12 Steps to Your DREAM Style: The 12 Competencies of Personal Style

A new year is upon us, and you are finally ready to get organized, discover your personal style, and build the foundation for your dream wardrobe. If you’re overwhelmed, I understand the feeling.

There are so many things to consider when developing your own unique personal style. And if you’re like me, I know that you love to take an analytical and scholarly approach to style. But you also want to augment that with creativity. You want to take all that knowledge and creativity and actually create outfits that you can wear right now, while working towards building your perfect capsule wardrobe.

That’s why I’d like to reintroduce you to the 12 Competencies of Personal Style, and invite you to join a 12-month free email course to help you master these concepts and develop your personal style, so that you can consistently create outfits that you love to wear, and ultimately build your perfect capsule wardrobe.

The 12 competencies of personal style are:

Color Type
Body Type
Core Style
The Wardrobe Framework
Wardrobe Editing
Fit & Measurements
Silhouette & Proportions
Color Story
Texture
Multidimensional Style
Conflict & Balance
and Creating Full Outfits

During the 12-month email course and on YouTube, we will focus on building one competency each month. We will complete exercises designed to help you develop your personal style, and build your own personalized style book along the way. So, I invite you to subscribe and join the email course!

In the meantime, let me give you an overview of each of the 12 Competencies and some of the fun stuff you have to look forward to in the coming year.

Color & Body Type

The first two competencies are crucial for honing your personal style - color type and body type. If you’ve explored my channel before, you’ll probably know that color and body type are always the foundation of every capsule wardrobe. I recommend using the 12-season color type and yin/yang or Kibbe body typing systems, but any system that works for you will satisfy these initial steps. It’s important to note that these two steps are not meant to narrow down your options, but to help you become more observant and intentional about your style.

Knowing your color type will help you understand why you enjoy wearing certain colors and why others may not work for you. And if you want to wear colors that don’t fall within your color type, you can do so intentionally and with confidence. For instance, if you are a Soft Summer color type, but you enjoy dark and moody color combinations, you can choose to use the darkest colors within your Soft Summer color palette, like dark gray or navy. Alternatively, you can choose black for an intentionally sharp and intense look.

Similarly, knowing your body type can give you a lot of comfort in knowing how to embrace and enhance your unique beauty. I recommend the yin/yang or Kibbe body typing system because it teaches you how to create harmony with your body, and doesn’t encourage you to correct or hide your shape. In this system there are ten different body types: Dramatic, Soft Dramatic, Flamboyant Natural, Soft Natural, Dramatic Classic, Soft Classic, Flamboyant Gamine, Soft Gamine, Theatrical Romantic, and Romantic. Each type has its own unique style lines and clothing recommendations.

Color and body type are not a set of rules that you must apply to your wardrobe. Each of these systems is a lens through which to see your outfits and your wardrobe more clearly. Tools not rules.

During the first two months of the course, I’ll be giving you resources and exercises to help you understand your color type and body type, start to create your wardrobe color palette, and test out your style lines.

Core Style

The next important step is to define your core style in three words. The key to successfully building the perfect wardrobe is to verbalize your style.

So how do you define your core style? The most useful way to define your core style is with three adjectives. And it’s very important that you distill your adjectives down to three. Think of these three words as your own personal brand. Your three words are the three elements that you really can’t go without. If any one element is missing, you won’t feel like yourself.

These three words are your core style. Like color type and body type, your core style is another lens in your toolkit that brings clarity to your wardrobe. In the third month, we will learn how to uncover your core style and start creating your own style dictionary.

The Wardrobe Framework

The fourth competency in the 12 Competencies of Personal Style is The Wardrobe Framework. The Wardrobe Framework consists of three categories that every stylish and practical capsule wardrobe must include: Essentials, Seasonals, and Statements.

This will be a month to regroup and get organized in your current wardrobe. We will categorize your current Essentials, Seasonals, and Statements and start to observe how they stack up against your color type, body type, and core style.

Using this wardrobe framework, your Essentials should make up about 50-60% of your capsule wardrobe.

Notice that I don’t use the word “basics.” When you’re looking for the perfect basics for a capsule wardrobe, what you’re really looking for is Essentials. Essentials are your basics, but better. They are your basics that take into account your color type, body type, and core style. And all together, your essentials should create a complete capsule wardrobe in and of themselves. And one that is not at all basic or boring. When you build a foundation of essentials rather than basics, even your worst day becomes quite stylish.

Remember - essentials should be useful pretty much year-round, and should take into account body type, color type, and core style. However, it’s okay if they don’t check all three boxes. What’s most important is that you feel great in them and can mix-and-match them with your Seasonals and Statement pieces.

Your seasonals should make up about 20-25% of your capsule wardrobe.

Seasonal items are those that can be worn 3-6 months out of the year and that you plan to bring out year after year. Usually these incorporate seasonally appropriate colors or textures and perhaps include some macro-trends that you expect to enjoy for several years. Your Seasonals can consist of just a few key items, like a coat and boots, or they can create entire mini-capsules that completely transform your Essentials for a particular season. The main idea is that these items are seasonally appropriate and rotate in and out of your wardrobe each year. They are absolutely practical, and because you are rotating them in and out of your closet, they bring excitement to your wardrobe each season, even when you aren’t buying new things.

Finally, your statements should make up about 20-25% of your capsule wardrobe.

Statement pieces are those items that you really have a strong emotional connection with, and are excited to wear now regardless of whether or not they make any practical sense. These are the items that really excite you and keep your wardrobe feeling fresh. They are still items that you plan to keep for a very long time, but they may rotate in and out of your wardrobe asynchronously with the seasons. The primary purpose of Statements is the pure enjoyment of style and self expression.

Wardrobe Editing

Once you’ve learned about The Wardrobe Framework and done some reflection, it’s time to analyze and edit your existing wardrobe. Editing your wardrobe is not about tossing out or selling half of your current wardrobe. In fact, I advise against frequent or extreme wardrobe culling because it can become very wasteful habit in the long run. If you have the space, I recommend storing your questionable items and returning to them in future seasons.

So, instead of traditional spring cleaning, we will focus on creating a visual guide or catalog of your existing wardrobe. We’ll try on everything and make some key observations about fit, fabric, texture, and proportion - that will help to frame and refine the way that you look at your clothing, outfits, and personal style. Plus, this catalog will be super helpful whenever you choose to shop or reconfigure your capsule wardrobe in future seasons.

Then, we can store away any misfits that don’t belong in the current season or maybe just don’t feel right in the current moment. And because you’ll have your wardrobe catalog in hand, you won’t forget what you have in storage come next season.

Fit + Measurements

Using the information you gleaned from wardrobe editing, you can now create your own personalized fit and measurement guide. You’ll learn how to take your measurements, analyze your fit preferences, and use body and garment measurements to make better purchases when shopping online. Your fit and measurement guide will also form the foundation for the next module, silhouette and proportions.

In the second half of the year, we will move into more advanced topics. I’m just going to give a very quick overview of each, because there is so much to cover that I really can’t do it justice in this video.

Silhouette + Proportions

The seventh lesson in our 12 Competencies of Personal Style will be silhouette and proportions.

There are many aspects to silhouette, such as waist emphasis, waist placement, shape, width, and vertical line. Proportion refers to the visual size of individual parts of the outfit in comparison to other items and your own body proportions.

Your experience with silhouette and proportion will be highly influenced by your body type and core style. In this module, we will learn about each element, conduct some outfit experiments, and make observations. Then, we’ll formulate three key outfit formulas that perfectly align with your body type and core style.

Color Story & Texture

An extension of silhouette and proportions is color story, since the use of color within an outfit can drastically change the visual proportions.

Not only can color alter visual proportions, but color can alter the visual mood of an outfit as well. Color and texture can also create focal points within an outfit.

In these two modules, we’ll explore each aspect of color, texture, and using focal points to tell a story with your outfits.

Multidimensional Style

Once you’ve mastered the first nine concepts in the 12 Competencies of Personal Style, you’ll be ready to expand beyond your core style.

Multidimensional style is all about tailoring your outfits to your unique circumstances and moods. We are all multidimensional people with a variety of roles to play in our daily lives, and our wardrobes should support that. In this module, we will work to identify those roles that we want to fill or moods that we want to create. Then, we’ll practice expanding our core style to create outfits that suit those roles while still feeling like ourselves.

Conflict + Balance

Creating conflict and balance is a technique for assessing your outfits emotionally and creatively applying your personal style. You’ll learn how to assess contrast and harmony within an outfit and when to add or remove elements to create balance and visual interest.

Full Outfits

Finally, we will practice combining all 12 Competencies to create full outfits and identify critical gaps in your current wardrobe. And by the end of the year, you have completed your personalized style book which will be an invaluable tool as you continue to build your perfect capsule wardrobe.

So, whether you are just starting your personal style journey, or want to take your wardrobe to the next level, I invite you to subscribe and join the course! I can’t wait to get organized and develop our personal style together in the new year!