The ABC's Of Styling You Need To Know

The fundamentals of styling combined with your personal preferences can be captured in three simples words, or the ABC’s of styling. In assessing your body and the aspects of it that you love and don’t love so much it helps to always think in terms of accentuating the loves, balancing the loves with the don’t loves, and camouflaging the don’t loves. Understand these principle styling concepts:

Accentuate
If you’ve got it flaunt it! When it comes to accentuating certain parts of your body, go for it girl...be proud and shine! Accentuating the areas you love can be done in a number of ways, of course if you love your legs then rock a mini skirt and if you have a great cleavage get those deep V necklines on high rotation. Other techniques aren’t necessarily as obvious and can be as simple as isolating a dominant colour or pattern to the area you wish to highlight or using design details such as frills, ruffles, pleats, draping and seams to draw attention. To ensure you achieve the greatest effect it’s usually best to focus on one or two highlights per outfit and remember that it’s all about drawing attention to a particular area or feature which can be done as obviously or as subtly as you like. 

Balance
This refers more to the ‘rules’ of dressing for your body type which are intended to create visual harmony. It requires adding volume and focusing attention on features that are less pronounced and in turn drawing attention away from and creating visual balance with the more noticeable aspects of your body. Balance comes more down to personal preference however and if you prefer to accentuate a certain body part that according to the ‘rules’ of your body should be the part that’s camouflaged then by all means break the rules! If you do wish to create balance imagine an hourglass shape and which areas you need to ‘fill’ to balance your body and refer to the ‘Know (and love) Your Body’ section of the Hungry Wardrobe Style Journey for your body shape tips. 

Camouflage
We all have areas, whether justified or not, that we don’t love so much, and that’s fine! Remember your personal style is just that, yours, and it all comes down to personal preference...just make sure you have a decent list of loves, it’s definitely not ok to want to camouflage your entire body! To camouflage is to disguise, so in this instance you want to do the opposite to accentuating. Avoid advancing colours and patterns in the area you wish to camouflage and instead opt for receding colours. Ensure design features are kept to a minimum in your least loved area and be aware of where any horizontal lines fall...for example, where your top ends should not sit at your widest point. Jewellery is also a great tool to draw attention away from the areas you prefer to camouflage. In theory when you’re camouflaging you’re simply drawing attention away and focussing it on something else.