Lessons in style

Learning how to dress myself

Jun 21, 2026

Hope you’re having a wonderful weekend.

I’ve been on holiday this week, climbing (well…attempting to climb) Snowdon. I haven’t had time to write a new piece so, I’m sharing an extract from my latest book, Before Work and at Weekends, a collection of non-fiction essays.

Hope you enjoy it.

Liz xx

Lessons in style

Learning how to dress myself

man in black suit jacket and pants illustration

I arrive for the style analysis on a chilly Saturday morning, the first weekend in January, feeling hopeful that after years lost in the style wilderness, this will be the moment I finally find my way out. All the panicking and tiny traumas about what to wear will forever be a thing of the past. By the end of the day, I’ll know exactly how to dress myself. It’ll change everything. In a few weeks, I will have edited my wardrobe, invested in new pieces, and will be looking good. In a year? Well, by then, I might be a style icon, sashaying around town, perhaps in contention for ‘Best Dressed in Barnsley’, if such an award exists, or at the very least, getting a “you look nice” from the husband or a random stranger in the street.

Whenever I’m away for work or there’s some kind of occasion or family gathering, putting my outfit together will be a pleasant experience, no longer fraught with anxiety, desperately calling my sister for emergency fashion advice. I will be calm, happy and confident in what I wear and how I show up in the world because, let’s be honest, clothes are so much more than just looking good. They say something about who we are. Well, I think so, anyway. There’s a psychology behind them.

Standing here now, on the stylist’s doorstep, I can’t help wishing I’d booked a consultation sooner. It’s been on my list of things to do for years, but I kept putting it off. Instead, I lost interest in fashion, bumbling along, getting by, and losing myself in the process. At least I’m here now, though. It’s a positive first step – investing in myself, taking action and, more importantly, learning how to cobble an outfit together.

The stylist is Karina Leacock from House of Colour, who I already know quite well because I had my colour analysis with her a few years ago, and I’ve kept in touch, attending her make-up masterclass, following her on social media, and once buying a beautiful multicoloured bag from her that is so bright it makes me happy every time I look at it. Karina is an award-winning and experienced stylist who always looks amazing, which I suppose you’d expect from a stylist. She’s also incredibly friendly, warm and welcoming. I trust her. This morning, I did not have any panic about what to wear, throwing on some M&S wide-leg jeans and a jumper, with trainers and a fitted quilt-coat because I felt completely comfortable in her company. I didn’t have to be someone I’m not. My attitude was very much, ‘this is who I am right now and I’m here for help to make the most of my style’. She asked me to come with examples of outfits I love, those I hate, those I’m unsure about, and lots of questions. I’m armed with a bagful of clothes and a head full to bursting with important questions such as, ‘Can I still wear skinny jeans?’.

Karina makes me a cup of tea, and we sit down and talk about why I am here, how I’ve been feeling about clothes and why they’ve become such an ordeal.

‘I’ve lost my confidence,’ I tell her. She listens and nods (clearly this is something she hears all the time), and suggests that perimenopause might also have played a part in my loss of confidence, which it absolutely has. We also chat about my career, lifestyle, and how I spend my time – all important factors when thinking about style and clothing choices.

‘The style consultation is the first step,’ Karina tells me. ‘It’s the start of the journey. Women dress to the ideals of how people expect them to look. This is about letting go of the chains and being themselves.’

She explains that style is like a triangle because it has three sides to it: colour, body architecture and character. Style confidence comes from knowing what suits you, including wearing the right colours for your natural skin tone, and understanding your body architecture and proportions. Then it’s about using colour and architecture to highlight personal characteristics that align with your personality. Basically, the House of Colour philosophy is about dressing for your shape, knowing your style, and wearing your ‘wow’ colours. And of the three, shape is the most important.

‘There are no wrong bodies,’ Karina says. ‘Only wrong clothing choices.’ She begins by taking my measurements. Not the ones I expected – like bust and waist – but measurements of proportions across the four quadrants of the body (upper, middle, top of legs, and bottom of legs). My body is sharp and straight. On the chart of body shapes that Karina shows me, I am on the far left – straight up and down like an exclamation mark. I have no curves whatsoever. The only slight hint of shape (if you look closely) is on my legs from running and spinning.

On the other end of the chart are full, curved bodies, which require soft structure, swish clothes, drape and movement. I have friends who have beautiful, curved bodies and wear long, swishy maxi dresses. I’ve always looked at them and thought, ‘I’d like to wear that’. But on me, these dresses look ridiculous. My body, Karina tells me, requires structure. I need tailored clothes with clean lines that follow the simplicity of my silhouette. They should be timeless, not baggy, and certainly not fussy. As much as I’d love to float about in a big, swishy dress with frills and acres of fabric, I just can’t. Curvier bodies can take more volume of fabric. I look like someone’s draped a duvet over my shoulders and sent me out for the day. The style I should go for, apparently, is simple, and this simplicity of structure makes it timeless – like a pencil skirt.

Karina gives some examples of shops that cater for the exclamation mark body style and, thankfully, they are all shops that I know and love. Karen Millen, M&S Autograph, Hobbs, Reiss, Jaeger, so I take comfort in the fact that I’m doing something right and at least shopping in the right places.

My height (5ft 10.5 inches) can make it difficult to get clothes long enough. I’ve always struggled to find trousers, but not only that, sleeves are often not long enough and waists not low enough. It’s a proportions thing. I’ve always enjoyed being tall, though, and love that in a big heel, I can be up there with my six-foot-something husband. Karina agrees I should make the most of being tall by wearing heels and owning my height. Not a problem. She also provides some options for brands catering for tall women (ME+EM, Holland Cooper) and suggests that I should broaden my shopping horizons and perhaps take a trip to Holland, the country, where they’re a taller nation.

I also need to be mindful that my height can affect the proportions of my four quadrants, which means that in a pretty little dress, I can look like I have too much body for the dress. My sister has always said that I have an excellent ability to ruin a good dress. She owned a boutique briefly, selling lots of pretty little dresses that perfectly suited her. When she asked me to model for her, she handed me a beautiful pink and yellow dress that fitted around the bust and flared to the knee. It was beautiful, and when my sister wears it, people stop her in the street to compliment her. When I put it on, ready for the photoshoot, she gasped at how horrendous I looked and declared that she no longer required my modelling services. ‘You really do ruin a good dress. No one would buy that if they saw you in it.’ My sister has a special way of making me feel good about myself. But Karina agrees. In the wrong dress, I will look like I’m in a pantomime. As much as I love a good panto, it’s not the look I’d choose for myself, so I make a mental note to avoid dresses that fit and flare above the knee for the rest of my life.

While there are restrictions with dresses, the good news is that I can have complete freedom with jeans, so long as they’re long enough, obviously. So, whatever the style, I can wear them (yes, even skinny jeans, if I want). Jeans can be my go-to, which is good news and a stroke of luck because they very much are. I can dress them up and down, and don’t need to overthink them. They are my thing. After all the jeans confusion over recent years, I feel like I’ve finally gained clarity (hurrah to that!).

Next up for analysis is my body geometrics. I have a triangle-shaped upper body with shoulders so prominent you can hang things on them. Not a negative. Apparently, my shoulders are my strength (although not physically strong). I have a tiny upper body and waist, but a low waist (I knew this already – get me!), which means I’m slightly long-bodied but also have long legs.

My lower body is more of an oblong shape, so when I’ve often joked that my arse is so big it requires its own postcode, I was wrong, which is nice to hear. It’s only because my clothing proportions were wrong – accentuating my backside and not being in balance with my upper body – that I made the assumption I was big-bottomed. Let me explain.

When it comes to swimwear, I have always longed to wear 1950s big-knicker style bikini bottoms. I love them, but every time I tried them, I looked terrible. I’d stand in the changing room, unable to understand why, and the only reason had to be the size of my arse. It looked massive in them. What I now realise is that it was just an illusion, all because of the proportions.

In order to wear the big knickers, I would need to balance this out with a bigger upper body, and because I have the upper body of a twelve-year-old child, I’m a long way from being anywhere near balanced. So, my proportions are completely skewed, and my tiny upper body makes the big-knickered bikini bottoms look enormous. It’s like standing in front of a mirror at Camera Obscura – never a good look. Thankfully, Karina confirms that halterneck swimwear is much more my thing, as are asymmetric styles, bandeaus and cut-outs. ‘There are no constraints with swimwear,’ she tells me (except the big 1950s knickers). ‘Try the interesting shapes and work those shoulders.’

After determining my body shape, we move on to necklines and jewellery. I have a long neck, an oblong face and a medium jawline, all of which means I can take medium-sized-plus earrings. But a word of caution with earrings, I should put the emphasis on length rather than width. If only I’d known this before my sister’s fortieth birthday party, I would have saved myself public humiliation. At the party, my sister – a few gins in – stared at my earrings (gold, pretty, newly purchased from Swarovski). ‘What’s with the massive earrings?’ she asked. And then a cousin, from the opposite side of the room, chipped in. ‘I was thinking the same thing. Your face is too small for big earrings.’ And then everyone in the room was staring at my earrings and my face and giving a running commentary. My friend sitting next to me leaned forward and said, ‘They’re pretty earrings and you have a pretty face.’ So that made the earring trauma easier to bear, but I couldn’t understand why I’d got it so wrong. Now I know what the problem was – too much width. It was as simple as that. One wrong earring move and an entire party will bring you down.

I learn I am medium scale with patterns too (good to know), that I have no constraints when it comes to coats, that my style is rooted in the equestrian (no surprise, I love horses), and that anything girly will just not work for me. This might go some way to explaining why my sister, who is very girly, can pull off a pretty little dress, whereas in the same outfit, I look like I’m auditioning for a part in a nursery rhyme.

So, what does all of this mean? Well, I’m a natural classic, a House of Colour style that is all about easy elegance, quality, smart / casual, well-groomed and casually classy. My personality is natural. My body is not – it requires simplicity, elegance and unfussiness. Karina says being a natural classic is about buying quality, too. Her advice to me. ‘Buy the best that you can afford,’ which makes me laugh because somehow, whatever I am doing or buying, I always end up choosing the most expensive item.

The other interesting thing about my style? Karina thinks there’s a little of the ingénue floating around too. By this, she means more feminine, which would explain why I love the pretty little dresses my sister wears. ‘You’re not an ingénue,’ she says. ‘But there’s something there, and you will need to experiment to find it.’ So, I’m a natural classic with a hint of ingénue. Wonderful. It confirms what deep down I think I already knew without knowing how to articulate it, and feels very much like me.

‘This is just the start,’ Karina tells me as I leave. And I’m not entirely certain, but I think she mentions something about now having the key, the secret. ‘Wasn’t that a song?’ I want to ask. But she’s already moved on. ‘There’s colour, architecture and character,’ she says. ‘Style is the cherry on top, and that can only come from you.’

I leave the consultation with a better understanding of what suits my body shape and personality. Things that I knew were wrong, I can now explain why they are wrong, which will be invaluable. I’m convinced I can make the right clothing choices for me, and while there’s still more work to be done on my style (it’s just the start, remember), now more than ever, I know I can find my way.

A year on, what’s changed?

A year after my style consultation and did I become a style icon and win an award for best dressed in Barnsley? Yes, of course I did. The editor of Vogue has just been on the phone demanding I’m on their next cover. Sorry, no. That’s not quite how it worked out. It’s been a slow process. Karina told me it would be, but there have been some significant steps forward. The main and most important one is my confidence with clothes and style choices. I’ve felt good in what I’ve been wearing, and that’s affected my mood, mindset, and how I show up in the world.

I know that simple works best for me and I don’t overthink it. I love wearing bold, bright colours, so I go with that, and for the first time in years, I’m excited about clothes again. Obviously, not as much as my sister (no-one could possibly be as excited about clothes as she is), and I’m still more excited by bookshops than fashion stores but I feel much more like the younger me, the one who shopped with her friends and focused on fashion. Now, though, it’s not about what’s in and what’s not. It’s about style. It’s about being me.

I’ve even had some compliments. ‘You’re looking colourful today, Liz,’ my colleague said when I met her in London recently. ‘You’re like Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat.’ I was wearing a bright blue jumper and indigo jeans with a brown belt, brown boots, a red mac and my multicoloured bag I bought from Karina, the one that makes me happy every time I look at it.

On the same day, another colleague told me I looked lovely. Another: ‘That’s a lovely coloured jumper.’

And my favourite, which happened on another day, this time when I was in a red jumper and jeans. ‘You always look very well put together’, which made me laugh because for a long time, putting myself together was an ordeal. Now picking outfits is fun again.

A year on, I am well and truly out of the fashion wilderness and finding my way. The confident twenty-and thirty-something who attacked the world and had her own style, well, I’ve found a new version of her, now forty-something, changed in many ways, but for the better.