bypass all of that. There’s no comparison happening. There’s no “but she has different proportions” or “that only works because of her coloring.” There’s just a feeling. And the feeling is either yours or it isn’t.
Why do interior designers get this right?
The firm Alice Lane designs interiors. One of their designers recently revealed a home office she’d just completed. The inspiration for the whole room was a photograph of a baby blue antique Italian sports car.
Not a mood board of other offices. Not a Pinterest board of desk setups. A car.
The result was a space that felt completely original because the starting point was completely personal. There was no reference point for comparison. Just a feeling she was trying to recreate.
This is what the best designers do across every domain. They go somewhere unexpected for their style inspiration because unexpected sources give you uncontaminated signal. You find out what you actually respond to, not what you’ve been conditioned to want.
Your wardrobe works exactly the same way.
If you want to understand your own aesthetic more deeply, I’d love to have you watch my free video masterclass, The Myers-Briggs Key to Signature Style. It connects your personality type to your natural aesthetic direction, which makes the whole translation process significantly easier.
How do you translate the image into an outfit?
This is where it gets practical. The image gives you a feeling. Your job is to identify what elements are creating that feeling and then find their equivalent in clothing.
With my linen dress, the image gave me three things:
- A color story: white and pool blue, with the quality of light you get near water
- A texture story: the smoothness of plaster and still water, with the linen adding softness
- A feeling: relaxed, luminous, unhurried
Once I could name those three things, finding the underlayer was easy. I wasn’t shopping randomly. I was shopping for a specific feeling with specific parameters.
Here’s what that process looks like when you do it yourself:
- Find an image from anywhere that stops you. Nature, architecture, art, a room, a car, a piece of fabric. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with clothing.
- Ask: what is making me feel this way? Name the colors, the textures, the quality of light, the mood.
- Ask: what would it feel like to wear this? Not what it would look like. What it would feel like.
- Then go looking for those elements in your wardrobe or in a store.
You don’t need an expert to collect images and identify what moves you. That part is entirely yours. What gets more nuanced is the translation, learning to read what the image is telling you about line, scale, color harmony, and how those principles apply to your specific body and coloring. That’s the work I do in Signature Style Foundations.
If you’re at the point where you have images you love but you’re not sure what they’re telling you, that’s exactly what Signature Style Foundations is designed to solve. If now feels like the right time, you can find all the details here.
Style Inspiration Exercise
Pull one image that has stopped you recently. It doesn’t have to be a style image. It can be anything: a landscape, a room, a color combination you saw somewhere.
In your journal, write down three things:
- What colors are in this image, and how do they relate to each other?
- What textures or qualities do you notice?
- What does this image feel like, and when have you felt that way in an outfit?
You’re not making any decisions yet. You’re just starting to read your own aesthetic signal.
You can identify what moves you. The harder part is knowing what to do with it: how to read what an image is telling you about color harmony, line, scale, and how those principles translate to your specific body and coloring. That’s the work inside Signature Style Foundations, where I build your personal style guide from your own aesthetic images and body design pattern. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start translating, click here to learn more about Signature Style Foundations.