Meet the new wave of sartorial agony aunts transforming how we dress
From TikTok styling sessions to a plethora of new books, it’s never been easier to find your own personal take on style.
Perhaps you’ve opened the door to your wardrobe, bursting with clothes, and felt you simply haven’t anything to wear. Or have worn something that somehow felt off or not like you. Worse, you’re victim to a questionable internet micro-trend or feel confined by what you think you are supposed to be wearing. Know two things, you’re not alone, and also that it’s never been a better time to seek advice on how to get dressed. Right now, the art and practice of finding your own personal style has perhaps superseded another eternal, practically moral, quest- possessing ‘good taste.’
Indeed Kay Barron, fashion director at luxury retailer Net-a-Porter and author of a new book of sartorial advice, How To Wear Everything, believes true personal style trounces ‘good taste’ anyway. Barron says she wrote her book because of the hundreds of pictures in her WhatsApp sent from friends with busy lives or important jobs who had absolutely no clue what to wear.
“Be it a job interview, birthday party, wedding, holiday, or first/second/fiftieth date, honestly, there is nothing I like more than dressing a friend from my sofa as they prepare for an event in their life, significant or routine,” she says. “I wanted to write this book for everyone who doesn’t have me, or an equivalent, in their phone contacts. How to Wear Everything is your getting-dressed companion.”
For Barron, dressing well, having personal style, is all about an emphasis on the latter. Especially when now – with a veritable cottage industry of style advice on social media – we are inundated with opinions.
“The key to personal style is understanding that the emphasis is on the word ‘personal’, for it is about what you feel good in, not what other people look good in. In a world where we are bombarded with other people’s advice, opinions and taste, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and also confused,” she says.
“Remember that there is no such thing as good taste and bad taste, there is only good style. To one person that might be loads of colour and print, to someone else that might mean sticking to neutrals. It is about individual taste, and both can be stylish. Get to know what you like, and don’t be distracted by the ‘good taste ‘noise.’”
Beyond a personal stylist – a not-so-secret weapon of people in positions of power and prominence – the art of advising what to wear has of course long had currency, in many forms.
This includes everything from Trinny and Susannah telling viewers What Not To Wear, to the icon-status of the late and legendary long-time Bergdorf’s personal shopper Betty Halbreich, once dubbed “the world’s most famous personal shopper”. Halbreich’s clients included everyone from Truman Capote’s queen Swan Babe Paley to Meryl Streep and Liza Minnelli. Her final book, No One Has Seen It All: Lessons for Living Well from Nearly a Century of Good Taste will be published posthumously next year, with a foreword by Lena Dunham. Halbreich once said of her line of work, “There’s no question. I’m a therapist – a fashion therapist. Half the time I don’t sell, I’m very busy getting into their lives. I hear more than I sometimes want to hear.”
One person to cut through the plethora of style advice online is stylist Allison Bornstein, who went viral on TikTok with her “three-word” philosophy. An example? Princess Diana, “sporty, demure, opulent”. Her own? “classic, ’70s and elegant.”
Bornstein, who late last year released a book titled Wear It Well, believes the three-word philosophy resonates because it gives people tools to figure out what they actually like, without being too prescriptive about it.
“While getting dressed is meant to be creative and expressive – it can be chaining for people to really understand what they like and why – so applying language and giving a little rubric can be such a helpful tool in articulating your preferences and also understanding yourself,” she says.
“I think the three word method is helpful in giving language to something that can feel really elusive and ‘indescribable,’ I also think it’s fun. It is fun to look at your wardrobe and your moodboard and see patterns emerge – it can be really illuminating for people to see that there are visible patterns and preferences and that they do in fact have style and taste,
“I also think the three words allows people to take control of their style. You are able too define yourself and you can also change and shift and evolve and the words just give you some guardrails.”
Another person reshaping the idea of the sartorial agony aunt is Amy Smilovic. New York-based Smilovic founded her fashion label Tibi more than 20 years ago. However it was sharing her styling sessions and her philosophies around getting dressed on social media during covid with strategies such as ‘creative pragmatism’ and wardrobe ‘without fails’ that she says transformed her business, and her purpose.
In Australia last week for a series of talks and styling events hosted by Ilana Moses, founder of Melbourne-based fashion boutique Grace, Smilovic says creative pragmatism is about embracing the nuances – and multitudes – of a woman’s life.
“What creative pragmatism did was it, first of all, explain that if you’ve been confused your whole life because you don’t feel like you’re so specifically one thing or another, but actually more complicated and nuanced, creative pragmatism allowed people to put their arms around it,” she says.
“What if you’re someone who’s really edgy and you love black leather and everything, but what if you’re also a paediatrician? How do you square those two? And what creative pragmatism has done is it’s given people who resonate with this permission to be like, ‘oh, I can be creative and I can be pragmatic… then what we lay out in these principles really make sense to these people. It’s not something that they’re having to textbook learn.”
For Smilovic creative pragmatism can mean many things, including the kinds of clothes she designs – clothes with an element of texture or twist, clothes you can layer up and build on, pieces interesting enough to both be worn every day and also kept forever.
Her concept of “without fail” pieces is another philosophy that resonates.
“Three and a half years ago when after Covid and I went on Instagram, when we started talking about this, we really carved out in our own collection what we call the fundamentals, or the pieces that without fail, no matter what, when you put them on, they make you feel like yourself,” she says.
Tibi collections, she says, are full of these. Pieces that are, to borrow a Smilovic phrase, chill, modern and classic. Pieces that offer a grounding to build an outfit, and also live your life in.
But as Smilovic notes, they’re not basics. Or at least, not “basics by anyone else’s standards”.
“No designer would put them in a duty-free shop because they would have too much of a point of view to them. But they’re ones that they have enough of a point of view so that when you wear them, you don’t feel like you’re walking around without an opinion. They give you a point of view, but they don’t take over a whole conversation,” she says.
Smilovic says the feedback she has from her customers and social media followers who have found their own slant on creative pragmatism or curated their own “without fails” has resolved her own purpose. She designs clothes, yes, but she wants to design clothes that offer women both relaxation and preparedness. She wants them to live their lives.
“I hear this often, and I know it might just sound so bizarre, but [customers] will tell me that even on the day of their husband’s death or their son’s death, going to a funeral, on a day that you’re not looking to be the best dressed at the funeral. And it is the last thing you ever want to think about ever having to do or get dressed for. But to somehow just sit there and at least feel like yourself in whatever you’ve just grabbed is so oddly comforting,” she says.
“So whether it’s you’ve got a big meeting with board members or the worst day of your life or the best day of your life, just to be able to show up and enjoy that day or experience what you should be experiencing that day rather than anything else is so liberating for people.”
What’s more, as Smilovic notes, with a foundation of true personal style you’ve then got room to experiment.
One such example is the Tibi spring runway show at New York Fashion Week in September, titled Almost Reckless.
“Because we’re really feeling like when you have got your ground feeling so steady beneath you, that’s when you can really take big risks. You can push, you can experiment because you’ve always got a home base to come back to,” says Smilovic.
“I really was feeling to kind of break things open a little bit more this season and play more with the styling and do things that made it so that if someone’s like, ‘oh, I don’t get that at all, I could be like, ‘yeah, I’m not sure if I get it either, but I still know who I am.’”
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