Resources 📚

  • Anuschka Rees' The Curated Closet – If you want to refine your personal style and curate a wardrobe that reflects it and is appropriate for your lifestyle, I highly recommend this book.

    How do you translate a Pinterest board of inspiration images into a collection of clothes you will actually wear? I break down the steps I use in my Inspiration to Outfits posts. The most popular one is Victorian Tea Party But Make it Athleisure.

  • This painting video by makoccino is not fashion specific, but a great demonstration on color pairing.

    Zoe Hong is a professional fashion illustrator who has a teaching channel on YouTube. She has a playlist of videos covering vocabulary for different styles of clothing and clothing features.

    Learning fashion vocabulary is helpful so that you can search for specific items more easily, e.g. "paper bag midi skirt with patch pockets" or "funnel neck coat". Her channel is amazingly informative if you're interested in the fashion design process and industry.

  • Jenny Lantz' The Trendmakers: Behind the Scenes of the Global Fashion Industry – A 2016 academic book (dry but still plenty readable) exploring the ecosystem that drives fashion trends, from fabric production to WGSN to influencers.

    Dana Thomas' Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster – "Once luxury was available only to the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty. It offered a history of tradition, superior quality, and a pampered buying experience. Today, however, luxury is simply a product packaged and sold by multibillion-dollar global corporations focused on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and, above all, profits. Award-winning journalist Dana Thomas digs deep into the dark side of the luxury industry to uncover all the secrets that Prada, Gucci, and Burberry don’t want us to know. Deluxe is an uncompromising look behind the glossy façade that will enthrall anyone interested in fashion, finance, or culture."

    WGSN and WWD – These are two trend forecasting sites/services whose target audience is professionals in the fashion industry. A lot of their stuff is paywalled, but you can usually get the gist of things from their Instagram posts or headlines.

    Vogue Runway – Whether your interest is in trend-watching or just admiring the creativity of clothing as art, Vogue Runway posts all the major fashion shows on their site.

    FF Channel – View full runway shows on YouTube

  • Anuschka Rees’s series of articles on how to determine whether any item of clothing is well-made.

    Alison Freer's How to Get Dressed – A practical book on all things clothes. Tips on how to shop for, maintain, and store different types of clothing as well as other situations like dealing with wardrobe malfunctions.

  • Blue Collar Red Lipstick – Adina is a lawyer, not a blue collar worker, but she lives in an area that most people would not generally consider a style mecca (hence the blog name). She almost exclusively thrifts all her clothes, and she has a very distinct, eclectic, yet polished style. This is a more casual, approachable hobbyist blog, but the outfits and insights themselves are still super sharp. She also does a lot of cool DIY and art projects. I'm particularly fond of her style philosophy of having multiple "style avatars".

    An Invincible Summer – If you enjoy my wardrobe round-up posts, Xin posts a similar (and usually much better-written than mine!) thoughtful summary of her clothing and beauty purchases each month. She also writes about personal finance and just anything else going on in her life.

  • #outfitrepeater – I don't know who started this one, but it has a lot of ‘regular-people’ outfit-diary accounts relatively to ‘person-as-a-brand’ outfit accounts

    #alwaysplaydressup – maximalist looks, or at least not #mybeigelife bloggers. Started by @bjonesstyle.

    #midsizestyle – the term is nebulous, but from what I can tell this generally is used by bloggers who are anywhere from about a size US 8 - 18.

    #ootdindepth – I started this hashtag in 2019 to easily find posts from people who write about what choices they made when putting together their Outfit Of The Day and how those affected the final look. It's a nice medium ground between the usual dump of context-less OOTD pics and long form blogs.