Seeing Your Way to Spec-tacular Style

There’s an aspect to your look which is so very often overlooked, if you’ll pardon the pun.

We all know that style is less about having the right shoes or a coat that you worked the whole summer to pay for, and more about how everything you wear fits together to create an image that is exclusively yours and yet at the same time blends with the trends. The tricky part, as always, is getting it right.

Formal or Informal, Smart or Casual

Style can be smart or casual, formal or informal, summer or winter, full coat, hat and scarf or beach-ready. It can be minimalist or it can be extravagant, paying attention to every last detail. It can be without socks, or it can be having the right socks, in the right colour and courtesy of the right designer. Style is what the occasion demands, and how you rise to it.

And whilst your clothes are of the utmost importance when it comes to being seen for who you are, there are other, sometimes less obvious, features of your overall look which often get passed over. A chunky gleaming watch, a simple earring, something decorative worn around the neck - all of these things can bring out your outfit and transform the message that it conveys.

More obvious, perhaps, is the hairstyle that you choose. We no longer live in the age of the regulation short back and sides, or even in one in which a singular fashion predominates amongst the younger generations, as was perhaps the case back in the 1950s. Today it is considered perfectly acceptable to sport the hair long, either free-flowing or tied up in a pony tail. The only prerequisite, of course, is that it is clean and smart. The same goes for beards, which are very much in vogue at the time of writing.

Imaginative Accessories

Perhaps one of the more imaginative peripherals that can add style to any look, whether formal as in evening dress or informal as in smart casual for the office, is a pair of braces. Not just any old braces, of course, but something which creates just the right compliment and contrast with the short, the trousers or the suit behind which they proudly reside. A good quality set, in Y-back or X-back and with either clip-on or button-down fastening, are an image-defining commodity almost unlike any other.

Also much forgotten, despite being worn by many, are glasses. Whilst primarily a medical necessity for correcting imperfect vision, there is no reason why your lenses shouldn’t add a dash of panache to your personal statement. Not so much your traditional National Health frames held together with an unsightly wedge of sticking plaster, as glass with a touch of class.

And if they are not required for their stated purpose, there is nothing preventing you from adding a cool set of shades to the image that you are trying to project in any event. Some would say they suggest control; certainly a lot is thought is given by many of those who wear them to design and appearance, so don’t underestimate their impact.

A Retro Look for the Modern Age

It is worth remembering that style rarely goes out of style. Whilst there have undoubtedly been fashions which are probably best forgotten, there has always down the years been a defining look which has been considered crucial enough to be worth keeping.

And so a fifties’ rockabilly haircut with a smart casual shirt and a pair of braces that could equally well belong to yesteryear or to this year cuts a dash all of its own, and gives off a surprisingly twenty-first century vibe. With the right pair of designer specs, more so still.