Is it shallow to be concerned about your appearance?

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I'm very focused on my clothing, knitting things to flatter me and fashion in general. I like to think of myself as a person with solid values (don't we all) so sometimes my concern with my outward appearance strikes me as shallow and slightly foolish.

I'm working on a talk I'll be giving about body image in the spring so this topic has been running around in my brain for weeks. I'm one of those people who mulls things over for far to long but then has the satisfying result of having solutions, answers or decisions pop into my head while I'm doing some totally unrelated thing. Today at lunch I realized that one of the most important things that comes to me from this focus is happiness. Wearing nice things makes me happy. Research shows that due to emotional contagion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion me being happy isn't a totally selfish pursuit. If I'm happy I can make others happy.

I work in an office of mainly men. I get a lot of compliments on my clothes here especially on the amount of colour I wear. I work on Bay St. which is the heart of the financial district in Toronto. Most women in this industry wear all neutrals, black being the most common. Dark dull eggplant is risque so I'm a rainbow compared to the standard. One of the guys in my office takes great delight in calling me "pumpkin" every time I wear my bright orange suede jacket to work. The pun of the colour and an endearment totally cracks him up because I'm always teasing him I'm going to complain to H.R. about his inappropriate behaviour to women.

The other men in my office won't use post it notes in any other colour than the standard yellow - except for our CFO. He goes searching for post it's that match the colour I'm wearing when ever he gives me a note and says I should order more colours into the office for him to use. A few weeks ago he came back from a lunch time shopping trip and proudly showed me the stack of colourful golf shirts he just bought on sale. He announced that I was no longer going to be the only one in the office wearing a great colour as he plans to wear one every dress down Friday with his jeans to challenge my status as the only one here brave enough to wear colour. That made me laugh and it made me happy too!

5 Tips on How to Become Your Own Fashion Stylist

Make it Flatter

Do you want to learn how to look better and choose more flattering clothing? I have some tips here to get you started.


1 Read some of the books that professional stylist's publish. You don't need to buy them just go to the library. When you find one that really works for you buy that one and read it more than once. There is a lot of detail in those books.


2 Look for the books with real women photo's. It will be much easier to find bodies with figure flaws similar to yours if you are not looking a fashion drawings or photo's of beautiful celebrities.


3 Look at celebrity women but not the ones who look like Charlize Theron. Look at people like America Ferrara (dressed as herself and then compare to her Ugly Betty persona), Oprah Winfrey or Hilary Clinton. These are women with real bodies who look good.


4 Remember that dark colours other than black can also be slimming and that they are not quite so drab. Consider navy, brown, dark green, charcoal and burgundy.


5 Notice that jeans come in different colours as well as shades. When you are choosing tops to wear with your jeans think about the complete outfit. Denim is a neutral but it's one that still calls for a little extra co-ordination. You can treat dark wash jeans as though they are navy for harmonious colour matching. You could also invest in black or white jeans to expand your wardrobe.