What is personal fashion "style"?

So many women have a natural ability to create their own distinctive style without too much fuss and bother. It's almost as though they were born with the knowledge.

Others, like me, take years to discover the basics of good dressing. It like a light goes on in our head, and we yell, yes, as though we've just discovered gold at the end of the rainbow.

And finding that you have the intelligence to formulate your own style comes as another surprise, because if you're like me, people have laughed at you and told you you don't even know the first thing about dressing properly.

I find it increasingly annoying that it is women who make these remarks, it's almost as though they enjoy seeing you cringe. And if we're told often enough that we don't know the first thing about mixing and matching or co-ordinating, that we begin to believe them. And that's a foolish thing to do, because they then think their opinion is better than ours. And that's not the case, because from what I've learned over the years, we already have the knowledge sitting in the deep recesses of the mind, and it's only a matter of reading, studying and then applying what seems to make a lot of sense to the way we dress and choose our clothes, for us to find our own personal "style".

Following a number of requests, I'm drawing up a small supplement, "50 Classic Fashion Items" for the readers of RoseMary's NoteBook© This together with the supplement "Making Fashion Work for You", will give you a great basis towards finding your personal style.

......© Rosemary Parry-Brock