Pre-workshop assignment Bring your album of your favorite outfits, from one or more of your friends, celebrities, or fashion icons. You'll be using these to figure out what elements you want to bring to your own style.
The Rule of Cool: Fashion Icons
Today you'll learn what makes someone cool, what questions you should ask to take inspiration for your own style, and practice building an outfit around a piece. Afterwards you'll be designing a new outfit for yourself, which you can use for the Hone Your Craft skill line.
What is Cool?
- Cool is the appearance of ease coupled with a difficult act.
- Fonzie (portrayed by Henry Winkler) from Happy Days, doing difficult things with no effort is the epitome of cool.
- This is why attempting to be cool doesn't work and appears "try hard".
- For our purposes, looking cool is giving the appearance of having such a cohesive style and look that it seems effortless to put something together that looks good.
Case Study: Prince on the street
- What do I like about this person and their look?
- Prince is gender bending without being androgynous, a modern dandy
- What does it communicate that I want to copy?
- A sense of laughing at tradition
- What doesn’t work with my look and style?
- Leather pants and heels
- How can I integrate this in future dressing and purchase choices?
- Long jackets, hats, and more prominent jewelry
Cohort Activity: Analyzing Fashion Icons
Take turns sharing and analyzing your fashion icon(s), using these questions to guide your analysis.
- What do I like about this person and their look?
- What does it communicate that I want to copy?
- What doesn’t work with my look and style?
- How can I integrate this in future dressing and purchase choices?
Thinking in Outfits
- You may have noticed a pattern here: all these people aren’t wearing 1 item, they are putting together outfits.
- The way to appear effortless - and cool - is to balance a modular wardrobe with an eye for accent pieces that tie it together.
- The way to not get decision gridlock in the morning is to start training yourself to see the items in your wardrobe in an outfit/holistic way.
- Buying thing as individual purchases = broke
- Putting together outfit and purchasing things to complete it = woke
Cohort Activity: Build an Outfit
Now we practice our aesthetic eye. Last week we had you build around a theme to create an outfit and that was fun. This week we will do a similar exercise but based on a randomly chosen item of clothing, in a more realistic scenario.
Whether you are window shopping and see something that catches your eye and makes you wonder if you should buy it, or if you receive an ugly sweater from a relative at Christmas and know they expect to see you wearing it the next day, often we work with what we have, not what we idealize. So you and your cohort will use this generator and select one item to base an outfit around, using other pieces found online to tie it all together. After you’ve created your outfit, ask the key questions again:
- What do I like about this person and their look?
- What does it communicate that I want to copy?
- What doesn’t work with my look and style?
- How can I integrate this in future dressing and purchase choices?
Homework
Find one or more pieces of your wardrobe that you don’t wear. Make an outfit around it and wear it this week. Here’s a big board of aesthetic inspirations to help you figure out where you might want to take your outfit. Unless you have a large wardrobe already, you’ll probably need some new pieces, so stop by a thrift shop this week to find those. Take a couple photos and note what you built the outfit around, and be prepared to share in the next class.