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Friday, 3 August 2007

Style Can Be Learned

A few months back I received a message from my sister who lives in Australia saying that she'd run into an old school friend of ours and he'd asked her to apologise on his behalf for the way he treated me in high school - oh and the reason he treated me that way was because he liked me! I was somewhat flabbergasted after over 15 years (now I'm showing my age!) of not having seen or heard from this fellow. I suppose I'd chosen not to remember what had happened though it did affect me profoundly. In fact I fancied him too which made the whole situation fairly baffling. We'd known each other since a very young age so I was pretty shocked - and yes hurt - to find when my family relocated so we were attending the same school that he started a teasing campaign towards me. Being one of the more popular "cool" guys in the school it didn't take long for the other kids to follow suit - he'd known me from before so how would they know differently? In hindsight it makes sense and I don't hold any grudges against this guy, in fact as I said, I actually liked him as well.

Anyway I guess the question is, what does all this have to do with style?

As a result of this one person and his gang of friends treating me fairly cruelly I definitely lost a whole heap of self confidence - all this at a very confusing time of life - and really, who didn't struggle in some way at age 16? I might also say that I was always a little different looking to the other beach beauties (my mother very kindly said I was 'exotic' looking, I'm not so sure about that but I was certainly lacking the blond hair, blue eyes and long legs that many of my friends had!). I guess I equated these two factors to not being very attractive. And when boys did try to 'chat me up' I immediately assumed it was because they were trying to get to know my sister through me! Okay that wasn't actually the case but it's funny how we convince ourselves of things to try to explain what is going on.

It took me a good eight or ten years to turn that misconception around. Part of this turnaround came from having an extremely supportive and loving family, part of it probably came from just growing up, but the rest came as I educated myself about style. I'll not pretend this process happened overnight, real change rarely does seem to happen that quickly, but over the past seven or eight years the various lessons I've learnt have been absolutely invaluable. From simple things like what colours actually suit me physically, to more complex matters such as what colours to wear to boost my confidence in preparation for a particularly stressful situation. It's not rocket science but there are scientific, psychological and theoretical aspects to it which I believe everyone can be trained to use. And like anything, the more practise you get using these rules or theories, the better you get - I know I'm still learning.

However this is why I believe, no, I know style can be learned via methods such as having a style consultation or going on a personal shopping trip, and by doing so can improve how you feel about yourself. I know and believe it because I've been there.

Oh, and I'm really quite grateful to my old school crush for his teenage boy teasing - look where it got me in the end.

Author: Danièle Hromek

Tags: learning about style, fashion styling, personal styling, personal shopping, personal style