4 | How Your Style Can Open Doors with Imogen Lamport

Did you know that what you wear could be the key to unlocking career opportunities, promotions, and leadership roles?

In this episode of The Shannon Fox Show, I sit down with Imogen Lamport, an award-winning personal stylist and image consultant, to explore how your style and personal brand impact the way you’re perceived in the workplace.

With over 20 years of experience, Imogen has helped women express their personality, gain confidence, and stand out as leaders—all through style! She breaks down why style isn’t shallow, the psychology of color, and how to align your wardrobe with your career goals.

If you’ve ever wondered how to dress for success without sacrificing your personality, this episode is for you!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ Why style isn’t just about looks—it’s about confidence & influence

✔️ The psychology of color and how different colors impact perception

✔️ How to dress for leadership, promotions, and workplace credibility

✔️ The biggest wardrobe mistakes that might be holding you back

✔️ Quick, effortless style tips for busy working moms

Connect with Imogen Lamport & Grab Her Free Gift!

🎁 FREE GIFT: Style & Wardrobe Tips for Busy Working Moms → https://aopi.ac-page.com/mum-wardrobe

📲 Follow Imogen on Instagram → @insideoutstyleblog

Resources & Links:

🚀 Take the Mastery Zone Discovery Quiz HERE

📲 Follow Shannon on Instagram → @the.shannon.fox

📩 Join the Email List for Career Strategies & Updates HERE

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👉 Subscribe & leave a review so more career moms can discover these powerful style strategies!

Kat and Tanner by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org/

Transcript

Hello everybody, welcome. Today I'm so excited because we have Imogen Lamport here who is an internationally award-winning personal stylist and image consultant based in Melbourne, Australia.

She has 20 years of experience working with women, assisting them in creating an image that both expresses their personality and gets them promoted. She has been writing the style blog, Inside Out Style, which has become an encyclopedia of color and style tips for women since 2008. She's known for her insightful expertise on all topics of color, style, and personal branding.

She also has authored four books on image-related topics and is the mother of two grown-up kids, and still can't believe she's old enough to have grown-up kids, as well as two adorable whippets. I don't even know what whippets are. She's a lover of things that start with the letter C, including chocolate, champagne, and cashmere, my type of person.

Her husband says she works too hard, but she's so passionate about helping women feel empowered by using their image to communicate with impact that she's always looking for new ways to share and help her clients shine. Well, welcome Imogen. 

Thank you so much for joining us. No problem, thank you for having me, and a whippet is a small greyhound.

Okay, okay, I'm like learning all new things here, that's awesome. So for those in our audience who may not have heard of you yet, can you give us a little bit about your story and what brought you to this career path that you have? Sure, so growing up, I used to, you know, make a lot of my own clothes because my mother was a bit cheap. She didn't want to like buy anything for me, so I used to go babysitting, earn a bit of money, go down to the haberdashery store, buy whatever was in the remnant bin, and make apiece of clothing.

And I'd spend hours making something and it would look terrible. And I go, like the lady on the pattern, she looks so good in this, and I just look like the side of a house. And I'm thinking, well, what is it about my body that means that this isn't working for me? And then I might make something else, a different style, and that would work.

And I go, it's interesting that this works and that doesn't work, and I wanted to know why. And I had other experiences, like I always remember going shopping with a friend of mine when we were about 16, and we went into the local department store. We both picked up the same dress in the same size, and we were about the same height and, you know, size and everything, and we both tried it on.

And she was like, this is amazing, this is so great, how do you look? And she whipped back the curtain on my dressing room, and I remember like going, it's horrible, I look terrible. And, you know, I just wanted the ground to open up and eat me. And I remember thinking, why is it that she looks good and I look terrible? 

So it wasn't that the dress was essentially bad, it just wasn't right for my body. And so it made me realize that there's something about, you know, different bodies and what suits different bodies. And I wanted to know that why. And that's kind of what set me down that path, kind of from those teenage years.

And it was just, I stumbled across an image consultant giving a talk once. And I was with a friend, and, you know, we were talking about color afterwards. And they had this big poster up of different people and different colors.

And my friend said, I can never figure out what I am. And I just looked at one, I think you'd be one like that. And this image consultant overheard me, she goes, wow, you've got a really good eye for color.

Have you ever thought about becoming an image consultant? And it was like, I didn't even know this thing existed. I didn't even know you could do this. And I didn't know you could get training.

And it suddenly, it was like everything I had been searching for, is like here it was. And I could do training, and I could become an image consultant. And I could, and I'd always wanted to start my own business as well.

So I knew in uni, I was like, one day, I'm going to run my own business. I didn't know what it was going to be. But I wanted to do that. And so it was like, all my worlds collided. And here I am 20 years later. 

I love that. That is awesome. It's just all everything collided. So can you start off by telling us like,why style matters? And I mean, because is it shallow to think that it matters? It's not shallow.

And in fact, I think back to my childhood. So I wore a lot of my brother's hand-me-down clothes when I was young, and all other people's things that my mother would get given.

And I remember somewhere around the age of 10, I didn't own a lot of clothes. I wore a school uniform, so I didn't need much. And I had one pair of shorts, and there was this pair of navy shorts with a red pocket and a white pocket on the front. But they look like back pockets, like they're the shape of the back pocket.

And I hated them. I mean, apart from they were made from some disgusting 1970s synthetic. But I really did not want to wear them because I thought people will think that I don't know how to put my pants on the right way around because I've got the back pockets on the front.

And I realized that it made me not want to go out, not want to see friends, not want to do anything. And what I was wearing was affecting how I was feeling. And it was affecting my confidence.

And it was affecting just everything about me and how I behaved in the world. And so even from that really young age, you know, I became aware that what we wear affects us in many ways. And so many women tell me how they lack confidence or how they wish they felt more put together.

And if they're thinking about what they're wearing, they're not concentrating on the activity that they're doing. And, you know, this is why people talk about good hair days and bad hair days. That's just your hair affecting how you're feeling, let alone everything else.

And so really it's not shallow at all. Our clothes are the things between us being naked and the world. They really do. You know, like they're the closest thing to our skin. They are on our skin. They touch us.

And they're actually personal expression. People often say to me things like, oh, does it, nobody notices what I wear or does it matter what I wear? I said, well, if it doesn't matter and nobody notices, why don't you wear a clown suit to work tomorrow? Oh, so you told me people do notice what you wear. That's not, you know, expressing who you are.

So this is where like, and I'll always remember a friend of mine who is a New Zealander who'd gone through the earthquakes there they had some years ago. And she'd gone to work and she was a policewoman. She'd gone to work in a uniform.

Her house had been destroyed by the earthquake whilst she was at work. She could notgo home. She wasn't allowed in. It was like condemned. Too unsafe. So she had my clothes and she said, people were giving me clothes.

She said, but they weren't my clothes. And so I didn't feel comfortable wearing them. And as much as we may think, it doesn't matter what I wear or does anybody notice.

If you are suddenly, you know, your only choice of what to wear is a whole lot of things that have been given to you. Probably you'll actually go, no, I don't want to wear that.

And we've all had that experience where you're into a change room and you try something on and you think it's not me, but we don't know what me is. And that's what I give my clients. I explained to them because there's actually a science behind understanding what me is, but it's something we're never taught at school. And so this is something that we all have to get up and get dressed every day in our entire lives.

And according to current research, we spend 150, $200,000 on clothes in our lifetime.

Wow. 

Yet most of us wear 10 to 20% of that. So you think about that 80% of what we are spending is potentially wasted money. So I like to think about what I'm doing is helping people become, you know, more thoughtful, more sustainable, more conscious and saving them a ton of money in their lifetime. I can tell you that probably most of my clothes in my closet are not being worn.

If I did that backwards hanger and what I wore through the year, there's just certain pieces that I just am drawn to. And that's what I wear. And the other ones are like, eh, that's okay.

So part of it, what it is, is the learning why the things you like are the things you like, and then why you shouldn't buy those other things. Because you know, you've got more money for the things you like or other things to do, you know, holidays and other fun experiences. 

Definitely. Definitely. So we have a lot of career women that are listening to us. So what advice would you give them to kind of express their personality, even with maybe work appropriate clothes, or even, you know, with the dress codes that many companies have, how can they go in and still feel confident and express themselves in those environments? 

So part of it is understanding what that dress code might be, if it's more corporate, say, you know, there's a certain kind of level of refinement we want to wear, but it's still going, how do I do it in a way that feels like me.

And so part of this is understanding what is it like about pieces of clothing. So it could be looking at some of the garments you own, that you wear, that you love, and then working out what is, what you actually love about those pieces of clothing. Is it the color? Is it the pattern? Is it the fabric? Is it the comfort level? Is it that it's versatile and you can dress it up and down? Is it, you know, the way it feels on your body? Is it the way it makes you look? All those sorts of things.

Because once we understand what it is that floats our boat, it's then much easier to go, okay, well, how can I look for something else that has that? Like, for example, I had one client, she was a lawyer, and she hated the kind of corporate, boring corporate law, kind of classic suit sort of thing. And she said, oh, look, I'm thinking about quitting law because I just can't stand wearing this stuff. And I said, oh, you know, so we were talking about what she did love, and she loved much more feminine clothing.

And I said, if you've got anything in your wardrobe that you don't mind, work, you know, wearing to work. And she said, actually, I've got one suit. And she brought it out and she showed me.

And the difference was, rather than just being a straight kind of masculine classic suit, it was like, it was a straight skirt, but had a little flippy hem. Then the jacket had a little peplum at the back. And then where the pocket flaps were, they were actually shaped into bows.

So it just had that little bit of feminine feel. It still was a suit, it still suited that environment. But it made her feel more like her. And so sometimes it's looking at, well, what are the things that I love? And how can I bring that into whatever is the dress code? That's going to help me get ahead. That's going to express what I wanted to do. So another way to think about it is to think about it like, if you were making the movie version of you in your life, what would the costume designer put on you? 

Oh, I love that. 

So really, costume is such an incredibly powerful part of any story. And I remember talking to someone who was in the industry, and I was saying, like, one of the first things you see is what the person looks like and what they're wearing, because it has such an impact. Like, we can immediately, you know, like, you know, create stereotypes of people by costume.

You know, I want to make someone look like a nerd. Well, I might put, you know, oh, definitely they'll be wearing glasses, you know, pretty much. You know, like, and then there'll be some other kind of signs, and it might be the pants are too short, or that, you know, like, there's a bunch of things, and that says nerd to us.

And so, you know, you think about it, this is a shorthand to explain what's going on in someone's life. And so, you know, what's the first thing that happens when we get sick or tired? It's like grooming ghosts. Can we be bothered to groom or dress well when we'resick or tired? No.

And so, therefore, kind of that poor level of grooming says to other people, because we know that's the first thing that goes, it goes, oh, maybe they're not coping terribly well. Maybe their life is not together. Maybe they're just teetering on the edge.

And so, therefore, will I give them promotion? Probably not, because I don't know if they could handle anything more. Now, it could just be you think nobody notices and nobody cares. But in fact, I can't tell you how many managers have told me that they have amazing people in their teams, but they can't promote them because of what they look like.

Wow. And it's not, you know, innate beauty. It's just personal presentation.

Right. Right. Yeah.

They just don't present themselves as a leader. Yeah. As a leader, they don't represent the company brand.

So if you think about that, if you're working for a business, you're a representation of that brand. And there's a certain point where if you're going to be interacting with people outside of the business, that you have to be representing that brand. And if you don't look like that brand, it's very hard to promote you, even though you may do amazing work and be completely capable of it.

So sometimes it's this awareness of just how much what we're wearing and how we're appearing is communicating to the outside world. I mean, the current research shows that when one tenth of a second, we decide how likable, trustworthy, dominant and competent you are. 

Oh, wow.

I mean, that's pretty fast, isn't it? Yeah, it is very fast. So, you know, they used to say, oh, you've got 30 seconds to make a first impression or eight seconds or seven seconds. It's like, no, it's one tenth of a second.

And then we filter everything through that lens that we've made that decision on because our brains, there's so much information coming through. Our brains are looking for shortcuts to make decisions. And appearance is one of those shortcuts.

Yeah. So I've heard before that color plays a role as like there's power colors and everything else. Could you dive into that? Like if you were going on an interview and you wanted to come across as super powerful or let's say you had a presentation in front of a big room of people, would there be a specific color that would I mean, obviously you said something that makes you comfortable, but are there colors that show that power?

There's all sorts of different things.What's really so this relates to the psychology of color and which is fairly universal, interestingly, and that's because most of color psychology comes from nature, which means you actually know it all already. So we think about a nice blue sky, a sunny day, a nice blue sky. How does it make us feel? It's safe, secure.

Trust me, I won't rain on you. You don't need your umbrella. This is why blue in every study has come up as the world's favorite color.

More people will say blue is their favorite color than any other color because that is the color of the sky on a nice day, isn't it? A massive big black thundercloud comes along.

How do we describe that? Ominous, threatening, intimidating. So that's what black is. It's not safe and friendly. It's ominous and threatening. So it's a power color, but it's not making people want to get to know you.

When we think about where's green, when nature's abundant, there's a lot of green. So green is very calming, very reassuring, makes you feel good. You don't have to store my nuts for the winter because there's lots of food around.

Everything's good. If we think about colors like red, where's red? It's like it's a ripe tomato, it's a ripe strawberry, which says pick me and eat me right now. So it's an action-taking color.

It's blood. Do I have to do something? And so red stimulates us and makes us do things. And this is why red is often known as a power color because it stimulates us and makes us do things.

So if you're in a boardroom and you want to have attention, wear some red. You don't have to wear head to toe red. Too much of any color could become this positive and negative associations with every color.

So a small amount is good. Head to toe is often too much. So when we think about red, you want to stimulate people and make them take action or make them notice you because you will pop. Wear some red. 

So blue is the trust me color. So navy is, there's some research that shows if you wear navy to a job interview, you are more likely to get the job than any other color because it's seen as trustworthy.

But if you're going for a job in a creative environment, navy is seen as a bit boring and corporate. So this is where it's always dependent on the situation and where you're going and what you're doing. So often we want maybe a combination of colors.

We can have navy and red, trustworthy but stimulating. So we want to see as creative, what are colors that are creative? Well, what I think is non-traditional. So we think abouttraditional business colors.

It's black, white, gray, navy, light blue, white. So we think about, well, if I want to be seen as non-traditional creative, maybe I'll be going in purple and green or something that you just go, oh, that's kind of unexpected and different. So really depends on what we want to do and what mood we want to evoke in people, but different colors will have different impacts.

I love that. I love it. I love to wear pink personally. So I don't know what that says about me, but I could dress head to toe in pink probably.

Depends on the sort of pink. So a very light, soft pink is much more soft, feminine, gentle, nurturing. A hot pink actually has red energy. So it is much more stimulating and forceful and vibrant and dynamic. So it really can depend on what version of pink you're wearing.

I like my hot pink. I like to wear hot pink and black. So yes, I love the pop of pink against the black.

So there you go. So what advice can you give us about just buying basics, like for your whole wardrobe that are not relevant to most working women? So the thing with basics is that not everybody needs all the basics. We're often told, oh, everybody needs a pair of black pants and a black dress and a trench coat and a white shirt.

I can tell you, I have thrown all those things out of so many wardrobes because they're not getting worn. Really, what we want is the clothes that work for us and our personality and what our preferences are. So, you know, some people love to wear dresses and other people would never wear them, you know, unless it's a formal wedding.

Some people love wearing pants and other people will never wear them. You know, like there is no one thing that we need. So part of it is looking at what's our life and our lifestyle, what kind of clothes we like to wear, and even if we want basic basics.

So there are very basic basics, which are the very plain, nothing going on sort of things, which are often touted as things everybody needs to own. Yet, I mean, you know, I like to have what I call non-boring basics, where even in something plain, like say the shirt I'm wearing today, it's got little kind of pleats down the arm. So it's not completely plain.

It's not a boring basic. It depends how you wear your clothes. If you are someone who's cold and you have to layer up a lot, you may need plainer things because it's hard if you've got a weird sleeve or something to put it into a jacket or a layer of something over the top.

But if you're someone who runs hot, you might actually find all I need is very interesting pieces because I don't like, I don't put things over the top. So I need my outer, you know, whatever layer I'm wearing to be the interesting layer. And so maybe I need to buy things that have, you know, built-in detail.

Now, some of us like to wear a bit of jewelry, which I'm a big fan of, as you can tell, but other people don't. So like, so if you like to wear jewelry, you maybe don't want as much excitement in the clothes, but you want more, you know, so you can layer on the jewelry. Versus if you're someone who goes, I could never be bothered to put on a piece of jewelry or, you know, it's just, you know, not something I think about, or it annoys me, like it irritates me, then you want to think about, can I look for clothes that have built-in detail, particularly in what I call the portrait area? Because that then draws attention up to your face, but means you don't have to do anything else.

So this is where like basics, it's a bit of a, you know, like white shirts, like that comes from back in the corporate world when everything was really formal. And, you know, in this day and age, we don't need a white shirt, you know, not unless it's something you really enjoy. Not unless it's something you really enjoy.

And I've actually had a lot of people dye their white shirts into much better colors. And then they could actually end up wearing them. Versus the white shirt was just like, it just says to me, laundry. And I don't need more of that. 

No, no, no. 

So let's talk a minute about your freebie that you have for everybody, the style and wardrobe tips for busy working moms.

And there will be a button below this video for them to download. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So I just put together a bunch of tips to help you kind of create a wardrobe, think about what you need in it.

And like when you've got young kids, how to get out of the house looking clean, instead of covered in banana hands. I always remember the number of times I kind of like, you know, banana leaves that little white everywhere. And just, you know, tips to think about how to create a versatile wardrobe, wardrobe capsules and putting things together.

Because, you know, you know, when we're busy, what we want is something that's versatile. We want our things to mix and match. We don't want to have to think too much.

And particularly when your kids are young, you don't have much time for yourself. And so, but this is where, you know, to make your wardrobe as easy as possible, but still feel good. Because often, particularly when we go through the kind of pregnancy and then birth and young babies and we lose ourselves, you know, suddenly it becomes about everybody else and never about you.

And so it's, you know, working out how to kind of bring you back in. So you still feelcomfortable and you still like feel like you, but it may be a bit more comfortable and practical. And, you know, like when you might be used to who you are and that even going through to, you know, like, even if you're going through to retirement, retirement is a whole nother aspect of style that we have to completely reassess our lifestyle and what we're because suddenly we don't need that corporate uniform anymore.

That seemed really easy, but has now, you know, something that's kind of disappearing. So yeah. So lots of tips in there, um, just to help you think about your wardrobe and what works for you and what you like and building a wardrobe, all those sorts of things.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I know I personally have learned a lot and I know our listeners have as well.

So thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Thanks.