I Had 10 Years in Fashion and Still Got My Wardrobe Wrong

I spent ten years at Bloomingdale’s in New York. Every single day, I worked with color. I knew how to put outfits together, how to style a mannequin, how to make a window stop foot traffic on Fifth Avenue. And I read Women’s Wear Daily religiously. I loved fashion deeply and genuinely.

And when I opened my own closet — my closet, the one I’d been filling for a decade with the knowledge of someone who worked in the industry — nothing felt like me.

Not wrong, exactly. I always looked good. I knew how to do that. But there’s a question underneath “Do I look good?” that the fashion industry never taught me to ask. The question is: Do my clothes express who I really am? Do I feel at home in them?

That was what I was after. And I had no idea how to find it — until I did. What I discovered in the process became 40 years of work helping other women find the same thing. I’m 78 now. And I’ve never been more at home in my wardrobe than I am today.

Here’s what I learned.

Why Looking Good Isn’t the Same as Feeling Like Yourself

This is the distinction that changes everything, and almost no one talks about it directly.

Looking good is a technical skill. It’s proportion, fit, color contrast, silhouette. The fashion industry teaches it expertly. Stylists practice it. Magazines demonstrate it. And it works — you can absolutely look polished, put-together, even striking, while wearing clothes that have nothing to do with who you are.

Feeling like yourself is something else entirely. It requires knowing your pigmentation, your coloring, your personality, and what I call your soul’s journey — your inner light. These aren’t things you can learn from a magazine or a trend report. They require turning inward rather than outward. And most of us have been trained, from the very first time we got dressed and looked for external approval, to look outward.

The result is a closet full of clothes that reflect everything around you — the trends, the people you admire, the looks you’ve been told are flattering — and almost nothing of you.

Here’s how I know this is true for most women: when I ask clients to look at their wardrobe and tell me honestly how many pieces feel completely, unmistakably like them — not just acceptable, not just wearable, but theirs — the answer is almost always “a few.” Sometimes none.

All those other pieces didn’t get there by accident. They got there through a set of influences that had nothing to do with who you actually are. And until you identify those influences, you’ll keep buying from them.

The Three Wardrobes I Built That Weren’t Mine

I want to show you something personal, because I think it will help you see your own closet more clearly.

Before I found my true colors, I built three distinct wardrobes. All of them had logic behind them. None of them were me.

The first was my family wardrobe. These were essentially the colors and styles of the people I grew up around — my mother’s palette, the aesthetic of my family dynamic. I loved these people. I absorbed their colors as the standard for beauty without ever realizing I’d done it. When I look at those vision boards now, I can feel the busyness of it against my coloring — the way it distracts from my face rather than illuminating it. But for years, I couldn’t see that. I was too close to it.

The second wardrobe came from a belief I carried for a long time: that I was too much. Too intense, too stark, too Winter. So I softened everything — reached for muted tones, quieter palettes, colors that would make me seem more approachable, less overwhelming. The result was a wardrobe that aged me and depressed me every time I wore it. I put hundreds — eventually thousands — of dollars into that wardrobe. It never worked. Because it was built on a lie I’d accepted about myself.

The third wardrobe came from growing up as the only girl with five brothers. I wanted to develop my competitive edge, my masculine energy. So I dressed for that — harder lines, stronger colors, a palette that read as authoritative. My eye color showed up in those pieces, but nothing else did. They were irrelevant to me. Technically connected to my coloring, but missing everything that made my coloring mine.

The Cost of Three Borrowed Wardrobes

Three wardrobes. Significant money. Years of getting dressed every morning and feeling, underneath the polish, like I was wearing somebody else’s story.

Then I found the Winter palette — the moonlight — and I came home.

The Conversation Running Your Wardrobe Right Now

Here’s something I want you to sit with: your wardrobe isn’t being built by your taste. It’s being built by a conversation happening in the background of every shopping trip you take.

That conversation almost always takes one of two forms.

The first is I’m not enough. Not successful enough, not professional enough, not taken seriously enough, not powerful enough. When this is the conversation running your choices, you compensate by dressing stronger than your actual colors — reaching for black, for stark contrast, for the visual weight of authority. You borrow the Winter palette when you’re a Summer. Or you cover the Spring’s whimsy with something more serious. You dress to project power you don’t yet feel, using colors that were never meant to be yours.

The second is I’m too much. Too intense, too strong, too loud, too dramatic, too much to handle. When this is the conversation, you hide. You mute your colors, soften your palette, choose pieces that make you smaller and less visible. The Autumn who tones down her richness. Or the Winter who borrows warmth from other seasons to seem less distant. The result is the same in both cases: a wardrobe built to manage a story about yourself rather than express who you actually are.

Go back to your closet and look at it with that lens. What conversation built those pieces? Not which ones do you love — which ones were bought to fix something? Which were bought to prove something? Which were bought because you were trying to be enough, or trying to be less? Those pieces aren’t wardrobe failures. They’re information. They tell you exactly what you’ve been carrying, and exactly what you’re ready to put down.

The Two Questions That Should Replace Everything Else

Here’s what I want to give you in exchange for all the questions you’ve been asking that haven’t been working.

Stop asking “Do I love it?” Love, by itself, is not a reliable filter — because we love what we’re attracted to, and we’re attracted to what we’ve been conditioned to find beautiful. That conditioning has gotten most of us nowhere useful.

Stop asking “Does it look good?” Looking good is too low a bar. You can look good in the wrong colors for a decade. I did.

Ask these two questions instead:

Does this make me look alive?

Hold the piece up near your face and look honestly. Does your skin look more luminous or more flat? Do your eyes brighten or dim? Does your face come forward or recede? Alive is the standard — not flattering, not polished, not appropriate. Alive. Radiant. Like the light in you is being amplified rather than muted.

Will this help me build my future?

This question sounds simple and contains everything. It asks whether the piece is oriented toward who you’re becoming or anchored in who you’ve been performing. It asks whether it serves your actual life and your actual purpose — or whether it serves a role, a fear, or someone else’s idea of who you should be.

These two questions, applied consistently, will do more for your wardrobe than any trend report, any shopping formula, or any style rule you’ve ever followed. Because they’re asking the only thing that actually matters: does this serve the real you?

How To Start Building a Wardrobe That Feels Like Home

The process doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start here:

• Identify the conversation. Before you touch a single piece in your closet, ask: was this built from “I’m not enough” or “I’m too much”? Name the story. That naming alone shifts the energy of every decision that follows.
• Find your inner light. The four seasonal archetypes — Sunlight (Spring), Twilight (Summer), Firelight (Autumn), Moonlight (Winter) — each carry a distinct energetic signature written into your physical coloring. Take the Seasonal Essence Quiz to begin identifying yours.
• Create your vision boards. Look at imagery for each season and notice what feels animated versus dull versus alive versus off-key. You’re looking for the board where your face lights up rather than disappears — where you feel recognition rather than aspiration.
• Ask the two questions at every decision point. Does this make me look alive? Will it help me build my future? Let those replace every other filter you’ve been using.
• Let go of what isn’t yours. What doesn’t work for you works beautifully for someone else. Releasing it isn’t loss — it’s good stewardship and, more importantly, it makes room for what’s actually meant to be there.

Your Wardrobe Is a Homecoming

Your wardrobe is meant to be a homecoming. Not a performance, not a projection, not a daily negotiation with a closet full of other people’s stories. A return to yourself.

You are whole and complete. You are, right now, a work of art — whether your wardrobe reflects that back to you yet or not.

The work is simply this: learning to see yourself clearly enough that your choices begin to match what’s actually there. That clarity is available to you. It was available to me in my early 40s, after a decade in the fashion industry and three wardrobes that weren’t mine. It’s available to you now, wherever you’re starting from.

Come home to yourself. That’s what this work is for.

If your wardrobe feels wrong, start with your colors. Read my complete guide to personal color analysis, or learn how to find your color palette at home. Then learn how to dress in your colors with my guide to color analysis for clothes.

Take the free Seasonal Essence Quiz →