You're sleeping on this essential Autumn layer!

& it's possibly the easiest & most inexpensive styling tip up my sleeve.

Hello and thank you for being here and I am getting right to it!

Here’s an incredibly easy, inexpensive, and low stakes styling hack that I’ve been leaning on time and again to invite more texture & variety into my looks without completely reinventing my go-to outfit formulas as it gets cooler out.

Socks! (technically hosiery) are incredibly underrated. Much like the act of getting dressed, depending on the weather & the shoe- socks are a non-negotiable. But we don’t tend to treat them like the layering jewel they are.

When assessing the relationship between our bottoms & shoes of choice in a particular look, we can observe the way their proportions & forms signal a story.

A lug sole penny loafer with long weighty, oversized trousers may read as hermitic, while skin-baring mules & cropped chinos could read as more inviting. And this is just one of many interpretations that the subconscious could observe & create narratives around (more on this coming in The Art of Self Expression).

If space is created between the start and end of the shoes/bottoms, there is room (literally & figuratively) to add more nuance to the style story.

So while this tip is already practical & affordable it can also teach us a bit more about deliberate storytelling through our own unique style language. Because it’s actually the little details, like the choice of your hosiery that tell someone everything they need to know about your Self through your style.

Image source.

We caught a glimpse of this revelation last winter, shades of red tights were everywhere, and for once it was a trend I wasn’t terribly annoyed with or regretful to participate in. I’m all for a low-risk experiment that calls more color into our lives.

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But we can take it a step further than this (or shall I say, we can iterate upon this) to feel less trendy & more individualistic.

Here are a 7 more ways to play around with your lower layers + links to some of the chicest socks on the www ;).