Nobody taught me how to have my own style…not really anyway.
There was no class, no moment where it clicked, no single person who handed me the rules. What actually happened was slower than that. I started paying attention to things that had nothing to do with clothes and then realised they had everything to do with clothes.
Here’s what I mean.
The last hour of a dinner party.
When the candles have burned down and everyone’s stopped sitting properly and someone’s refilled your glass without asking. The conversation has slowed into something better and nobody wants to leave. There’s a whole outfit that lives in that specific feeling of that final hour… something you could have worn to arrive and would happily sleep in. Relaxed silk or a dress dress with a little give. Anything that gets better as the night does.
The feeling after an ocean swim before an afternoon spritz.
You know the one with salt still on your skin, hair doing its own thing, somehow relaxed and excited at the same time. The afternoon is full of possibility but you’re not rushing toward any of it. That’s a very specific dressing energy and it’s something easy but not sloppy, put-together but not trying. It is usually the simple dressing of a slip dress or something that says I was just in the water and I’ve already moved on and I’m fine about it.
The moment before your date walks in.
Not the anxiety version of it, but the good version! You know the feeling when you’ve arrived somewhere first and you have a drink and you’re sitting pretty in whatever you chose to wear (with the rest of your wardrobe on the floor) and you’re just ready. That feeling is the point, it’s not the outfit. The outfit just needs to get you there.
Wet sand after a wave pulls back.
Look at what the water leaves behind! Those parallel ridges, each one slightly different from the last and it’s not a pattern exactly, more like a record of movement. The colour shifts too, from the pale dry sand above to something deeper and richer where the water just was.
That’s ribbing to me. That’s a textured knit, a pleated hem, a jacquard that moves. The most beautiful fabric textures aren’t designed, they’re observed. The ocean’s been working on this one for a while and honestly the brief was good.
I don’t have a formula to my personal style and I don’t think we need one.
What I have is a habit of paying attention to feelings, to light, to the specific mood a moment creates before you’ve had time to name it. That’s what I’m dressing for; not an occasion, instead a feeling I’m trying to keep.