Welcome to the Nothing To Wear Edit where each week we curate the best picks from the topic we spoke about on the podcast. Listen to the full episode here .

Shopping for clothes isn’t hard, we can all buy more ‘stuff’.

I like to call it the ‘pay and pray’ approach, where we buy l-o-a-d-s of items and pray one of them will make us feel good.

But where we’re going wrong is ending up with a cupboard full of stuff when we should be building a wardrobe full of outfits, that’s where the skill comes in.

I’ve coined the phrase ‘Strategic Shopping’ — which is the opposite of mindless over-consumption.

As a fashion designer turned personal stylist, I see clients waste hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every year on shopping purchases they’ve never worn that still hang in their wardrobes…and they’re still buying!

This isn’t to shame anyone as I know that successful shopping is challenging for so many reasons that we’ll discuss below (and don’t even mention the meltdowns in intimidating fitting rooms with terrible lighting, lack of staff etc!). In fact, my Personal Shopper service has become my most popular styling service.

Why? Because we never actually learn how to shop successfully.

We just expect that we can create a wardrobe full of amazing outfits that bring us joy with no planning, strategy or help.

So as a personal stylist with over a decade’s experience, here are the seven biggest shopping mistakes my clients make complete with solutions to change the way you approach shopping for fashion. Not only will this help you get more positive shopping results, it's what we desperately need to reduce textile waste and save during #cozzielivs.

Buying items not outfits.

This is the biggest game changer because you can’t wear an item, only an outfit.

Even a dress needs a shoe and a bag.

SOLUTION:

Don’t leave the shop with a new item unless you can think of at least three ways to wear it (I often push that to five outfit combos). Ask the staff what is designed to wear with that item because when I worked as a fashion designer, that’s how we designed, in full outfits.

The skill to creating a capsule wardrobe is to maximise your purchases by mix & matching your clothing into multiple outfits. What we don’t appreciate is that so much of that outfitting is actually done during the shop.

Buying clothes that are too big (particularly when buying online & then not returning them).

This works in two ways:

1. Thinking our size is our number.

I call this the ‘Size Spiral’ and I saw this behaviour increase massively due to COVID.

You put on a little weight, so you wear looser clothes. You look in the mirror and see yourself bigger which confirms your thought, so you buy a bigger size and lose all sense of your actual body shape and this size spiral continues. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2. Buying clothes that are too big.

Our size is a size range and will vary from shop to shop because there are no Australian size standards, hence why sizing is all over the place. Clothes sizes are CRAZY and confusing.

SOLUTION:

Take two sizes into the fitting room, the size you think you are and one size smaller.

The issue with wearing clothes that are too big for us (and I’m not talking about intentionally oversized fashion styles, I’m talking about the daily clothes you live your life in) is that they’re not flattering OR versatile enough to style easily. For example, if you can’t layer your coat over your loose, chunky knit, you’ll struggle to dress in the colder weather, dressing becomes all too hard and we stick to black activewear.

Buying emotionally, when you need to shop strategically.