Best Trade

Realize that dressing well is a skill
Just like cooking or shooting free throws, dressing well is a skill that can actually be learned.
My job as a personal stylist isn’t to buy clothes for guys and send them on their way. I teach men how to choose clothes that enhance them so they can do it on their own. If dressing well wasn’t a skill that could be taught, I’d be out of a job!
With all skills, you get better the more you practice. And unless you live in some weirdo nudist colony (I would apologize here, but if you're a nudist reading this blog, you're in the wrong place), you need to get dressed everyday. That means you have an opportunity to practice and nurture the skill of dressing well every single day.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Nobody is born in a perfectly tailored 3-piece suit, or with some magical intuition on how to dress well. (If you need a reminder, scroll back up and look at my high school picture again.) Realize that dressing well is a skill that can be developed through practice.

Remember the 2:1 Waist/Neck Rule
Shopping secondhand can unearth some truly incredible, unique pieces to add to your wardrobe. But the truth is that it often takes a lot more effort than shopping the new arrivals at your favorite department store. Which is why I absolutely flipped when Assistant Editor Delia Curtis taught me this wild hack for buying pants without needing to try them on. “The trick says that typically the circumference of your neck doubled will likely be the circumference of your waist. With that in mind, the rule states that if you hold the waist of a pair of pants up to your neck and the ends meet together with little to no room between the edges of the waist, the pants should fit.” It may sound too bonkers to be true, but according to the experts (and my own personal field testing), it really does work.

Sometimes You Just Can’t Fake It
Social media is chock-full of fashion and style hacks that claim to transform your favorite bikini bottoms in a chic crop top, allow you to wear a regular T-shirt bra as a backless one or using a hair tie to hem your pants. And while some of these tricks are wonderfully clever, others simply do not work for the vast majority of people. Sometimes the best solution to finding a bra to wear with a backless dress is just to invest in an actual backless bra.

Thank Items Before You Get Rid of Them
I am notoriously bad at letting go of things, especially clothing. I just feel so guilty about getting rid of something I bought but never wore, a gift that wasn’t really my style but that’s perfectly lovely or even a raggedy sweater that’s well past its prime but that I have so much love for. Then I learned this one piece of advice from Marie Kondo: show gratitude to your items. Now when I get to an item I’m having a hard time parting with I take the time to acknowledge why I feel this way. I actively recognize that I can be glad for having learned something from an unused purchase or grateful to have people in my life who love me enough to give me such lovely gifts, rather than stressed or sad. As for those items that have outlived their usefulness? That’s exactly what clothing is supposed to do. You should be wearing your sweaters, jeans and T-shirts until they’re practically threadbare. In the words of Cynthia Erivo, hold space for those items, then be glad to have a little extra breathing room in your closet.