How To Look Current Without Looking "Fashion"

There’s nothing more annoying than seeing something you genuinely like becomes so recognisably a thing that wearing it feels a little….cringe.

You bought the shoes because you loved them. Then you saw them on Instagram and game over. By the time your own pair arrives, you feel less like you have bought shoes and more like you’ve joined a very well-dressed regional sales team.

This isn’t, incidentally, an argument against trends. I like trends, they’re fun to observe from a safe distance. I work in fashion; noticing what’s changing is quite literally part of the job and there’s something genuinely exciting about the moment an old proportion suddenly feels new again, or when a colour you have ignored for a decade begins making complete sense. Fashion would be unbearably dull if we all identified our timeless wardrobe at 28 and then spent the next 50 years replacing the moth-eaten cashmere.

But there’s a difference between letting fashion update your style and letting fashion temporarily replace it. Read that again.

After writing earlier this week about why the women with the best style rarely look particularly “fashion”, I realised that this is probably the bit worth unpacking. Because wearing whatever we like sounds wonderfully liberating until you’re standing in front of a mirror wearing a new skirt, a new shoe and a jacket you saw on six people last week, wondering why an objectively good outfit somehow feels like fancy dress. That doesn’t mean there’s necessarily anything is wrong, there may simply be too much now in one place.

Because the trick isn’t avoiding fashion, it’s controlling the dosage.

That, more than anything, is how the best-dressed women I know manage to look current without ever appearing as though they’ve dressed directly from a trend report. They filter….and this is how.