THE METHOD, IN FULL
How it works. All of it.
This is the whole method, written out. Most of my industry keeps this vague. I’d rather you knew exactly what you’re buying.
What I need from you
Your measurements, taken to a one-page brief I send you, and seven photographs: front, arms out, side, back, hand, foot, face. It takes about twenty minutes and you’ll need a friend or a tripod. That’s the entire ask.
FRONT
ARMS OUT
SIDE
BACK
HAND
FOOT
FACE
How big your frame is
THE TRADE WORD IS SCALE
Calculated from your measurements: height, shoulder width measured point to point, hand length, all measured rather than estimated by eye. This tells us how much an outfit can carry before it starts wearing you instead.
How your bones are built
THE TRADE WORD IS KIBBE
Scored on its own, separately from how big you are. This is where most assessments fall over, because they collapse the two and a small woman with strong bones gets read as delicate. She isn’t, and dressing her as though she is will look wrong forever without her ever knowing why.
The colours that make you look awake
THE TRADE WORD IS YOUR SEASON
I do this from photographs rather than by holding fabric up against your face, which is part of why the whole thing works from anywhere.
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What I’m looking at isn’t the colour. It’s what the colour does to you.
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The first place I look is wherever your face is hollow. Under the eyes, mostly. Some colours deepen the shadow there and you look like you slept badly. Others lift it, and you look rested, with the same face you had a second earlier.
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Then your skin. A colour that’s wrong makes you look greyer and duller, which is hard to name if nobody has told you to look for it. A colour that’s right makes your skin look like there’s light in it.
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With the stronger colours there’s a third question, which is where your eye goes. A bold colour that suits you sends attention to your face and your features. A bold colour that doesn’t sends attention to itself, and then the colour is wearing you rather than you wearing the colour.
Putting it together
None of the three readings outranks the others, and none of them outranks you.
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Nobody turns up as a blank slate. You already have a climate you live in, a job with its own unspoken rules about clothes, things you’ve quietly disliked about how you look for years, and things you’re attached to and don’t want touched. So when the colours point one way and your shape points another, that history is what decides it. You know things about yourself I can’t get from a photograph, which is why there’s an intake form and a call about your answers before I analyse anything at all.
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What comes out of that is a set of decisions rather than a verdict handed down. They already account for the fact that you live somewhere hot, or that you’re on video three days a week, or that you’ll never wear a jacket you can’t move in.
It’s also why a colour analysis on its own tends to sit unused. People come to me having had one. They can tell me their season, and their wardrobe hasn’t changed. The colours were right and there was nowhere to put them. Knowing your colours doesn’t tell you what shape of jacket to buy, where a hem should land, or what to do with the rest of the outfit, and without that most people still can’t picture themselves looking put together. So they carry on buying what they always bought.
What I can tell you without seeing you, and what I can’t
TRUE FOR ANYONE
Some things are true no matter who’s wearing them. How a fabric behaves under stage lights. Whether a fine stripe will wreck the footage. Where a shoulder seam should sit. Whether a hem reads short. Whether a sheen will photograph cheap.
NEEDS ME TO LOOK AT YOU
Other things need me to look at you. Whether that green does anything for your skin. How much contrast suits your face. How your bones are built.
So when you message me, you’ll get the first kind answered completely and for free, and I’ll tell you honestly where the line is. The second kind is what a year of working together resolves.
What you get
Your styling guide, written as a manual. The shapes that work on you, the fabrics worth buying, where things should sit, and your colours, laid out so you can find one answer in thirty seconds while standing in a shop.
The reasoning behind it doesn’t sit in the guide, and that’s deliberate. It sits with me, in the WhatsApp thread, for a year. You ask about the jacket in your hand instead of looking up a principle and trying to apply it yourself. Clients tell me that’s the part that makes it stick.
Why I’m giving the method away
Reading it and doing it are different jobs. If you want to run this on yourself, everything you need is on this page. If you’d rather someone did it properly, that’s what I’m for.
Start here
Tell me the one thing you’re never sure about.
I’ll tell you whether it’s actually the problem. No charge, and I answer every message myself.