I am the full-blown millennial cliché. I started my “social media journey” with Myspace, then moved on to Tuenti (a weird Spanish teenage social media platform!), and I was absolutely obsessed with MSN. Remember how exciting it was to log on and see if your crush was online?! Those were the days!
Then came Blogspot, Tumblr (OMG, I miss Tumblr!) and finally, where I actually wanted to get to today: the absolute blessing that Pinterest has been to creative minds everywhere.
I think Pinterest is probably the social media platform I’ve used the most over the years. But I didn’t want to take you down memory lane for nothing.
Every time I have a vague idea for a newsletter, I like to gather images on Pinterest to get the creative juices flowing. And recently, I came across the picture below from Reformation. I absolutely loved the outfit and thought, “Hmmm, this might be how I wear my satin shorts this autumn”.
And it got me thinking about how inspiration can be a wonderful thing, but sometimes there's so much of it that we don't know what the hell to do with it! You can end up saving a million outfits and somehow feeling less inspired than when you started.
Actually, I had a conversation with my friend Angie recently about a little style dilemma she’s been having, and it made me realise how tricky it can be to take all that inspiration and make it work for you. I’ll come back to that in a bit, because I think so many of us can relate.
But one thing I really believe is that one of the most useful things you can learn when developing your personal style is how to look at an outfit you love without feeling like you need to recreate it exactly.
Instead of immediately thinking, “Oh, but I don’t have that jacket, or those shoes, or I’m not as tall or skinny as that person...” stop yourself right there!
Ask yourself instead what made you save the image in the first place. Was it the colours? The proportions? The contrast between different pieces? Or just the overall vibe?
Once you understand what you actually like about an outfit, you can start figuring out how to create something similar with what you already own.
Anyway, back to those satin shorts.
What caught my attention about the Reformation outfit was the combination of the soft satin shorts with an oversized leather jacket. I also loved the sheer socks and pointy shoes with it, so I gave those a go, but wasn’t entirely convinced and swapped them for loafers instead. My jacket is a different colour, and I layered a white long-sleeved T-shirt under a vest rather than wearing a jumper.
And I love the result! It’s not the same outfit obvs, but I made it work with what I had and it feels more me because of that.
But then I thought, why stop at one outfit? What if I wore these shorts for a few days straight and challenged myself to come up with completely different combinations?
And you know how much your girl likes a challenge, so that’s exactly what I did!
Below, I’m sharing the rest of my satin shorts experiment, the outfits I came up with, and coming back to my conversation with Angie to explore how we can keep evolving our personal style without losing what makes it ours in the first place.
