Reply #83: of course not. how you dress yourself is your style, but a professional can help your vision! [View All]

[NuttyFluffers]

body image is a creation of societal expectations. the neuroses comes from an unattainability of such societal expectations. now, outside of body modification, the easiest way to achieve a semblance of such expectations is through the illusions of fashion expertise. literally, makeup is magic and tailors can work miracles.

now the really fun part of these fashion people is that they will readily tell you that fashion models (and the expectations they are used to perpetuate) are an Nth of 1% of the human population. then, if you have a good professional stylist, they will be gently honest with you and tell you to love yourself -- while attempting to get as close as possible to the illusionary effect you want to achieve. after a while these same stylist, wanting your repeat business, will comment that you have other assets that are beautiful and try to steer you away from a self-destructive spiral of unreasonable expectations. this then leads you down the path of dressing for your shape, face, silhouette, tone, hair, etc. and showing you how to play up or play down various facets of yourself. in the end you realize beauty is something far more manageable in your hands than is generally perceived.

this is where self-acceptance and personal style development comes in. after you see how close you can achieve certain looks, and then are redirected into attempting potentially easier looks specific to your current condition, you can disassociate from the artificial normative conventions in popular culture. you realize you can play up your natural state and play down other things. and finally this leads to an understanding that beauty is a spectrum -- not a cut-out. this is important, because realizing there is a spectrum, and that you have some control, gives you license to visualize your own style. finally your thinking is liberated from imposed cultural expectations to personal creativity -- and that creativity can even take you into a rejection of certain aesthetic principles!

but the principle of liberation is always the same: educate about basics, empower with techniques, realize the artificiality of the system, finally liberate the creative impulse. by utilizing the professionals' knowledge you begin to walk the path of personal body image liberation and undo the narrow confines of dimly understood commercial aesthetics. commercial fashion need to stay in business by selling to an elite clientele, and next selling an elite image to the rest who want to emulate the elites. this leads to deliberately selling an unattainable image in an effort to project exclusivity -- which people then directly internalize that they are not worthy when they do not fit. good professional stylists need to stay in business, but instead of an international brand they must work on a very intimate retail level. so their goal is the happiness of their direct customers for repeat business. this in turn leads stylist pros to try to undo the damage of personal self-defeatism developed by the in-fighting of commercial high fashion chasing after a few elites.

sorta like the difference between a megabank fighting over massive hedge/mutual funds versus local credit unions building up the community. one chews up small customers and spits them out, the other tries to nurture them back into a healthy reassessment of self.