The Link Between Personal Style and Identity: Molly Bingaman (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Molly Bingaman’s talk titled “The Link Between Personal Style and Identity” at TEDxUMKC 2021 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Importance of Personal Style

MOLLY BINGAMAN: Everyone has style. The question is not whether or not you have it, but whether or not it’s being expressed. I know this because I’m a personal stylist, and the kind of work that I do is transformational personal styling. So my team and I lead people through a process of transformation with their appearance. And sometimes when people hear this, they’ll say, “A stylist? What a fun job. That sounds so fun. You get to dress people up all day, spend other people’s money. So fun.”

I say, “Yeah. It is. It’s so fun. I’m really lucky.”

I think, fun, really? Do you know many women? Have you been in a dressing room with a woman before? There’s a mirror in there. I’m going to ask her to strip in front of a stranger. Brené Brown’s research on shame reveals that body image and appearance are nearly universal shame triggers. And after a decade of doing this work, I can tell you that that’s true.

I also know that it’s not just something women struggle with. It’s also men. It doesn’t go away with age and that there are certain environments, relationships, and life cycles that trigger this. And I think the thing about struggling with your appearance that’s particularly painful is that our deepest desire is to be seen. We care about our appearance not because we’re super vain or obsessed with our image, but because we want to connect, and we want for people to see us.

The tricky part is that in order to be seen, you have to first show up.

A Client’s Journey

So this is a client of mine.

Her name is Joanne, and I met Joanne a couple of years ago when she was going through a transition. And so she had hired me for two reasons. Number 1, she was going through a divorce, and she really wanted to focus on her appearance. This is something that she’d been ignoring for years, and she felt like this was the time to do it. And the second reason was that her daughter was getting married, and this was the first time her ex-husband and his new girlfriend were going to be there too.

And so when I asked Joanne, “Well, you know, how do you want to feel at this event?” And she was like, “Amazing. I need to feel incredible. I need to feel confident. I need to walk in there and really just show that I am doing well.” So we settled on “smoking hot” for this event.

So I meet Joanne in her closet. I go in there, and I’m like, “Oh, crap. We’re going to have to start from scratch.” There was just nothing in there. There were, like, 6 things. They were mostly black, maybe 1 or 2 solid colors, things that she literally had bought from Costco when she was doing errands. That’s how much she just wasn’t thinking about this.

But the biggest thing was that none of the stuff hanging in her closet had anything to do with Joanne. It all looked just not like her. One of the first things that I felt from Joanne when I met her was she has this just really dynamic, vibrant quality about her. And I could see it in her surroundings, how she had decorated her home. So there were interesting things on the walls, colorful pillows, even just a lot of personality being expressed in her environment, and yet none of it was showing up in her look.

And so I asked her about that. I was like, “Joanne, I can see you here, but how come that’s not coming through in your appearance? Because it comes from the same creative place.” And she was like, “I don’t know. I just thought black was slimming.”

So here’s a picture of Joanne, on our shopping trip together looking smoking hot in a leopard print dress and also what she decided to wear to her daughter’s wedding.

The Power of Authenticity

We all want to be seen, and we want to be seen as attractive. I don’t know anybody who wants to be considered less attractive. The good news is that the most attractive look is always the most authentic one. Authenticity is universally attractive.

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Your size or your age or how much you’re spending on your clothing, if you know anything about fashion or brands, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that you show up authentically. When someone shows up authentically, you don’t just see it, you also feel it. The signature of authenticity is resonance. What that means for styling is that you’re trying to choose clothing that resonates with you.

You’re looking for a match and a sympathetic relationship between the clothing and the wearer. That’s all it is.

Finding Your Signature Style

In order to figure this out, how you might do this for yourself, imagine that you are a member of an orchestra, and orchestras are arranged in 4 parts, different sections. The instruments are grouped by their like sounds, their like characteristics, and there’s kind of a signature to these sounds.

So in the first section, you have your woodwind instruments. These are things like the piccolo and the flute, and they have a certain quality to them. They’re kind of that light, bright melody bopping along. We know how they make us feel, and we recognize them by their sound.

Compare that to the second section, which is the string section. Their sound is totally different. These instruments make these long, sweeping, dramatic sounds. If you think of, like, the violin or the harp or the cello, they make us feel a different way, and we recognize these instruments by their sound.

In your third section, it’s the brass section, and that’s where, like, your power instruments are. So things like the trumpet and the tuba and the trombone. And these are the loudest instruments. You can hear them from the furthest away, and they make you feel a certain way. Whenever I hear a trumpet, I just feel like I can, you know, take on the world. They have a certain feeling to them.

And then in your last section, it’s the percussion section. And these are instruments like the bass drum and the timpani, and they keep the beat for the whole rest of the orchestra.

And each instrument shows up and has a different sound, a different quality, and we are like that. You are like an instrument. You were made to play a certain kind of music. My uncle Morris used to be a professional singer, and he would often describe his voice as his instrument. And we would kind of laugh, you know, like, “Oh, no. He couldn’t sing at church because he has to protect his instrument.” But for this, it kind of works because he was using his voice to express the music inside him.

That’s what style is. That’s what true personal style is when it’s resonant, when it’s authentic, when it’s attractive. It’s you showing up and expressing the specific kind of beat and rhythm of your life.

You have a certain energy to you. You have a certain movement, a feeling. All of this is wrapped up in your identity, and it looks like something, and it feels like something to the people around you just like an instrument.

If you don’t take care of your appearance and your style, it tends to fall out of tune. And this is really normal. It happens, you know, it can happen at different parts of your life, and it’s really easy to fall out of tune because there’s so many other people around you playing different notes, and it’s very easy to kind of tune to them. So if you see someone over here and you’re like, “Oh my gosh. Their style is so cool and great.” Like and then you go and you try and you put that on, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s not working for me.” It’s because it’s not tuned to you. It’s tuned to them. So you’re wanting to find clothing that’s in tune with you.

The Four Style Groups

In order to do this, I want to give you a key for finding your true personal style. It has a signature to it. The way that I like to talk about style is that it’s just the way in which you do things. It’s the way in which. It’s not simply the result. It’s not simply what shows up. It’s how you get there. This kind of grid is going to help you tune into your signature style if you haven’t found it before or to retune if you’ve gotten off track.

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In order to understand your signature style, you need to understand the way you move. So like the orchestra, there are 4 different groups or parts of instruments or a style, and each person resonates more clearly and strongly with one of these groups. The things that look attractive and authentic on you have to do with which group you resonate with, and you’re wanting to choose clothing that has that same quality or that likeness to it.

So in the first group, you have what we would liken to the woodwind section. So these are people who are moving through their life, and we’re talking about, like, their inner movement. It’s your inner beat or your rhythm for how you are expressing this energy inside of you. This group, it looks light. It looks bright. These are people who are full of fresh ideas. They, their energy moves toward what’s new. So they’re constantly wanting to switch things up in order to get variety so that they can keep their energy up. If this is you, don’t let anybody shame you about wanting to shop or needing new things or needing change because this is how you actually get energy. And so the key here is to choose clothing that has that same kind of energy, that same kind of spirit to it. So it might be things like, you know, light bright colors or fabrics that are light and they move and there’s a ton of animation. You want to match the spirit to your spirit.
Compare that to the second group. The movement here, the natural rhythm of life in with this group looks like this. These are your string instruments. They’re moving slowly. They’re moving more fluidly. People in this corner need to take more time with things. The look is comfortable and relaxed. It’s totally different from this first group. They make you feel welcomed. They have a patient quality about them. So the way that this expresses in their clothing, if this is you, you might be someone who has a lot of, like, really comfy things in your closet. So, like, a lot of knits, a lot of stuff that’s just kind of slouchy because comfort is really key to you. This group of people also really has a hard time getting rid of things in their closet. So if you’ve held on to stuff from, like, high school, that might be a clue.
Compare that to the 3rd corner. These people, again, totally different. Their vibe, their rhythm, their movement through life is this quick cutting pace. They move with purpose. They move to get things done. They’re wired for efficiency. These are people who have done, like, a 100 house projects during quarantine. I’ve done 0 house projects, but their energy is such that it’s wired to accomplish things. It’s onto the next thing. It feels substantial. Clothing that matches and resonates with them needs to have that same quality. It needs to be more textural. It needs to have the movement quality of being, like, sharp and fierce. So this was Joanne’s group, which is why black was no good for her and leopard print dress looks so great. She has this fierce energy.
And then the last group, the final movement. The signature of the last group is no movement. No movement is actually a movement. And it’s not that these people don’t move. It’s just that they’re not going to move unless they know that it’s the right move, unless they know where they’re going. And then it is a very clean, straight line. So these are people who need a lot of alone time. Their look is bold. It’s clean. They have a low movement in who they are, and so their clothing needs to have that too. So they like things that stick right to them, that hold their shape. So this is my corner, and I’ve found all of this to be true. I want everything to just to stay with me.

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The key is that your clothing goes with you, that your clothing moves and expresses the way you move and express. In that, you’ll find the resonance. You’ll find that attractive, authentic look, and you’ll find that people can see you better, that they can hear you better, and that they can feel you, what you really mean. So you’re going to get a better connection.

The Courage to Be Authentic

Even so, even if you can master this, you still must be brave enough to show up in your life and in your relationships as your authentic self. I had a client a couple years ago who came in because her husband had bought a gift card for her to go through our process, which is very nice of him. But she came in, and she was wearing all black, heavy, kind of shapeless stuff, and she has this long hair. And all of that’s totally fine, but the thing I remember about her is that she just she felt really guarded. It was like she had, like, a block on her heart, and her hand was up like this. And I’ve done this work long enough to know that that comes from something. That’s a “I need to protect myself” type of thing. Like, “I don’t want you to see me.” And she really wasn’t buying it when I was talking about how we were going to draw out her authentic beauty and, like, here she was going to appear, and she was just kind of sitting there like, “Yeah. Okay.”

And so I really was not looking forward to this appointment. But by the time it came around the following week, I’d gotten myself in the right place, and I reminded myself that the most important part of this job is simply to see someone. And so that’s what I was going to do.

And during our appointment, we went around, and what we do is we test people in these different groups. So we’ll put you in clothing that has, you know, each of these movements expression, and we’re looking for that match. And when you see the match, when there is a match, you can see it, you can feel it. And so when we get around to that first corner, which is the highest level of movement, the brightest, most animated level of movement, and it’s a match for her. You never would have known it. You never would have known it by the way she looked, by the way she was expressing herself. None of that. And yet there it was.

And she’s wearing this, like, pink blazer, and it has this, like, cute little you know, all these little cute details, and it was like her spirit just filled the room. It just got bigger, and it was beautiful. And I was like, “I’m so good. You look so good.” And she felt good. And we’re laughing, and we’re dancing, and we’re celebrating her freedom and the permission that she’s been given to be herself.

But then she looks at me, and she says, “But I could never wear this though because my husband would just tell me that this is only something a skinny person could wear,” and the energy just shrunk back down into her. As she changed back into her clothing that she’d come in with, gosh, it was just so sad. Her whole countenance just returned to that depressed heaviness. And we all noticed that as she walked out, her voice lost its energy. You couldn’t see her anymore, and we didn’t hear from her again.

The question is not whether or not you have style. It’s whether or not it’s being expressed.

Thank you.