Franca Personal Style Consultancy

This post is not about mandatory uniforms. I am talking about people who choose to wear the same look for work, everyday, by choice.

I guess this started to be popularized by the ascension of Steve Jobs, as the business grew and bigger audiences started to realise he wore the same look everyday. Blue jeans, a black sweater and tennis shoes. 

This has been studied and one of the most straightforward benefits of wearing the same look everyday is that increases productivity. 

In a nutshell the idea is that you should save your brain for hard decisions you have to make throughout the day. Small decisions should be automated, so all your energy goes to more important tasks. 

Thinking about what to wear every single day, can be tiring and time consuming. We all have those days that we are unbelievably indecisive. If you are someone like me that needs to feel my mood for the day, to decide what I want to wear, means that many times I get frustrated right when I am starting my day.

A trick my mother taught us in my childhood, choose your outfit the day before and leave everything ready on your bedroom chair. I try to follow this, up to today. 

I am keen on this uniform trend and in a way I have a few tricks that kind makes decision making in the morning easier. I have full suits and I wear dresses a lot as well. These are outfits that pretty much style themselves. 

Dress, means tights and a pair of boots or heels, a belt. Specially in winter bodycon dresses are my favourites as they keep me really warm.

Suits, you need a blouse or top, you can wear with shoes, heels, moccasins, etc.  

Another thing I changed when I came to live in London, on workdays I wear a backpack, to carry my food, my books, wallet, mobile, etc. I used to change bags, depending on the outfit of the day. Moving to London, having to carry all the things I will need for that day with me, the most intelligent solution is a backpack. Why? You need to protect your back and shoulders. 

I am concerned about comfort but also health. Why are we wearing one shoulder bags that can’t properly carry all our stuff, don’t zip properly, you can lose important things, plus damage your posture. No, thanks!

I want to clarify that just because you decide for one look for your workdays, it doesn’t mean you have to be boring or that you will only use one or two colours. 

You can decide to wear a different colour jumper everyday, with the same trousers.

You can decide to wear a different scarf everyday with your white blouse.

You can wear a different skirt everyday. 

If you are a busy person, I think this trend is something that could be useful for you. 

I am Franca and this is personal!

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a10441/why-i-wear-the-same-thing-to-work-everday/

https://www.fastcompany.com/3026265/always-wear-the-same-suit-obamas-presidential-productivity-secrets

Is part of the human condition to judge. We all judge over people’s style, appearance, hairstyle, etc. It is a survival instinct tool, we have it ingrained in our brains. 

The one thing we need to train ourselves is not to let our judgement stop us from actually knowing that person, enquiring about their qualities and capacities. We need to override our brain and get to actually know the individual. 

We also know how style reflects our personality, but it doesn’t mean it reflects the whole of our personality. I like to think humans are like walking kaleidoscopes, therefore the person’s style on that day, does not reflect the whole being that person is. 

Women also have to manage the glass ceiling everyday at work. One thing we need to manage, in a smart way, is our professional style. How can our personal style help me look great and reflect the great person/employee I am.

I am a true believer that if I look great, I will feel great. If I feel great, I will feel more confident, consequently it will be easier for me to talk on that important meeting, do that pitch better, sell my product-service, etc. 

There are enough statistics that show how misogynists are workplaces and that a woman’s appearance is judged more frequently than men, so I think that we need to be smarter than the patriarchy and use personal style as a tool to improve our well-being in the workplace and hopefully help us push the glass ceiling further and further away. 

Some of the my own guidelines are:

Don’t wear anything that is sheer.

Underwear must not show at any time

No short skirts or shorts.

Shoulders should be covered. 

Cleavage should not be showing, just in case I need to lower myself or bend over things.

No tight clothes that show a lot of body curves. Not only because it can distract many male colleagues, but also because I don’t like to have my body restricted at work, even having a desk job. 

Not a lot of jewelry, that can make noise and annoy colleagues. 

I want my outfit to reflect the following:

I am professional.

I am an active person.

I am focused on my job.

My instinct tells me to follow this objective “I want people to look at my face and pay attention to what I am saying” so they look up, to my face. 

With this said, I think we can still wear colour to work and can use something unique like a scarf, a pair of earrings, a lapel pin, something that shows you have a unique personality and you care about your look, that everything was thought through. 

Is the glass ceiling fair? No.

Is it fair that women keep being blamed, for men to be distracted in their workplace? No.

Is it fair that it is harder to get our voice heard in the workplace? No

But are we all here to change this? Yes, we are!

For now, we need to be more intelligent and use every tool we have at our reach, to navigate our workplaces and make ourselves respected and heard. 

I am Franca and this is personal!

https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/news/a37305/women-appearance-workplace-caution/

I don’t know why but I always had a concept of style ever since I was a  little kid. I remember being in primary school  and I decided to cut up a pair of wool trousers into shorts, because I felt I would look cool in shorts. 

This was the late eighties, yes I had access to scissors and needles. I cut the trousers and with a needle, I did the hem on them. 

My older sister would do the school run and she didn’t care what I wore. I remember I could enter the house through a different door and change straight away to “home clothes” so my mother would not find out.

I don’t remember how my mother found out, but she did and amazingly enough she didn’t get very upset with me and I was not disciplined  for this. I remember she was more upset about me ruining a part of trousers, than anything else. But they were hand me downs, so she was not that concerned, but told me I should tell her if I wanted to change my clothes.

I must have been around 8/10 years old. When I look back I think this is crazy, being so young and having a sense of “my own style”. Crazy.

Nowadays, I can see a bit of this with my older nephew. Ever since he was a small kid, he is concerned about his appearance especially with his hair. He is always making sure it’s on point.

What I felt then and I still feel now is that this esthetic concern comes naturally to me. It is part of my core and I accept it and I will use it as a tool to improve my life.

I am Franca and this personal!

Personal style is a journey, so is self-esteem. I truly believe one cannot evolve without the other. For me it is the same as the existential question of who came first, the chicken or the egg?

Nobody likes having low self-esteem, one of the most important decisions I made in my life was “I don’t want to feel like this anymore!”. This decision eventually led me to therapy, eventually led me to martial arts, etc, etc.

The most important thing I want to say is that there is no perfect path to improve self-esteem. All of us are different individuals, with different life experiences, therefore the work we need to do will be different. For me, my turning points were therapy and Taekwondo. 

I was always an eccentric kid, I always felt I didn’t fit in. I felt like a boy and a girl, information I am still processing until today. 

But the more I worked on myself, the more I loved myself, the more I believed in myself, the more my personal style was more honest and truthful, reflecting my personality. And the more honest I was to myself, the more I explored my fashion sense, the more confident I felt. One thing was feeding the other. 

You can wear the most expensive dress in the world, if you don’t believe in your own worth, that dress will not work on you.  You have to believe it, because if you don’t believe in yourself, who will?

In the past, if I was wearing something different but I didn’t feel confident, some person would make a comment and this would bring me down. What I have learned with life is that I deserve my space. I learned to talk back “So what? I am wearing this and you have an opinion, so what?”.

A huge life lesson I learned from Feminism, from therapy, from Taekwondo, is to Take Space. Take your space, you deserve it, it is yours if you want it. You may not want to make a big statement, you may even want to stay quiet, but you are there, in that space that now it’s yours and no one can remove you from it. 

Personal style is about holding your space, your spot. And if anyone challenges that, your reaction needs to be “So what?”.

My question to you is, do you want to take your space?

I am Franca and this is personal. 

Personal style is a journey. My understanding and my personal experience is that your style changes as you move in life and this is Ok. Many times in my life I felt conflicted about this “Am I changing? Am I being true to myself? Will people judge me?”

The answer to all these questions are:

Yes you are changing, every single day of your life, this is how people evolve. If you are stuck with the same outview on life, you are missing out.

Yes you are being true to yourself, because you are listening to your inner desires, to your core self. You are a living being, ever changing and your style should reflect this.

Yes, people will always judge you, you will need to deal with this and not let it stop you. 

As a child I wore hand me downs, all the clothes that would not fit my older sister and my older  cousins.

By the time I went to high school, my mother started to  buy some clothes just for myself. If I was with her I could have an opinion if I liked it or not. I hated when she would show up with something she bought, without me being present. I was between 10 and 13 years old.

Later in my teens and craving so much to have a personal style and personal identity, I found a way of buying cheap clothes that my mother would buy for me. Flea markets! I would go to one every month and I would always return with a huge bag, full of items.

It was a win-win situation because I would get items no one in school would have, I would have my own personal style and I didn’t have to ask my mother for expensive clothes that she definitely would never buy for me.

By the time I went to University I started to have random part-time jobs, where I would get some pocket money to buy my own clothes and shoes. Throughout University I was definitely a hippie kind of girl, wearing vintage t-shirts, always tennis shoes, scarfs around my head or my waist, long hair and pallazo pants.

When I started working, I finally met people that had amazing personal style and showed me we can have an office job, look professional, wear “adult clothes” but not be boring. 

My first years working was also the beginning of  a process, where I started to explore androgyny. I cut my long hair into a very short haircut. I started playing with being super feminine or being masculine. 

Right now, I still keep the short hair (I highly doubt I will ever grow my hair that long again). Working in a Fintech start-up in London, this allows me to have a more youthful professional style. I definitely embrace colour with less fear. 

Where will my style go? I have no clue. The only thing I want to make sure is I have fun. Clothing is supposed to help us and inspire us, not be a burden. Enjoy it. 

I am Franca and this is personal!

One positive aspect of this quarantine is definitely the fact I am spending much less money and I have not bought any new clothes or shoes, for more than one month. Let me emphasise this, I HAVE NOT BOUGHT ANY CLOTHES OR SHOES AND I AM HAPPY ABOUT IT. 

I like clothes and shoes, I like bags, scarfs, hats, sunglasses, etc, etc, but for some years now, I have decided to change my shopping habits.

When I started working, I had an income and no big financial commitments, my available surplus to spend on clothing and shoes was big. I spent a lot of money on clothes, shoes, bags, etc and I even bought items thinking ”I might need this in the future, like a party”.

For a couple of years, I was definitely a fan of shopping therapy. 

I was sad, shopping. 

I was frustrated, shopping. 

Needed to seduce a new partner, shopping.

But it didn’t take me long to realise that this was not working out. Eventually life also directed me in the direction of therapy. I cannot talk enough about how good therapy was for me, I totally recommend it.

One of the things that naturally happened was that I didn’t get the urge to go on shopping sprees anymore and I didn’t have the need to accumulate things anymore. I noticed that as I was sorting my thoughts and emotions in every session, I was also sorting my house and my things. 

I was throwing out a lot of things out of my life. I was throwing out physical things and I was throwing out all those old feelings and mindsets that were no longer working for me.

A few years later, I  got to know the minimalism trend and I ended up finding the documentary The Minimalists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Co1Iptd4p4.

I loved it, finding out that other people felt the same as me. 

I also ended up reading the book Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Everything-That-Remains-Memoir-Minimalists/dp/1938793188

I strongly  recommend everyone to watch this doc and read the book, if you can.

There are several layers to minimalism, but what I want you to understand is that anyone can join, at their own pace, setting their own boundaries. I will never be like those people that get rid of their furniture and sleep on the floor, because they want to drastically reduce the amount of things they own. 

The beauty is that there is no right or wrong way.

What do you gain?

You learn that you are worthy, that you are not the things you own, that people will love you for you and not by the clothes you wear. If someone is “with you” because you wear G*cci shoes, are they really your friend?

You learn that you save a lot of money.

You learn to enjoy fully the things you own and appreciate the time and money invested to produce that item. 

The list is long and I could go on and on, but I will let you find out by yourself. 

I wish I can establish with time, that you are you. That your personal style has nothing to do with money, that is Ok not to constantly be buying new things. 

I am Franca and this is personal!

The story of me buying my first suit to go job hunting is very interesting and an important mark on my life.

When I left University I didn’t have a single piece of clothing in my wardrobe that could be considered professional, so for the first time in my life I asked help to my older sister, to go shopping. 

We spent a saturday navigating through stores trying to find something I would like and at the same time it would be professional. It was a very challenging day for the both of us. 

By the end of University my style was very much a hippie girl, with long hair, bell bottoms trousers and  always wearing tennis shoes, either rain or shine. I didn’t do skirts, heels, nothing that would show my curves, etc. I can say I was still struggling to manage both my feminine and masculine side.

Amazingly enough I studied Business Management at University and I was definitely one of the students that stood out, because of my personal style. 

While at school, I definitely thought that people working in offices were boring and elected grey and beige as their main colours. All I could see in head was this mass of people wearing boring clothes, boring colours and complying with the 9 to 5 lifestyle.

I was scared, to say the least. My life had directed me to this course, that I enjoyed, but now I couldn’t  see myself having an office job and being happy.  Obviously I was young and naive, but I didn’t know anyone that could show me any different. Social media was in its infancy and I didn’t have instagram to get inspiration.

My sister and I spent that saturday visiting stores and one advice she gave me that day, I still follow up to today “You don’t have to buy a complete suit to look good, you can buy some pants and then buy a separate blazer”. Up to last year, I didn’t have a full suit. I would always buy blazers I liked and then pair it with different trousers. This was the positive note of this day.

The negative one, was that I was really scared of my future, of how my life would be. I couldn’t see myself being happy with an office job and I kept thinking I had spent my time and my parents money, at University for nothing.

I was so stressed, that eventually reflected on my sister becoming stressed. I ended the day with my sister upset with me and me crying. She said something I also never forgot “You are reacting as this is the end of your life (ending university), but this is just the beginning”.

So, even if the end of the day was negative and ended up being yelled by my sister, what she said resonated with me and  it is one of the best life lessons she taught me. 

That Saturday I bought a blazer, a pair of trousers and a white shirt. For my first interview, I borrowed a pair of black high heels from a friend of mine and I got the job! I kept that blazer for around 7 to 8 years. 

I was lucky to work in a british company with offices in Lisbon and the working environment was more relaxed that a typical portuguese business would be, less formal. This allowed me to experiment with my professional looks and allowed me to choose what made me happy. 

Also, I had the chance to meet people that were older than me, with very interesting personal styles and showed me we can look good, professional and at the same time have fun with your style. I was lucky. 

I am Franca and this is personal!

Why?

Because on the last Vogue cover, she wore a scarf on her head, called a durag.

Why is wearing a durag so revolutionary? 

Because a durag was a piece of scarf that black female slaves were forced to use by their “owners”, to reflect their low social status as workers. 

Originally with a dark purpose,  Rihanna is now owning it and indirectly owning a piece of Black History and rewriting it. This is a liberating process for the Black community.

Specially for black women, that for centuries were enforced euro-centric beauty standards, it is great to see that they have space to show a different narrative. 

The bad side of this, is the fact that it is 2020 and BAME communities still have to fight for space to show us their narrative, of their lives, their experiences, etc.

How can we change this?

I am a big believer that money speaks volumes. If we only buy magazines that have BAME women, then maybe Vogue (and other magazines) will understand that diversity matters. If they see they earn more money, they will recruit more BAME models for their articles, photoshoots, BAME journalists and photographers, etc. 

We all agree the Fashion industry needs a refresher. I know I am tired of the Hadid sisters and tall, white, skinny underaged girls, selling garments for women. 

I am Franca and this is personal. 

Humankind is going through a  rough time, indeed. Many of us feel anxious, sad, depressed, confused, due to the uncertainty of our future as a species on this planet. I have definitely been through many different moods, some days I spend better than others.

One question that I definitely asked myself was “How does fashion/style fits in the world right now?” and I left this huge question mark over my head for some time.

It didn’t take long for me to find the answer…for me. For an individual that takes great pleasure in coming up with different styles and looks, I believe fashion/style is essential to make my days happier.

Struggling for many years to accept that enjoying fashion/style was not a shallow thing, with Covid-19 I moved back to core feeling/emotion.  Dressing up should be a happy activity and a platform to make your day a better experience. So even though I don’t leave the house to work, I still dress up in a way to make me happier that day, or confortable, whatever I feel 

I need that day. 

By this, I am not saying that I dress up as if I was going to a gala, no! I dress whatever lifts up my mood that day. Sometimes the overall look “works” and sometimes it is not so great, but hey, I am comfortable. Win-win I say!

I would lastly like to mention that, I strongly disapprove of spending all our quarantine days in onesies, loungewear and tracksuits. Yes, some days we feel down and we don’t want to think about what clothes to wear, maybe your period is coming, maybe you have to clean around the house and you need something quick and efficient. 

Other than this, I think we need to make an effort to dress pretty (again, for you) simply because I believe in the energy we emit to the world, when we feel happy. If a small thing like wearing lipstick, putting a nice shirt will uplift your mood, then queueing for the supermarket won’t feel as bad. Maybe we will smile more at strangers and improve their day too. 

You may not believe in this new age stuff, but for the ceptics I ask “What harm can this do?”. I think that anything that can make us feel happier and better, is beneficial for the world.

Keep safe!

I am Franca and this is personal!