Baby, where the hell has my style gone?

What if your style isn’t the problem?

In Episode 3 of Not Your Size, Amy explores what happens when we stop chasing fashion rules and start paying attention to ourselves instead. From “dressing for your body type” and endlessly buying clothes for a future version of yourself, to the pressure of keeping up with trends and never repeating an outfit, this episode is a reminder that personal style should feel like self-expression, not self-correction.

Amy shares practical tips for curating your social media feeds for inspiration rather than comparison, understanding how clothing makes you feel, and building a wardrobe around pieces you genuinely love wearing. Because finding your style isn’t about becoming more fashionable, it’s about becoming more yourself.

Transcript

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Fashion has always told women who deserves to be seen. This podcast asks why. Welcome to Not Your Size. I'm Amy Abrahams, the woman behind Wear the Damn Dress, and founder and director of Size Inclusive Runway, Revel the Runway based in Canberra. And today I want to talk a little bit about style rules, particularly for us plus size fashion peeps. I think a lot of women have spent so long trying to dress correctly that they've completely lost touch with what they actually like. Does that sound familiar to you? Somewhere along the way, getting dressed stopped being creative and started becoming strategic. Hide this, slim that, lengthen this, minimize that, dress for your shape, dress for your age, dress to look smaller, dress to look flattering. And babes, we're done with that. I'm going to start this episode with something quite controversial and say race for it. You don't actually need more clothes. The dopamine of buying lots of new things is short term, trust me. And you're left standing in front of a wardrobe overflowing with clothing and still feeling like you have absolutely nothing to wear. Here's why that might be. It's because so much of what's sitting in our wardrobes was never really bought for the life or body that we have now. And if it was, it was only ever designed to be temporary. It was bought for the version ourselves we thought we were supposed to become. The jeans we'll wear when we lose weight, or the jeans we've kept because we think we're going to go back into them. The trend piece we panic bought because everyone online had it. The sale item we convinced ourselves was practical, even though it never really felt like us. The thing we ordered online and it got delivered, and it never really fit us properly, but it didn't matter because it was cheap. And over time, wardrobes become cluttered. They become cluttered with guilt, with fantasy, and with obligation instead of clothes that we genuinely love wearing. I honestly believe that personal style becomes much clearer when you stop trying to build a wardrobe for five different versions of yourself and start paying attention to what you consistently reach for already and what you're drawn to when you see it being worn on others. Wardrobe clear outs are a really powerful way of starting to refine your personal style. And one of the ways that I encourage my clients, because I am an accredited stylist, to start clearing out their wardrobes is to really assess each item about why it is that you have kept it and what it's doing for you if it stays in your wardrobe. So there are pieces, for example, that might not fit you anymore, but they have sentimental value. So that could include a dress that you wore to your high school formal or your prom if you're listening from the US. It could be a particular garment that belonged to somebody important to you. It could hold a really special memory, and that's okay. You should keep those things, whether they fit you or not. But maybe look at getting them preserved or put somewhere lovely, put them in some sort of box or something that's going to preserve the memory and let you keep them without them cluttering up your wardrobe. The second type of categories are things that we keep because we think we should. So that is things like, well, it still technically fits me, but I don't really love it or wear it. Every time I put it on, it doesn't feel right. But because it technically fits me, I don't think I should get rid of it. Those are the pieces that I absolutely recommend if in a six-month period you set yourself a challenge to wear them. And if you don't, donate them, resell them, give them to somebody who's going to get joy out of them that's not you because they're not doing any good sitting in your wardrobe. And then there's the category of pieces that have been sitting there that you are using as motivation. And I hate these pieces deeply. I hate these pieces deeply because I had a wardrobe full of motivation. After I had my first child, I had bags and bags of clothes that sat in the top of my wardrobe for years. For years. It took me until the birth of my second child to finally realize that I was never getting back into that size 12 pair of pants or that dress that was already snug before I'd had the babies. The bounce back body wasn't coming. And I was holding on to a lot of guilt and a lot of pieces that reminded me that I was failing in inverted commas to do what society expected me to do and get back to somebody smaller. One of the most freeing things I've ever done was getting rid of all of those clothes. I gave them to friends, I sold them online, I donated some to charity, but clearing those out and letting go was amazing because then what I was left with in my wardrobe was pieces that fit me and pieces that I enjoyed wearing and that helped me start to rediscover what it was that my personal style was. Whether we realize it or not, social media helped shape our understanding of beauty, style, and even what feels acceptable to wear. And I think a lot of us are consuming content that constantly makes us feel behind, inadequate, or like our body needs fixing before we can participate in fashion. In a world where mainstream fashion doesn't want to inspire us, we've got to get creative ourselves. And for those who don't know, where the damn dress was started, because I realized my social media made me feel rubbish. And I wanted a completely fresh account that inspired me as I was. I wanted to follow and to find people who actually gave me a boost and helped me to feel comfortable and confident as the person I was right now, not the person that I thought I was constantly trying to work to be. One of the most powerful things you can actually do for your style is to curate your social media feeds intentionally. Follow a diverse range of people with different bodies. Bodies that look like yours, bodies that don't. People who are older, younger, with different skin colors, different abilities. The more diversity our brains see around us, it is easier to accept our own bodies. That is a fact. Follow people whose style genuinely excites you instead of just impressing you or making you feel like this is something that you should aspire to. See where they're getting their pieces from. See the different ways that they build and repeat outfit combinations. Save outfits that make you feel something emotionally, not just outfits that you think are technically fashionable. And, and this is important, unfollow accounts that leave you spiraling into comparison or shame. Because if your feed constantly makes you feel worse about yourself, it's not inspiration anymore, it's self-surveillance, and it is going to sabotage you exploring your style. When you wear outfits, start paying more attention to how the clothes actually feel and how you feel when you wear them. We've been taught to really evaluate our clothing almost entirely based on the visual. Does this make me look slimmer, younger, taller? Is this more flattering? But I actually think one of the most important style questions is really much simpler. How do I feel when I wear this? Because your body usually knows before your brain does whether something feels right for you. You know the difference between clothes that are digging in or that you're tugging at, or clothes that you forget that you're wearing because you feel so relaxed and confident in them. You know the difference between something that makes you stand taller versus something that makes you want to disappear into the background. And that emotional response really matters. Clothing affects posture, mood, confidence, and energy far more than people like to admit. Style isn't just about aesthetics, it's about alignment. You know that piece that you have that everyone compliments you on when you wear it. And I bet you feel amazing in that, visually, physically, and emotionally. Honestly, more of that, please. More refining the pieces that make you feel beautiful inside and out. And I know that sounds trite, and I know that sounds very twe, but the pieces that make you feel visually incredible, emotionally incredible, those are the things that are really going to lift and you're going to reach for them again and again in your wardrobe. Those are the cornerstones of your personal style. And personal style can evolve. Your personal style from when you're in your 20s can look different to your 30s, to your 40s, to your 50s, but also maybe it doesn't. Both of those things are okay. What isn't okay, I think, is when we don't pay attention to those different slides and changes as we go through. And it does affect us when we have all these pieces of clothing that just don't align and don't reflect who we are anymore. It's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater and getting rid of everything. You will have some really great staple pieces in your wardrobe that will adjust and grow and change with you, but it's about removing the clutter and the pieces that just don't feel right anymore. And on that, re-wearing the pieces that feel great on you is a smart choice. Social media has created this pressure for particularly women, I would say, to constantly appear new, new outfit, new trend, new aesthetic. Social media feeds are full of try-on hauls and new drops this week and new products this week, and here's this latest thing that I have. Somewhere along the way, we've started acting like repeating clothes was embarrassing instead of normal. But honestly, the most stylish people are actually incredibly repetitive. They know what works for them and they wear it consistently. They might have signature silhouettes, favorite jackets, trusted jeans, jewelry they wear every day, and outfits they've returned to over and over again because they feel good in them and because they work on their bodies. So if you've got, for example, a pair of jeans that fit you incredibly well, they feel really comfortable, they're the right style, the right size, the right shape, all of those sorts of things, you don't need to go and buy a new pair of jeans every season. You should wear what makes you feel great. And knowing what makes you feel great makes it so much easier to pick those pieces that you're going to go for again and again and again. There's something really freeing about giving yourself permission to stop chasing endless novelty and instead building a wardrobe around pieces that genuinely fit you well and align to your lifestyle. It's more cost-effective, it's better for the environment, and ultimately it's better for you. Because confidence doesn't come from having more clothes. Back to the very first topic of how often we stand in front of our wardrobes, confused and overwhelmed and not sure what to wear. More clothes doesn't help that. It comes from knowing yourself and what clothing you love better. I think finding your style has far less to do with trends than what we've been taught. It's actually about trusting yourself and noting yourself honestly, paying attention to what really makes you feel visible, comfortable, powerful, excited. What are the pieces that you look forward to grabbing out of your wardrobe and wearing out for the day? And more importantly, maybe most importantly, letting go of the idea that your wardrobe needs to transform you into somebody else, that you need to be visible only through what it is that you put on your outside. Style becomes much easier once you stop dressing for the person that you think you should be or the person that you're waiting to become. Start dressing for the person that you already are. There's nothing more powerful than that. Next episode, I want to chat about why we need straight-sized champions to move the dial on plus size fashion. It's an important conversation to have.