You likely won’t throw on an outfit and have it feel balanced. Balance is what will make your outfits look purposeful instead of thrown together. In the beginning stages of learning balance, it’s less about having a lot of clothes and more about training your eye to understand the relationship between silhouette, color, and weight. You’ll probably feel like a blob wearing a big sweater with big pants, but feel fine wearing that same sweater with fitted jeans. This is because balance is about distribution of attention on your body. As you practice this, you’ll slowly start making intentional styling decisions.
A good place to begin is by using clothes you already have. Select a top, bottom, and any additional layer (like a jacket or cardigan). Pair them together and take a second to study proportions rather than decide whether or not you look “good”. Take note of the length of the sleeves, width of the pant legs, and the rise. If you’re wearing a big top with big pants, try tucking the front or add a belt to create some definition. Little tweaks like this will help your eye understand structure as it relates to balance without you having to buy new clothes. Distribution of color also aids in the balance of your outfit. As a beginner, you might be obsessed with matching, but color harmony is really achieved through repetition.
If you’re wearing black boots, repeating that color in your belt or another accessory will help ground your outfit. A good exercise for this is to take a photo of yourself wearing the same outfit once with your accessories and once without. Looking at the photos later will help you understand how one little thing can ground your entire outfit. Over time, these comparative photos will help your eye anticipate what will ground or balance an outfit when you add or take away items. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to fix an imbalanced outfit by adding more. When you feel like your outfit doesn’t look right, you might be tempted to throw on scarves, jewelry, and layers in the hopes that something will fix the problem.
Generally, the best trick is the opposite: remove one thing. Taking one thing away will likely show you what your outfit is missing. For example, removing a chunky cardigan might show you that the proportions of what you’re wearing underneath are actually okay. As you practice editing, your eye will start to understand when your styling works because of its restraint rather than its embellishment. Spend about fifteen minutes on a few evenings each week experimenting with outfits using the same handful of items.
Spend that time reorganizing your clothes, tucking and untucking, changing your shoes, and taking note of what works and what doesn’t in the mirror or in a photo. Your goal isn’t to create the perfect outfit every time, it’s simply to understand how manipulating structure affects the balance of your outfit. After a few days, you’ll start to notice patterns and styling will slowly start to feel less like guessing and more like quiet problem solving.