A running index of style exercises

Fall to me, is touch. Every season capitalizes on the senses in a new and fresh way.

• Summer is sight

• Winter is taste

• Spring is smell

• Fall is touch

• Hearing is all four

Fall marks the beginning of holding loved ones a second longer without sweat slipping you apart. Swaddling yourself deep into fabrics you pay for the indulgence of feeling.

This is my interpretation and of course, does not have to match your own. So for your style exercise of the week, as we breach the first week of September and Fall looms,

Think to yourself which senses do you identify most heavily with Fall. Then go to your wardrobe and choose three pieces that you correlate to that sensation.

• A sweater in your most favorite-to-feel fabric for the sense of touch

• A jacket in the same brown tone as your favorite cardamom bun for taste

Build three separate outfits you have never worn starting with each of those pieces.

In the spirit of contrast lets fine tune a way to play with it. '

Go to your wardrobe and identify your favorite type of clothing. Is it casual pieces? Knits? Patterned items? Clothes with robust color palettes? Choose one piece to start building your outfit around.

Now, choose your next piece based on something you’d identify as the opposite of your first piece. For example:

• Casual clothing / Formal clothing

• Summer clothes / Winter clothes

• Knitted pieces / Leather pieces

• Clubbing clothes / Office clothes

Then seesaw back and forth between these two styles, adding one piece, then another.

Next, add three accessories you don’t normally think of: a hat, socks, necktie, jewelry, stockings, brooches, handbags—something to remind you that an outfit can go beyond just a top, bottoms, and a jacket and see what new combinations reveal themselves.

We can’t talk about practicality without discussing its antonym: impracticality.

Often, when we’re trying to get dressed, we end up in an outfit that isn’t our style at all simply for the sake of getting out the door. But just as it’s important to learn how to build an outfit, it’s equally important to learn how to fix one.

Build an outfit using your most impractical and difficult-to-style pieces. There must be at least six different items in the outfit. This can include socks, bags, pants, jackets, anything, as long as there are six distinct pieces.

Now, instead of hating the outfit and tearing it all off, we’re going to work backwards. Remove one piece at a time, and replace it with its opposite, whether that’s in shape, fit, texture, color, or style.

Wearing a giant denim jacket? Swap it for a fitted blazer. In a tight midi skirt? Try pants, or a skirt of a different length or silhouette. Go piece by piece, and practice seeing the outfit as a sum of its individual compon

ents. Troubleshoot each one, and sharpen your skills in fixing a look, not just building it.

One of the things that can keep us stuck in a style rut is how we build our outfits. It usually goes like this:

You pick a pair of pants or a top, then you pick a top or a pair of pants to match. Add a jacket if it’s chilly, and boom — you hit a wall. What now?

When we start an outfit from the same place every day, whether that’s your shoe choice, or a pair of pants or a jacket, we’re setting ourselves up to fall down the same monotonous styling path every single time.

For this week’s style exercise, start your outfit from a place you never have before. This could be choosing a belt as your first piece, then moving on to a jacket and building from there. Maybe start from a makeup look that inspires the rest of your choices, or even a pair of socks.

Start from somewhere new. Then choose your next piece from the opposite end of your body. If you start with makeup, your next choice should be around the feet, and vice versa.

This will get you out of the styling rut where your next choice feels obvious. It’ll also force you to consider styling components you might have been overlooking. Components that can make your outfit feel way more intentional.

For this week’s style exercise, I want you to focus on patterns. What subconscious choices are you making, ones you might not even be aware of, that are forming the perception of you and your style?

Spend the next week documenting your outfits. It doesn’t have to be much! Just a quick mirror selfie saved to an album, and a sentence or two about how the outfit made you feel.

After seven days of tracking what you actually wear in real life, take a moment to identify your most common colors, textures, and shapes. What do you keep gravitating toward?

Then ask yourself, do I like these styling choices? Are they reflective of, or guiding me toward, the personal style I have envisioned for myself? Or, do these outfits feel like they’re going in the completely wrong direction?

We’ve discussed in the past how to do this by mixing dress codes, but this time we’re going to mix seasons.

Start at the bottom of the frame and choose a shoe that screams summer. Then move up a bit to your bottoms, where we’ll switch things up by choosing a winter piece. Move to the middle of the frame by pairing a fall-appropriate top. Finally, end with an accessory up top that’s perfect for spring.

You can play around with the order of your seasons—it doesn’t have to follow this exact sequence. Just make sure you’re mixing pieces that you feel a bit hesitant about at first, and see what new combinations emerge when you lean into some weather madness.