Where to find Fashion Inspiration
1 Professional Stylists
I would like to start with the most popular first step everyone makes searching for an inspiration. Of course, you can learn a lot from stylists who generously share their fashion tips on blogs or YouTube channels - how to systematize your clothes, how to have less items with greater variety of good looking combinations, how to be trendy and look fresh, where to go shopping and save time and money, where to hunt for rare vintage items or discover new names of young and promising designers.
Let me share the one I really like, for those who speak Russian - Margarita Muradova, a brilliant stylist from Ukraine with a successful inspirational YouTube channel. And just look how variegated one person can be expressing herself via clothes:
2 Street Fashion Photography
But truth to say my real love to fashion started not with tips of a stylist, but after discovering The Sartorialist blog of the famous fashion photographer, Scott Schuman. He opened my eyes and life was never the same since. The blog posts are mostly photos of random, or sometimes not random, beautiful and beautifully dressed people from streets of different cities and countries. There you can see how fashion works in real life, not in theory, not on a runway or in a fashion magazine. You can see all the creativity and diversity in fashion that people, not necessarily professional fashion designers, can produce to express themselves.
3 Blogs about aesthetics
There are many! But let me show you just one. That should really be enough!
https://convoy.tumblr.com/ (the archive)
4 Fashion Literature
Inspirational TOP 4 from me:
Love. Style. Life by Garance Doré. This charming book by fashion blogger Doré is part memoir and part style guide, gathered together in a chic, Gallic-inflected package.
Peter Lindbergh. A different vision on fashion photography. Unique fashion storytelling that first launched the supermodels.
Haute Couture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Richard Harrison Martin. Tailoring and dressmaking techniques as well as the decoration produced by embroiderers, beaders, lace makers, feather workers, and other craftspeople are discussed in the explanatory text. No bibliography.
Contemporary Fashion, by Taryn Benbow. Includes coverage of more than 450 designers, milliners, footwear designers, fashion companies and textile houses.
5 Vogue Runway App
If you want to see a bit ahead and be prepared for future trends, try to follow the most famous fashion designers and their latest collections. As you know, what appears on runways, later transforms to worldwide fashion. Vogue Runway application is the best tool I could find to explore upcoming haute couture collections almost in real time. Look, I’ve picked a few fresh looks for you from the year 2022:
Download Vouge Runway application for iPhone
6 Artists of all genres
Creative minds are sensitive and impressionable. They see the beauty of our world with a vengeance. This ability helps them to do their primary art and moves them further beyond in creativity of other kinds. Musicians play musical instruments and are good at writing lyrics, painters are often good photographers, architects can be so great at product design. Good taste and aesthetic visual baggage make them all good at fashion too. Just look at glasses architects choose to wear - always the most fashionable ones!
This is my personal TOP 4 of the most fashionable and inspiring musicians - Wooze, Aurora, Pond and Devendra Banhart. Their music is as exceptionally beautiful as their appearance.
7 Nature
Everything that you can find in nature is natural, right? :) And cannot be wrong! I don’t believe those, who say you should not combine green and red or yellow and orange in one outfit. Same way I don’t believe they cannot enjoy the beauty of a red flower on a green stem or a texture of a peach or apple skin. The time has already come to get rid of old stereotypes, and let ourselves to be free curious observers of our beautiful world which appears endlessly inspirational!
8 Architecture
This could be probably the least obvious source of fashion inspiration, but for me personally it still works well. While having a walk alone around Prague, the city I currently live in, I spend some time looking at facades of beautiful medieval or contemporary buildings and often notice nice combinations of colors, forms, proportions and textures. I try to imagine how it can be applied to clothes and accessories. Try the same! You should come up with interesting conclusions of how many more options you have in your wardrobe to create a good looking outfit.
