Sugar & Spice

And All Things Nice

When it comes to assessing your personal style, brutal honesty is important. I spent my twenties swept away by dreamy catalog shoots of women in romantic settings—Provence, Barcelona, Morocco—think of the Anthropologie catalogs with their always interesting, always feminine women. Shaped by my love of old movies and sartorial icons like Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, I had deeply embedded ideas of what it meant to dress like a woman: florals, full skirts, fitted waists, embroidery.

The problem was that I was a different woman from these icons and models; my life in no way resembled theirs. I am more Katherine Hepburn than Audrey. Put a crisp white blouse and a pair of wide-legged trousers on me, and I immediately feel at home in my skin. While traditionally feminine styles evoke soft pinks and florals paired with pearls, I am not that type of woman. It wasn't until my 40s that I became confident in my own fashion self. I am a woman and want to feel like one, and dressing is a large part of that. So sorting through and finding the sweet spot between traditional images of womanhood and my particular sense of self has taken me some time.

I realized one day that these ideas of feminine style are often simply remnants of particular moments in time. Those fifties-style dresses belong to a particular era; there’s no reason they should define feminine style more than the mantillas of medieval Spain or the drop-waist dresses of the roaring twenties. Though we tend to think of feminine style as defined by the items themselves, it is, in fact, defined by fidelity to the woman wearing the clothes. So step one in figuring out how to dress like the particular woman you are is, first and foremost, paying attention to what you actually love to wear and feel most yourself in.