Sometimes you get dressed in the morning and it all seems so easy, but for some reason over the course of the next few days nothing seems to look quite right. Everything seems awkward, or your outfits seem to all be repetitive. This can be an irritating experience when you first encounter it, because it feels like you’re not making progress anymore. In fact, you probably still are. What’s more likely is that your taste has developed ahead of your practice skills. You’re starting to see things you don’t like more quickly, you’re starting to see where the proportions are off, and you’re starting to feel the disconnect between how you want to be perceived and how your outfits are actually presenting you. This is actually a good thing. It’s a sign that your taste is still improving, even if your skills aren’t quite there yet.
When you hit a bump in the road, you’ll be tempted to tear everything down and start from scratch again. This almost always makes things worse, because it changes too many things at once. Instead, go back to focusing on just one thing, and really pay attention to it. You might look at just proportions for a few days, and notice where you carry volume and where the outline of your body starts to dissolve. Or you might look at just colors, and see if all your outfits are built around the same color interaction. When you do this for a little while, you’ll begin to see patterns emerge that you weren’t noticing when you were trying to experiment with every aspect of your outfits. Focus is the best way to overcome the bump.
One of the big pitfalls when you hit a bump is to decide that it’s happening because your clothes lack personality. When you do this, you’re likely to start incorporating more interesting items, or bolder accessories, or trendier flourishes before the basics are right. This tends to make your outfits look messier, but not necessarily better. When an outfit already lacks fundamentals, piling more embellishments on rarely helps. Instead, you want to ask a more level-headed question. What part of this outfit needs more work? The answer will probably be that the fit needs to be better, or the layering needs to be more thought out, or the mix of soft and structured pieces needs to be more defined. Once you see the problem, you can fix the outfit with purpose rather than desperation.
You can get some relief from the bump in the road by doing a mini exercise. Take 15 minutes and pick 3 garments that you commonly wear. Put an outfit together with them, then make a second outfit by changing just the garment that determines the silhouette. Then make a third outfit by changing just the color interaction. Take photos of each one, then compare them slowly. See which outfit looks better to you overall, and where your eye goes first. This works because it isolates the one thing that makes the difference in the styling, so you can see clearly what is and isn’t working. Sometimes just being able to identify the problem will help you get past the bump.
When you’ve hit a bump for a few days, it’s a great time to start repeating an outfit. Put a trusted outfit back on, but look at it more analytically. Where does that hem fall? Is the footwear consistent with the rest of the outfit, or does it clash with it? Is there enough contrast in the textures, or do they all run together? Wearing the same outfit again gives you a familiar frame of reference, so you can judge tweaks to it more easily. This is much more effective than staring into your full closet and wishing that you could find some inspiration.
Getting feedback from someone else can sometimes help you get past the bump, but only if you ask about something specific. Ask if they think the outfit is too monotonous, or where they lose the outline of your body, or which of your accessories seem out of place. Then try to see it for yourself. Getting to a bump in the road is not a reason to stop trying. It’s usually a reason to slow down and look harder. Once you can stop seeing the bump as a failure, you’ll start to see it for what it really is, a sign that you need to make some more specific decisions.