Gathering Inspiration for My Versatile, Expressive, Modern Fall Wardrobe

Week Two of the Design Your Wardrobe course at Seamwork focuses on setting a goal and gathering inspiration. This part was easy for me. Once I realized what my wardrobe woes were in Week One, I knew what my goal needed to be for this project. My goal is to create a fall collection of pieces that are both practical and stylish and that work together and offer options. Essentially, my goal is to create a fall capsule collection in a mix of patterns and textures. Because I want a well thought-out, coordinated fall wardrobe that is truly a collection. 

I have been gathering inspiration over the past couple of weeks in a number of ways: pinning patterns and looks on Pinterest boards, bookmarking posts from other makers on Instagram, revisiting my own pattern collection, searching the pattern library on Seamwork, and doing a bit of fabric shopping. I knew very early on what my color palette would be. I purchased two coordinating viscose crepe fabrics for my current pre-fall top and pants project, and I love the colors: cinnamon, teak, black, white, tan/sand. My color palette now has evolved into rust, black, white, and tan due to color range availability while fabric shopping. 

Choosing a color palette and fabric is the focus for this next week, but once I decided on patterns and a color palette, I couldn't wait to head over to my local JoAnn Fabrics to see what I could find. And I got really lucky on that first trip. I found a color splash denim at 30% off, tan quilted cotton for 30% off, a rust floral knit on clearance at $4.97 a yard, a patterned/textured organic cotton on clearance for $3.97 a yard, and a black and white windowpane brushed cotton at 70% off. I love the mix of patterns and textures of these fabrics. 

My first outing for fall wardrobe fabric was a great success!

I'm still looking for a rust twill for pants and twill or denim or corduroy for a couple of color-blocked dresses I want to make. This isn't Project Runway, though; I have plenty of time to fabric shop and work out the rest of the details. I have been a bit ambitious in the number of pieces in this collection, but my patterns aren't overly complicated. And I already am thinking that the color splash denim jacket may get pushed into my winter collection. 

My Fall Wardrobe Patterns

I will go into more detail about my pattern choices in a later post, but here is where my thinking is today. My fall capsule wardrobe will include two dresses, two tops, one skirt, one pair of pants, and two jackets. I  foresee a lot of versatility with and interchangeability between these pieces. 

I am really having fun planning this collection. I love having a road map for my makes over the next two or three months rather than randomly buying fabric and a pattern. This just makes so much sense!

My Core Style Words for Fall 2024 (And What I've Learned About Myself This Week)

I just joined Seamwork and signed up for the Design Your Wardrobe course in order to bring some cohesiveness to my closet and to help me build a solid capsule wardroble for fall. We just completed Week 1 of the course, and in this first week, one of the biggest objectives was for us to figure out our personal style by working through exercises in the Style Workshop workbook. Through this thorough exploration, we were tasked to ultimately define our core style in three words. 

Working through my Style Workshop exercises

Before I reveal my core style words, I'd like to share some observations I made about my style and my wardrobe this week. We were asked to dig deep within our histories, values, cultural influences, and body types/self-images in order to determine why we dress the way we dress and how that does and doesn't reflect who we really are. 

One main observation I made is that my personal taste never crystallized. I never really knew my own taste and style. My wardrobe through the years revolved around fast fashion trends. I wore a lot of cute inexpensive pieces of clothing that were rarely purchased as a complete outfit. For a long while (about ten years ago now), my favorite stores were Marshalls and TJ Maxx, and I would pop into one or the other as often as I could and buy whatever cute top or sweater or skirt I stumbled across. I admit that I purchased clothing that I never wore because I didn't have a plan for them. 

After my Marshalls-TJ Maxx phase, I got into thrifting. But I ended up with the same disjointed wardrobe. And my thrifted wardrobe, for the most part, didn't look fresh. 

This past week I spent time inside my closet. I wanted to figure out why it takes me so long to find something to wear each day when I have a closet (and drawers) full of clothes. I realized that, essentially, as I retired from a long career in academia, my closet didn't. Most items hanging in my closet are very dressy dresses and skirts and pants and jackets that no longer serve my lifestyle as a home-based sewist, milliner, blogger. In a typical week, I leave my home to run errands, maybe take the train to the city to see a play or visit a museum, or dine out with friends. I don't wear a dressy dress and heels for any of those things. 

But here's the thing: I don't want to live my life in shorts and t-shirts either. I still like to feel put together to an extent even on days when I never leave home. How I dress truly feeds my mood. I want to wear stylish clothing and fix my hair and put on a bit of makeup and spritz on a little perfume. That is what makes me feel good on a day-to-day basis.

After all of the deep thinking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of my relationship with clothes, I was asked to make a long list of words from my answers to the exercises in the workbook. From that long list of words, I was asked to choose ten words that were most important to me. And then I needed to narrow my list even further to find the three words that were most aligned to who I am today. 

And so, at the end of the week, at the end of the day...

My Core Style Words are

• versatile
• expressive
• modern

As I move forward in designing and sewing my fall wardrobe, I do so with these thoughts in mind:

A versatile wardrobe (one that is practical and provides my capsule wardrobe pieces) allows me to utilize a piece in more than one way within and across outfits and allows me to dress the piece up or down. 

An expressive wardrobe (creative, artsy, bold, colorful) allows me to choose colors and patterns that reflect my personality.

A modern wardrobe (edgy, sleek, fresh) allows me to incorporate pieces with different features/lines than what I already have.

Whew! That was a lot of work, and I had no idea that this is the style that I am looking for at this point in my life. For the first time I feel as if my style is crystallizing. In all of my excitement I jumped ahead a bit and started picking out patterns and buying fabric for this project, but I still have a bit more thought to put into the next steps. At the end of next week, I will share my inspiration as well as my pattern and fabric choices. 

Right now, I have more homework to do.