Fashion and developing one’s personal style can have huge effects on your experience of day-to-day life. In a previous post, I talked about how your personal style, and the parts of your style that you choose to lean into, can help you become the person you want to be. Today, I want to explore some concepts that can help make that vision a reality. I started off completely clueless, so hopefully I can help you get a clue too. This is what I’m learning along the way.
First, some definitions. These concepts can be a little abstract, but they’re essential to understanding the rest of this conversation. They’re also things you develop an intuition for over time. It takes a while for your brain to wrap itself around them, but once it does, you start seeing them everywhere.
Fashion: This is an umbrella term that encompasses the world of garments, aesthetics, history, and culture surrounding clothing, as well as your place within that world. If someone has good fashion sense, they understand not only how to choose and wear clothes that suit them, but also where those choices sit in a broader context. That understanding may be conscious or intuitive.
Style: Personal style goes beyond fashion, though clothing is one of its clearest expressions. Style is the way someone talks, their mannerisms, their behavior, the emojis they use when texting, their clothes, accessories, hair, and grooming. It’s the particular flavour of an individual. When someone has good style, it usually means they embody some compelling ideal in the way they move through the world, and their clothing feels like a natural extension of that.
Resonance: In the context of fashion and style, resonance is the click that happens when a person and a garment become one harmonious thing. They complement each other in a way that creates a strong, coherent signal that can be felt by an observer. It’s almost magical to experience. In haute couture, the goal is often to create resonance between the model, the garments, the styling, and the overall presentation. Two garments may resonate with each other, but if neither resonates with the wearer, the effect is dramatically diminished.
Destructive Interference: The killer of resonance. This occurs when two things with their own strong signals create unwanted disharmony when combined. A garment may be beautiful on its own and a person may be beautiful on their own, but together they can clash. With enough destructive interference, you stop looking merely boring and start looking actively bad.
Personality: The qualities that make a person or garment distinctive and memorable. Personality is what gives something character. In order to achieve resonance, the personality of a garment should complement, or at least not interfere with, the personality of the wearer.
Sauce: The magical ingredient that makes someone’s style feel compelling. It’s difficult to define precisely, but it has something to do with authenticity, self-awareness, originality, personality, and resonance. You can have good fashion sense and wear clothes that technically suit you, but still lack the emotional spark that makes people connect with your style. Sauce is that spark.
Alright, now that that’s out of the way, we can get into the good stuff.
Step 1: How to Create a Capsule Wardrobe
My experience creating a reliable wardrobe has been long and frustrating. I’ve tried on thousands of garments over the years, especially through thrifting, and there are so many things to consider when deciding whether something deserves a place in your closet.
We all know that the capsule wardrobe is great if you’re into minimalism, but I sure as hell am not. What I did not initially understand is that a capsule wardrobe is just as useful for someone who wants to be kooky and interesting as it is for someone who looks their best as, say, a “clean girl”. What belongs in a capsule wardrobe will look different for everyone, but the core principle remains the same: every item should work with every other item. Nothing should create destructive interference.
The ideal capsule wardrobe contains pieces that can be mixed and matched almost indefinitely while still looking cohesive. If you’re skilled, those pieces can absolutely have personality. But if your goal is to build a wardrobe you genuinely love, I think it’s worth starting simple.
I would argue that every garment exists somewhere on the spectrum of “personalityless” to “personalityful”. Basics are called basics for a reason. They tend to sit closer to the personalityless end of that spectrum, and that’s useful for two reasons. First, two personalityless items are less likely to clash with each other. Second, they’re less likely to clash with you. There’s a reason half the women on the streets of my hometown in the summer are wearing a white tank top and blue denim. It works. A white tank top and a good pair of jeans aren’t likely to destructively interfere with anyone.
Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not interested in wearing basics forever. Looking good isn’t the whole goal. You’re looking for resonance; for a way to bring your personal style to the surface.
Unfortunately, the boring advice is also often the useful advice. It’s much harder to express your style effectively if you don’t get the fundamentals right first. There are broader principles of fashion worth learning, and there are specific things that will work best for your body, personality, and lifestyle. Understanding those things gives you a foundation from which you can eventually break the rules with intention rather than by accident.
This is where basics become surprisingly intricate. Once you’ve removed the personality dimension from the equation, you can focus on all the smaller details that actually determine whether a garment belongs on your body.
- Do I prefer thin straps or thick straps?
- Chunky heels or narrow ones?
- High-waisted or low-waisted silhouettes?
- Do I actually enjoy the feeling of this fabric on my skin?
- Do warm tones suit me better than cool ones?
- What silhouettes am I trying to create?
If you’re trying to glow up, getting genuinely good at answering these types of questions is a ridiculously overpowered first step.
It can take a while, but please, get you some clothes that fit properly, that let you stand up tall, that feel good against your skin, that don’t clash with your features, and that all play reasonably nicely together.
There are plenty of fashion-adjacent systems that can help you understand your own energy signature and avoid destructive interference. Two worthwhile examples are colour seasons and Kibbe types. The former can help you understand which colours work best with your complexion and features, while the latter can help you understand which silhouettes, proportions, and visual lines tend to complement your body.
That said, if you take no other advice from this section, take this: if you can’t realistically imagine wearing something at least twice a week (weather permitting), it’s probably not part of your capsule wardrobe. Leave it.
Another thing that helped me was learning to pay attention to the boring parts of great outfits. When you see someone who looks incredibly stylish, a surprisingly large portion of what they’re wearing is often basic. The difference is that they’ve chosen a few key pieces to highlight, while everything else quietly supports them. The basics fade into the background and create a resonant canvas.
Also, figure out your undergarments. I don’t have much more to say about that, except that the science surrounding them has gotten absurdly good.
My own current capsule wardrobe contains lots of tans, browns, greys, and blacks. I have tank tops that are all more or less the same cut in different colours, plus a couple of effortless, flowy neutral t-shirts. I have black wide-leg jeans, blue wide-leg jeans, cotton tiered skirts in brown and black, and a long cotton twill skirt in army green. A grey cardigan, a few well-fitting sweaters, and some reasonably put-together athleisure for lounging. I have a leather jacket, a bomber jacket, and a long-ish trench coat. For shoes, I have beige Converse High Tops, black-and-white sneakers, brown leather Birkenstocks, and a pair of soft Ugg-adjacent boots. This is all to say that a capsule wardrobe doesn’t always have to look like officewear. The capsule wardrobe is for the casual comfortable baddie too.
Step 2: How to Create a Stylish, Resonant, Saucy Wardrobe
Now, let’s say you’ve gained reasonable proficiency in curating your beautiful capsule wardrobe. You understand what version of black suits you, and you have a number of tank tops, t-shirts, skirts, and pants that have your back at all times. Even if you’re bored by the personalitylessness of it all, you probably no longer need me to explain how wonderful it feels to have a collection of ride-or-die pieces that always work. You know that even if you randomly throw together items from this pool, you’re going to look and feel pretty good. You and your base wardrobe resonate effortlessly. No destructive interference here.
Now, here’s where it gets fun.
This process is both conscious and subconscious, purposeful and intuitive. It can absolutely happen alongside the process of refining your capsule wardrobe, but having that foundation in place makes everything easier. Once you’ve built the canvas, you can start hunting for the quirky and personalityful.
A quick aside on trends. Trends get a lot of hate nowadays because of fast fashion and overconsumption. And yes, buying an entirely new wardrobe every season only to throw it out later is bad. But trends themselves aren’t inherently evil. Trendy pieces simply often sit on the more personalityful side of the spectrum, and the internet has also created a strange situation where dozens to thousands of trends can exist simultaneously. This means that trends can genuinely be a fun way to inject novelty into your wardrobe.
If you’re reasonably familiar with the zeitgeist and sit somewhere in that twenty-to-thirty-ish age range, you’ll probably find that some trends genuinely resonate with you because they reflect your generation’s values, aesthetics, and interests. I often find myself gravitating toward certain trends because they genuinely align with my preferences as part of the elder zoomer cohort. So please, don’t be afraid of trends if they feel authentic. They might just exist because there are lots of people who think the same way you do.
Anyway, by this point you know certain things about yourself and your relationship with clothing. Some silhouettes work for you and some don’t. Some fabrics feel incredible and others make you want to crawl out of your body. Some colours light you up and others leave you looking vaguely unwell.
Now comes the hard part. You need to find garments that:
- Meet the standards of comfort and quality you established for your capsule wardrobe.
- Complement your capsule wardrobe.
- Complement your body and personality.
- Say something interesting about you.
One thing I’ve learned is that your body is often smarter than you are. Sometimes you’ll see a garment and you will immediately feel a jolt of excitement, like a little internal “!”. Pay attention to that. Life is too short to wear only sensible clothes that never spark joy. Those little moments of excitement are often clues about your personality. They’re signals pointing toward motifs, aesthetics, textures, colours, silhouettes, and stories that resonate with something deeper in you.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should buy every “!” garment. It could be poorly made, wildly overpriced, not a proper fit, or a clash with your capsule wardrobe. Maybe it looks incredible on the hanger and terrible on your body. That’s okay. Keep the “!” in your back pocket by taking a picture, saving it to Pinterest, or just making a mental note.
If you pay attention, you’ll start seeing that same essence appear elsewhere. Over time, you’ll begin to recognize what specifically captured your attention. Was it the drape? The texture? The sense of drama? The softness? The masculinity? The glamour? The weirdness? Eventually you’ll find ways to incorporate that spirit into your wardrobe in a way that actually works for your life and your body.
You can incorporate personality into your style in so many ways: colour, texture, print, layering, structure, sparkle, etc., and all the mixing possible thereof. It took me a really long time to understand that I’m actually just not much of a colour person, aside from the occasional small dose. But that understanding mentally opened up a whole new world for me to play in: mixing and matching textures, adding a focal points, incorporating scarves for drape and flow, contrasting masculine and feminine elements, and having fun with animal prints, to name a few examples. There’s always so much more going on in a great outfit than the details you consciously remember afterwards.
A rule that I often go by (as previously alluded to) is that your outfit should be mostly pulled from your ride-or-die capsule, because those are the clothes you have the strongest relationship with. You can tell when someone has a strong relationship with their clothes. They just know how to style them better, and everything has an authentic, lived-in quality. It looks like it’s part of them rather than a costume.
Those pieces can then support you in playing with something bolder so that the bold thing doesn’t overpower you. Choosing a base that complements your personalityful item can help you pull off almost anything. A loud piece becomes much easier to wear when the rest of the outfit is quietly doing its job.
Over time, you start to get a better understanding of the personalityful motifs and archetypes that follow you around. For me, my style might be described as slightly earthy/witchy, with some intellectual refinement and restraint and hints of sparkle. My truest fashion self seems to live somewhere in the tension between “dowdy intellectual” and “whimsically pretty”, and somewhere in the related tension between high-class and low-brow. When you develop an understanding of where you like to sit in the vibes spaces, your brain becomes attuned to seeing those things out in the world. You’ll start noticing recurring themes across the garments, people, interiors, artwork, and media that speak to you. Embodying those individuated energies effectively and coherently is where the sauce starts to come from.
As you get better at understanding who you are, what looks good on you, and what consistently feels meaningful, your “basics” start to become less objectively basic and more specific. You also start to understand how to break the rules effectively, which also increases the sauce factor. But it takes a long time to figure out which tiny little corners of the garment world are actually yours. That’s something that develops through observation, experimentation, and paying attention.
At some point in this process, if you really put in the work, your eye will become refined enough that almost every article you own is somehow personalityful. Because every piece is so deeply yours, you become the throughline in your wardrobe; everything works together because it works with you. That’s what we’re all shooting for, I think. Starting with a capsule wardrobe and slowly, iteratively introducing more personalityful pieces has been the formula that has worked for me.
Conclusion
Fashion is a particularly accessible way of learning about yourself. It’s a sandbox in which you can experiment with identity, aesthetics, self-expression, and how you want to move through the world. A very nice thing about it is that you don’t need to figure it all out at once, and in fact, I’d argue that you can’t. I think it has to be a multi-year-long journey of trial and error, buying the wrong things, trying trends that aren’t for you, stubbornly holding on to garments that look terrible on your body, and slowly piecing together an understanding of what actually resonates. I still feel like a beginner often.
At the end of the day, the goal is simple. Build a wardrobe that supports your life, reflects your personality, and makes it feel effortless to be the parts of yourself that you enjoy. Start with a strong foundation, add personality iteratively and intentionally, and trust that your eye will develop with practice. Eventually, if you’re paying due attention, you yourself, your instinct, taste, and standards will become your throughline, and in so doing, you’ll arrive at style, resonance, personality, and sauce all in one go.
BRONZE FROG 
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