Welcome to the first of our three-part series on BACK TO SCHOOL FASHION, which is really just an excuse for us to talk about style and clothes. Today, the incredible Sophie Strauss — aka, the stylist for regular people — joins us to answer your questions about finding that one piece that will solve all your fashion problems, letting go of the fantasy capsule wardrobe, what you're actually asking when you say "can I pull this off?," and, of course, our most popular question by far: how to figure out your style in your late 30s/40s. Sophie is the ideal Culture Study guest; I can't wait for you to get to know her (and her style philosophy). This is an episode about style that is not meant to make you feel bad about yours — what a revelation!
Anne Helen Petersen: This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
Sophie Strauss: Hi, I'm Sophie Strauss, and I'm a stylist for regular people.
Anne Helen Petersen: So, okay. Stylist, I think people hear this term and they think, I don't know, like Rachel Zoe being a stylist for the it girls of the early 2000s. Like, they think it's for fancy people.
But you're a stylist for normal people, so can you describe the range of people that you work with and the kinds of things they're looking for when they hire you?
Sophie Strauss: Absolutely. You know, it's funny you mention Rachel Zoe. She's totally my foundational style. Like, who else would we have seen, right?
That's, like, the only…
Anne Helen Petersen: That was like, my first understanding of a stylist imposing their understanding of style onto people, right?
Sophie Strauss: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, just like the unifying threads of style, I'm trying to think of who she styled. Like, Mischa Barton, um-
Sophie Strauss: Was it, like, Cameron Diaz?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Sophie Strauss: She used to, I think, style Anne Hathaway. I think. I mean… it was also just that, quite frankly, and we could, we should do a whole other podcast about this, but part of why that was the beginning of the stylist in the sort of like public imagination is because it was also really the beginning of when celebrities were as visible as they now are all the time.
Like, the sort of explosion of tabloid and paparazzi culture and this idea that you actually might wanna pay somebody to help make sure you, quote, unquote, "look good" all the time. At first for red carpets because they were these sort of brand and image-making opportunities, but then it was like when you go to get groceries and all these things.
But to your first question, growing up, I absolutely loved fashion and style, and all I really knew of this particular job was Rachel Zoe. And that, while I found it deeply entertaining, was not actually appealing to me at all as a career. And so I didn't consider it. And then I actually pursued a career in music and was working as a nanny and sort of doing, like, other creative pursuits for work. And all the while, I mean, I worked, to be clear, I worked fashion retail for a long time, through high school and college, so I also think I learned a lot about the industry and clothing that way. It's not like I went from zero knowledge to this job.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: But I wasn't working consistently on like a I wanna be a stylist track, which is very much a thing now. I was just helping my friends get dressed when they were having, not even struggles, I think the thing I've really come to is moments of transition. So whether that was a transition like a new job, or a new city, or a transition like a new body size, bigger, smaller, a new gender presentation, I was the first call, and I really cherished that.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And eventually, while my other music career was sort of not really panning out, though, you know, I'm at home-
Anne Helen Petersen: Who knows? Who knows?
Sophie Strauss: It could still happen. I think my music was good. But anyway, I started doing this on the side, and I kind of on a whim, was like, "I wonder if people would pay for this."
And I posted about it on my Instagram. And the response was overwhelmingly yes, and I kind of built it as, like, a side gig. And then it very quickly overtook my regular assistant job that I had at the time. And from there Sophie Strauss Styling was born. So I really work with, I mean, like I said, with everybody.
I work with people of all ages, genders, sizes, locations. So I've worked with people as young as 13 and as old as 80. I work with men, women, non-binary people, trans people. I work with people who are getting married. I work with people who are attending funerals. I work with people who want to feel better when they drop their kids off at carpool.
And I work with people who do go to red carpets but are not celebrities. So I, being in LA, I have a lot of people who may not be Anne Hathaway, but they're like, "Yeah, but I have to stand next to Anne Hathaway on the red carpet and I don't wanna look like shit."
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. Totally. That's like my nightmare of like, going, being on a red carpet and doing the stop and pose and like, What would I wear? How would my makeup be? Like, you have to do all these considerations that celebrities kind of have outsourced for them, and you have to do them yourself. So, and you also helped, like Melody, didn't you help Melody?
Sophie Strauss: Oh yeah, that's how I'm here. Melody, what happened?
Melody Rowell: I was invited to do an onstage interview with Sarah Chappelle of Taylor Swift Styled, and I was like, "I can't do a fashion interview wearing my current, like athletic shorts and oversized T-shirt." So I found out about Sophie from the Big Undies newsletter.
Anne Helen Petersen: So we're doing this whole back to school theme of… 'cause I love back to school energy. It just really transports me to, even though I have no kids and don't go to school anymore. Just that idea of like, okay, like let's go, in my case it was this department store called Le Bon Marché.
Let's go to the Cube, which was the teen section. And get two pairs of pants and two tops, and like figuring out your first day of school outfit. Like I loved that. So I wanted to do a series about it. I was like, "Melody, please let me do this." And we're interviewing a bunch of different people about clothing, about style, and we're interviewing Corinne Fay of Big Undies.
Sophie Strauss: Tell Corinne I say hi.
Anne Helen Petersen: And you did an interview with Corinne. You did her, she does like style interviews that are really fantastic. So many people have done them, including Lena Dunham, which is amazing.
Sophie Strauss: Crazy ...
Anne Helen Petersen: But in that interview, there's this great picture of you in this like taffeta gown and fur stole, and I think sometimes people look at pictures of us when we're kids and are like, "That person was into fashion."
But I think all of us are into fashion in some way or many of us are into fashion in some way when we're small, and then we get it gradually like flattened out of us in some way.
Sophie Strauss: Oh my God, I have so many, so many... That's a rich text you just laid out for me. Okay. So first of all, I think one of the things is historically, culturally if you will, on the Culture Study podcast, fashion has been one of the purviews of marginalized demographics, right? It has historically been an area for women, queer people, people of color, people who have been colonized, to try to find avenues of agency and expression that are still within their means as some other dominant force has tried to take that away.
Fashion has obviously also been, or clothing has been a means of control and dominance in other ways. But what that has often meant is that the people who kind of feel excited and connected to it are people for whom that expression is precious. And I think the people who most often tend to think fashion is frivolous are people where their humanity is not really questioned based on what they're wearing.
So, you have a lot of, like, white bros who think it's either shallow or silly to care about fashion. And, what that tends to tell me is if, if you, quote-unquote, "don't care" ... I mean, first of all, I don't even think that's real. I think most people care because, and that's a separate piece of this answer, but I think people care because clothes are communication.
And so that feeling of even that, the first day of school, what am I gonna wear, the question at the core of that for every kid is, "Who am I going to be this year?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. Yep.
Sophie Strauss: And that's identity. And I don't think that fashion is ... I'm not like, "Oh, fashion saves the world. It's the most important thing."
Like, there's a lot of awful, evil, villainous well-dressed people out there. But I think that at its core, when you are not dressed in a way that feels good to you, it feels kind of like opening your mouth to speak and the wrong words come out. And so that's kind of at the core of all of what we're talking about is, like, why is fashion for everyone?
And it's like, well, maybe, maybe I make a distinction between fashion and style. Like, fashion to me is a little bit more tied to the industry, and style is kind of a personal expression, but that's my semantics.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: But I think that's also why you don't have to be a fabulous gala-bound gal in a gown to have fashion feel or have how you dress feel important to you.
You can be a person who lives on a remote island or you can be a mom at carpool drop-off, and how you are experiencing the agency of self-presentation in that moment will matter.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. I mean, I agree with all of this entirely, and I just like, as someone who used ... I've gone through periods of in and out of love of clothes, and I think probably a lot of people can identify with that.
Like, feelings when you felt more empowered to wear the things that felt very you, and times when you felt like your choices were limited or circumscribed by some forces. And sometimes that's like, "My body keeps changing, and I buy something and it no longer fits the way that it used to." Or, "This company that makes this thing that I think is gorgeous will not make it in my size," or, "All the kids make fun of me when I wear the thing that I wanna wear in school."
Like, I have all of these moments of very subtle incorporation. I grew up in a small town in Idaho where there wasn't a lot of leeway about what was cool or what you should, quote, "wear to school." And I remember yearning for a school uniform or loving the days that I wore my cheerleading uniform because it gave me that release from trying to perform a certain type of feminine, 1998 femininity for the audience of my peers, right?
Sophie Strauss: Well, I think... So the first part of what that was, and it also goes back to the conversation about being little kids who love fashion and then something kind of changes is, and I kind of think almost everybody has an experience like this, which is, like, I have a four-year-old, and I watch him get dressed, and it is just so joyful and ridiculous.
And he is not looking in a mirror until the very end just to sort of admire. He is not thinking about his body. He is not even really thinking, I mean, obviously not really thinking practically, but there's something so magic that gets squashed so young, and I think even younger when you are socialized to be presenting femininity in a certain way.
But I think every single client I've ever had and every person I've talked to, myself included, has some memory from childhood of putting something on that felt really good. Like, "Oh, this is, this is so... I'm just, I'm filled with joy." Like, "Yes."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. Yep.
Sophie Strauss: And walking out of this sort of private sanctity of wherever you put that on, your room, your closet, whatever, and emerging into the public sphere, whether it was just, like, into your living room, or a sibling, or a parent, or at school, and having somebody go, "What is that?"
And the core feeling of that is I believed myself when I said this felt good to me. And I was wrong. And so that severs our trust with ourself, that we can kind of like follow our nose on what brings us joy. And then that gets reinforced like a million times more throughout like childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
And unless you're really consciously going, "How do I unpack that?" Then you end up in the position that you were talking about now, where you were seeing even like the sort of freedom from the fatigue of trying to navigate all of these choices, and being relieved when you'd have to wear your cheerleading uniform.
What you're getting at there is that for most people, getting dressed feels like a guessing game, where they don't hold any information. So it's like, "I hope I'm guessing correctly at what the outside world will somehow know is right or wrong, but I couldn't possibly know myself."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. Yep.
Sophie Strauss: And then it's like, well yeah, no shit, that's not fun.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right, right. And the people that I know who maintain style, like throughout their lives, they had such a strong sense of self, and sometimes this came from their family, came from their parents, or it just was like, just them. Like, they're the weirdo in the school pictures, right?
And by weirdo I mean that with great admiration and respect. Or in their family photos, they picked out their outfit. Like the sense of self was so strong that no other voices could tamp it down. And that's when you get like style icons, right?
Sophie Strauss: Totally.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, I don't wanna be a style icon, or that's not in my purview. But, I would like to have that sense of self really shine through. And I feel like some of us are getting there a little bit more as we age, but then some of us are very confused by this matrix of like what is happening in the larger fashion world in this moment, and then also, many of us no longer being young girls anymore.
Which is where a lot of the momentum of fashion is oriented, is towards a 22-year-old consumer.
Sophie Strauss: Of course. Of course. Well, I think the key there is the definition of style that I like to work from with my clients is very simple. It's that style is the expression of your personality and your preferences through your clothes.
And why I came up with that definition 'cause I don't think that's what the definition is in the dictionary.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: Why I came up with that definition is because it puts all the agency in your hands. There's no following of any rules, there's no needing to be on trend, or relevant or not dated, or whatever.
It's guided by two things, which is personality and preference, and it also allows those things to fluctuate in a very human way from day to day. And the thing I often remind people is like, "I'm actually really... I don't care if you wear sweatpants every single day of your life. If that feels like a choice you're making because you are prioritizing comfort, that's really different than if it feels like it's happening to you against your will because you don't know how to do anything else."
And the reason that this very simple definition is so difficult for people to then execute, like for me to sit here and go, "It's just your preferences and your personality in your clothing. Run, go forth, dress stylishly," most people would still not be able to go anywhere with that information because most of us have been taught to shop and to get dressed kind of like if you had to cook without knowing what ingredients are. So you end up in this position where you're often trying to make an informed choice without information.
So you might notice, "I don't like this shirt." Great, but why? What about it? And to your point about, like, you may never be a style icon and, like, not everybody's gonna be a fashionista. Not everybody's gonna be a Michelin star chef. But I think all of us understand the value in being able to cook ourselves a nutritious meal.
And then maybe from there you become somebody who kind of finds joy in experimenting with food, or maybe you are simply somebody who can adequately nourish yourself for the rest of your life. Both of those paths are valid, but if you're so far away that you can't even do the nourishing, we've got a problem.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. And it's the same thing with clothes. Well, and like a nourishing meal that tastes good to you. That you're not like choking down.
Sophie Strauss: 100%.
Anne Helen Petersen: No, it's not punishment. Right?
Sophie Strauss: Yeah. It's not punishment, exactly.
Anne Helen Petersen: There's a way that you distinguish between personal style and the way that fashion markets to us.
Like, I'm trying to remember how you phrase it. It's like that's style and that's marketing?
Sophie Strauss: Ah, yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, how do you discern between those two?
Sophie Strauss: So I think that when clients sit down with me and we start to do an intake, I tend to hear a lot of things about all the rules, right?
Unpacking this kind of secret language. Like, "I've hired a stylist, and she's going to help me speak the secret language of the cool, stylish people so that I can follow the rules and I can be, I can finally be correct when I go out into the world. They will see me as one of them."
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sophie Strauss: And it is this sense, and the undertone of almost everything I hear from clients who struggle with this kind of thing is very similar, which is, like, are we wearing wide-leg pants now, or are we in skinny jeans, high rise, mid-rise, low rise? Am I not allowed to wear socks? Am I not allowed to wear no-show socks? Like, is this not... What's going on?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And what that comes from is the sense that your job in becoming stylish is to sort of see what the cool people over there are doing and try to replicate it correctly. And then, as anybody who's tried that knows, by the time you learn the language, the language has changed, right? By the time you got rid of your skinny jeans, skinny jeans are back.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And that, what I tell people, is marketing, right? That's not style. That's marketing.
That is a very, very manipulative and savvy machinery of industry that is designed to make sure that you are feeling inadequate and anxious and less than and also ideally under-informed about the more objective parts of style as well. Fabric composition, silhouette, measurements, cut, color, things like that, so that you also are more likely to make an impulse purchase, right?
You didn't check that fabric composition. They can get away with making things that are shittier and lower quality and that you won't even really notice 'cause you don't know better, right? The less you know and the worse you feel, the better of a customer you are.
Anne Helen Petersen: We have so many questions today. I cannot, like... I really narrowed them down. We got so many good ones. But we're gonna start with a couple more philosophical questions building on what we've already talked about with style. And then for the Ask Anne Anything section, we're going to answer three questions from listeners with specific style conundrums.
One about dressing for both in-office and remote work, one about dressing for work as a teacher, and one about what to wear when it's really, really hot. Sound good?
Sophie Strauss: Great.
Anne Helen Petersen: Let's start with this question from Jordan.
Jordan: With personal fashion, there's a sense that if you just found the exact right pieces for you, all of your problems would be solved.
It's a quest centered on self-knowledge and optimization. But the self is dynamic, and modern clothing is deeply flawed, so it can be a bit of an aesthetic treadmill. I'd love to hear more about how others suss out the difference between trying to find items that help you feel like yourself, especially as that changes, and feeling pressure to view consumption as an existential solution.
Sophie Strauss: Mwah. Mwah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oof. I know, right? Right. Gorgeous. Well, I will just say that, like, I love how so many of our listeners submit questions that kind of answer the question in their question because it's such a smart question. Like, they're, they're working through some of their own ideas that they've processed already in this question.
So what comes to mind when you hear this?
Sophie Strauss: Yeah. So I'm hearing sort of two things at once. I'm hearing a bigger picture, sort of existential question that is so gorgeous, and I can't wait to talk about it, and then I'm hearing a more material and concrete question about sort of how can you possibly tie something as fixed as clothing to the fickleness of personality.
Yeah, I love that I'm like, "And then there's that objective question," and then it's like the fickleness of humanity.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: So, okay, so the first part, which is like the meatier half of this, and I just love this question, is we're pitched personal style as both like a solution to the ickiness of the consumerism treadmill, but then it just kind of puts us back on that treadmill. And the reality is, my opinion is that personal style is not a solution, it is a result.
Anne Helen Petersen: Hmm.
Sophie Strauss: And that personal style can emerge not through consumption of things, right? Like, a sort of ravenous quest to buy up stuff so that you can be stylish is both bad whether or not it worked, it's just like morally bad.
And also doesn't work, so then it's cool 'cause you don't have to do it at all.. And to me, the clients who are always the most difficult to support in their style journey are the clients who are very, very far away from themselves as human beings. Because there is no way to sort of express - like, you can, we live in an era that is saturated with imagery, and it is very easy to - imagery and affiliate links. So it's very easy to click, copy, and paste to try on like you're a paper doll, whatever your influencer person, paid advertisement comes up on your feed, and it's not going to feel the same as wearing something that feels like it came out of your life because it made sense for you.
And that is, of course, super lofty. But the reality is like... And by the way, I would say there are probably way more kind of cool dressed people who suck and are far away from their like selves as people than there are like wonderfully kind of grounded human beings who maybe to the average person are not well-dressed.
Like, I would pick that 100 times over. And again, I think that's because to me, personal style is not an aesthetic, it's a practice. And it comes less from did you buy a bunch of things that express you, and actually more, I think, from buying less, like discernment and restraint. I didn't, especially when truly you cannot take a step without being advertised to -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: - that it really comes much more from what you don't buy than what you do.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And so I guess that would be my answer there, is like, personal style, how are you bringing that about and how you make do with what's already in front of you, with what's around you, with what your life demands, with what your body demands, right?
And then the piece about this sort of expression of like, it's supposed to be this expression of your personhood and your humanity, but that we change all the time. That's part of why I really don't like a lot of, and I don't mean any disrespect, but there's a lot of style solutions out there that in my opinion repackage the problem and then sell it back to you as a solution which is like this kind of confinement of your three words, your two words, you're this body type, you're this color story, and it is all the same crap, which is like, "Here's all these external things, these things to put you in a box." And the sort of limited number of words in particular comes up a lot because I think the only stylish people we see most of the time are either brands or celebrities or influencers who are brands.
And these are all people who have an ulterior motive, which is that they have to be packageable to somebody to have to do.
Anne Helen Petersen: They have to be able to sell an affiliate link in order to succeed, particularly in today's, larger…
Sophie Strauss: Totally. And so when you see an influencer who seems to have a very, something I hear a lot is like consistency, like they have a really consistent aesthetic. And I'm like, "You don't, you're not a brand, so you don't have to have a consistent aesthetic." You could look at my Instagram, I mean, I just moved to a farm, but I also love to wear a sexy dress, and then half the time I'm wearing like Carhartts and a T-shirt and, you know, work boots, and both of those things are me and a million things in the middle.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: So that's the sort of, again, the more abstract... Sorry,, wow, I could write a dissertation on this. The final button on this, I will say, on a really, really material level is that clothing, and this is where that knowledge and information comes in handy, clothing is not the whole sentence, right?
Each garment is like a word in a sentence. And so if you actually understand how clothing behaves, where it performs well, right? How the material's gonna breathe or not breathe, fit or not fit, how that color's gonna interact with another. And I actually wrote about this recently for my newsletter Style School, where I talk about trying to take my Los Angeles city girl wardrobe and without doing a bunch of shopping, edit it to make sense for a year living on a farm, which is what I'm doing right now. And that's only possible by being able to look at the clothes as what they are and remembering, okay, well, if I used these pants in this context with heels and a blouse, what happens to them when I use them in this context with rain boots and a work jacket?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And the more fluent you are in this language, the more capable you'll be of moving the pieces around and using them in, in a context that suits you as you inevitably change without needing to start over each time, right? That a lot of these garments are extremely versatile when you've purchased them 'cause you understand them instead of purchasing them because you saw them on an influencer, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. I wonder if others have had this experience of finding an item of clothing or a style of an item of clothing, and then it becomes your personality for two years, right? So when I was 24, maybe 25, I went back to school shopping. I actually went back to school shopping. This is when I was in grad school.
I didn't have hardly any money, but I had a little bit of money that I wanted to buy, I was gonna be a TA, and I was like, "Okay, I need, like, a little bit... What's gonna, like, be something that makes me feel like me," right? And we went to Nordstrom in Portland. I was living in Eugene, Oregon. I was going to the University of Oregon.
And it was the famous Nordstrom half yearly sale, and they had these boots, which now are very, very familiar to everyone. It was the classic Frye riding boot. And I had never bought anything that expensive. Back then they were, like, $240. But I looked at them and I tried them on, and they were so different from anything that I owned, and my friends that I was with were kinda like, "Eh."
And I was like, "They must be mine."
Sophie Strauss: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: I cannot... Like, my entire wardrobe rotated around those boots for the next four years of my life, if not more. Like, I wore them with everything. I wore them with dresses, I wore them with shorts, I wore them with pants, I wore them every single scenario, but they just felt like me.
And so sometimes I'm just trying to chase that high of what thing can I then use as my, that item? And it doesn't have to be like a specific boot or a specific pant. Like, in 2014, the thing was, I tried on a jumpsuit before jumpsuits like became everywhere, and I was like "This is me." And I didn't realize it would be, and continues to be my fashion personality. But like, as people say, sometimes you're just really, like it returned me to my seven-year-old self, like the sort of feeling that I had in clothes when I was seven, and I loved that. Rompers even more so. But does that make sense?
Like, and it's not necessarily about buying the thing that is marketed to me. It's more like, how do I find that one thing that does that for me?
Sophie Strauss: Oh, okay. So first of all, love that. Yes. I had a pair of Nine West combat boots that I found at a thrift store in LA called Wasteland when I was 15, and I still have them, and I haven't worn them in like 15 years, but they were so me for like a four-year chunk of time. That I'm just... I've got, I put more money resoling and re-fixing the zippers and everything than I spent on them at the time. And worth every penny. And I'm sure I will come back to them.
You can't force it. You can't force that.
Anne Helen Petersen: That's the thing. No.
Sophie Strauss: You can't. And I think what you're getting at honestly, and it depends, but what you're feeling is affirmed. And for some people, that comes from something that feels a little bit more like a security blanket. Like, I know that when I put this thing on, I'm gonna feel like myself and that gives me either wiggle room for everything else, or…
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sophie Strauss: like with a jumpsuit, right? I think boots are a little different because they don't take up as much surface area. They're not the whole outfit ever, but they add such a tone. And a jumpsuit is kind of the whole thing, so you're kinda one and done, and there's an effortlessness to that that appeals to some people, and for other people is, like, dreadfully boring, and that's not to say it's boring for you, right? Like they live for variety, and for other people, that variety is the most stressful daily decision fatigue they could possibly imagine.
Right? And I've seen both sides of that equation. But what you're talking about at its core is this skill that I try to teach my clients a lot, which is, my dad is a chef, and he has this tattoo on his wrist on the underside of his wrist it says taste, and on the above part of his wrist it says adjust, which is sort of the, taste it and then season it.
Sort of with what part of your hand are you looking at when you taste versus when you adjust. But I use that phrase, taste and adjust, all the time, which is just kind of life. But it's really applicable for clothing, which is I think a lot of people will put on an outfit, and maybe on paper or the objectives, right, there's sort of the objective half of, of clothing, which is like is it comfortable, does it fit you, the sort of physical realities.
And then there's the more abstract. There's the messaging, right? Is it girly? Is it edgy? Is it masculine? Is it formal? Is it professional? These things that clothing communicates and that humans kind of instinctively we pick up on those messages. And so oftentimes I think, like with the Frye boots for example, a piece like that is going to allow you, if we do a little forensics on it, right? Like, those Frye boots are a little bit edgy. They're a little bit sort of like western-y, outdoorsy, rugged. They are casual, they're warm, they're grounding. And so it gives you the ability to be a little bit more flexible with the garments you put around it, because when you add those Frye boots into the mix, it's gonna kind of always tweak the tone towards something that feels relevant to who you are in that moment. And sometimes that can be a single piece that you come to every single day. You just top, right? It's the sort of like a, “I put this seasoning on everything, and then I like it.”
It's like, great, if that works for you. And then sometimes it's not gonna be that one piece every day. It's gonna be understanding when you look in the mirror and you go, "Okay, I like this, but it's not edgy enough," right? That instead of just looking in the mirror and going, "Blech, I've failed. Take it all off."
"What... It's off, it's bad, this is wrong." Going, "Hmm, what is this feeling too much of, or what is this feeling not enough of? And then what garment from my wardrobe can I add, swap, or take off to bring that sort of messaging balance back to where I want it?" And I would say 99% of the time, it's actually that people are missing some of their own complexity.
So they've put on their girly dress with their girly shoes with their girly jewelry, and suddenly they feel sort of like a poofy princess.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: And for some people, that is how they like to dress every day. But for others, that feels like, "Well, I know I wanted to wear this dress 'cause I think it's really pretty, but now I feel like I'm in costume as somebody else."
And that's a perfect opportunity where it's like, well, yeah, let's put on those Frye boots with this frilly dress. And then I think it's gonna bring in, you can... you are a layered person. Your outfit can also be sort of emotionally, aesthetically layered as well.
Anne Helen Petersen: This actually is a great segue to our next question, which also hearkens back to a little bit of what you were talking about with the personal style in three words. This comes, this is just about restriction generally. This comes from Rebecca.
Rebecca: "Is describing your personal style in three words or having a capsule wardrobe a diet? My personal style has always been somewhat limited by my size. I currently wear a size 14, but have other times been an 18 or a 20.
So my style has evolved with some general sense of what I like: colors, graphic prints versus florals, specific shapes, but I don't like being hemmed in. And when I'm at the store, there's only so many pieces that even fit me. So is the construct of having a three-word style a diet?"
Anne Helen Petersen: So this question of “is blank a diet” comes from Virginia Sole-Smith at Burnt Toast.
Sophie Strauss: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: And it's basically asking, like, is the thing that we're talking about, is this a form of restriction that will ultimately fail?
Sophie Strauss: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: And that we will feel like failures because we failed at it.
Sophie Strauss: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: So how do you think of the three-word style and the capsule wardrobe, especially when people, the restriction is not necessarily something that they are choosing?
Sophie Strauss: Yeah. So I think you have to separate those two things out. I don't, I think I wanna talk about just the limitation of availabilities over truly a size 12 and really it used to be a little bit more generous than that, but it's contracted back down to over a size 12.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: I think that's a very worthwhile conversation that's just not the same as the restriction inherent in this, like, three-word method or Kibbe body typing or color typing or there's a million, like, a capsule wardrobe. That was the other one.
Anne Helen Petersen: Capsule wardrobe, so huge in, I don't know, 2018. I feel like it's still here but was so big then.
Sophie Strauss: It comes up all the time, so ..
Anne Helen Petersen: You're like, "Ugh."
Sophie Strauss: Yes. So I wanna talk about the capsule wardrobe separately. I do think these are all diets in, less in that they're inherently… I mean, they are all inherently restrictive, so yes. I think the point behind them, my touchstone for this is, like, I am a big Maintenance Phase podcast super fan. I feel like I've listened to every single episode, and I think that they talk very, very eloquently there about, and this is what Virginia is also getting at, right?
Which is this system that is so ridiculous essentially. That it is impossible to achieve it, and you will fail, and it will feel like it's your fault and not its fault. And I would say with clothing, sometimes it's because it's extremely restrictive, like the three word method. And by the way, I wanna be careful sometimes because people do sometimes find this helpful.
And there are a handful of different people who sort of claim, whether you call it the three word method or like finding your adjectives, or there's a bunch of different versions of this, so I don't wanna just be like pinning down on the three word method 'cause that's just one person's thing, and I don't wanna be like, it's not her.
This is a cultural thing. But the other thing that style advice in particular has a lot of is like malicious or, or not intentionally malicious, but very sort of convenient opacity. So, this is to me, and I've been written about very negatively on the Kibbe body typing boards, so maybe this will be another notch in my bed post over there.
But Kibbe body typing is something that gets brought up to me a lot, and it, to me, it is truly the most unintelligible body typing system I have ever heard of. It takes the already complicated messaging we receive about how we are and are not supposed to present our bodies to the world, and then grounds it in language that is so unintelligibly convoluted.
And then you go onto these message boards, and this is the same thing with all of these color analysis things too, which is that you then go onto these message boards and you find a bunch of people who are sad about what they were assigned because it doesn't actually reflect the things that they're like, that makes their heart sing.
You find people who have gone to multiple sort of practitioners who have confidently and concretely assigned them completely different things that contradict each other and sort of reveal that the emperor has no clothes. No pun intended, but that like, if you are a Kibbe body type, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it's like I'm a soft, gamine, dramatic, and then I went to another person who said I'm a - I don't even know what the other kinds would be, but you know, whatever. Or I'm a I'm a bold winter, but I'm actually a soft summer, and it kind of takes the veil off of these things that are really like, yeah, because this is subjective. Like you watch these color typing videos where they're mean. It's like, "Look how dead you look when you're wearing this color."
And it's like, what? You know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and okay, so the other thing too, I think, so some of it is like you look dead or you look old, and then some of it, especially with the body, the overall body typing, the thing that they never talk about or that they know that they're not supposed to say as much anymore as explicitly is like, everything is about a fear of wearing something that God forbid makes you look fat, right?
Sophie Strauss: Absolutely.
Anne Helen Petersen: This is the core of like seeking out flattering at all costs, flattering in quotes here, right? And I've done my own work, a lot of personal work on what I mean when I say that something is flattering. What anyone means when they say that it's flattering. What they're trying to get at is like, does it make me look fat or does it not make me look fat?
And if you don't name that anti-fatness, like…
Sophie Strauss: I have to do that with clients all the time because a lot of the time people reach out and they think what they're gonna get from me is somebody who's gonna sit in front of them and like be honest about whether or not they're, quote unquote, "pulling off" the clothes that they're wearing.
And I like to do exactly what you're talking about, which is I like to name it. "Oh, what do you mean pulling off?" And they'll be like, "Well, does this work for me?" And I'm like, "What does work for me mean?" Right. And then when I drill them until we get to a point where they go, "Does it make me look fat?"
And I'm like, "That's actually not what I do." I'm not gonna, I don't provide that service. It’s also, I mean, I've worked with over 600 people at this point in my career, and I can just tell you there is no objective flattering. So I have clients with very arguably similar body types where one person absolutely loves the way this outfit makes her hips look wide because it makes her feel really feminine, or it makes her feel really sexy, or it's a feature she's worked really hard on, or it's a feature she's worked really hard to make peace with.
And then I have another client who is non-binary and is made to feel extremely dysphoric by an outfit that emphasizes the width of their hips because it feels very femme in a body that they are trying to present as more masculine. And so this idea that I can just sit there and sort of go, "Yes, no, yes, no," that's not the skill I'm building.
The skill I'm actually building and the question that we're gonna ask over and over and over and over again is, "Do you like it?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: "And if you like it, why? And if you don't like it, why not?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Right.
Sophie Strauss: And by the way, that's allowed to apply to your body. You're allowed to not like something.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sophie Strauss: It's a little muckier because when you get there, it's like, okay, well, do you actually like this but you don't think your body deserves it, or you're afraid of what people will think about your body in it, or do you not like it? Those can be hard to disentangle.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, I see a lot of that happening with people figuring out how they feel about, like, midriff showing.
Sophie Strauss: I'm on that journey. I'm on that journey
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Like my ideal was like there's this episode of Sex and the City where there's a rooftop party, and Kim Cattrall is wearing these high-waisted shorts which…
Sophie Strauss: The gingham.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, the gingham. I love that you knew exactly what I was talking about.
Sophie Strauss: I know. And you could have stopped at roof. I knew.
Anne Helen Petersen: And like at that time, wearing a high-waisted short, which is very almost like a '50s silhouette, right? Which is very back, has been back for a while.
But I remember looking at that and being like, "Huh, interesting." Like this is a different way, especially at that time in the early 2000s, of wearing something, like showing off, like loving your midriff ... showing your midriff, that doesn't involve wearing low-slung jeans, right? But then also just people who are like, oh, there's just this understanding that like if you have a fat roll, there's no way that that fat roll should be visible to anyone at any time.
That somehow it must be covered under penalty of social exclusion. And people being like, "But I like the feel of this midriff-baring top. Like, this feels awesome to me, and I'm gonna do it."
Sophie Strauss: Hell yeah. And that actually brings up the one other piece when the people are like, "Am I pulling this off?" Is I would say 80% of the time, it's like a fatphobic question about like, "Does this make my body look bigger?" And then the other 20% of the time, it's an ageist question about am I too old to be like allowed to have fun? Or to show this part of my body. Right. Or has that ship sailed, and now I just hide away until I die?
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. Totally.
Sophie Strauss: Because I'm 34. You know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Because I'm 34. [Laughter]
Sophie Strauss: Yeah. That's just how people are.
The other part of that question, by the way, which was about the lack of size options, I don't wanna miss that part, is that's like we're talking about it, that's a systemic issue, you know? It is like one of... it's up there with all of the biggest issues in fashion, and I would say on the consumer side is the biggest issue. I think we have existential crises on the production side as far as sort of treatment of workers and sustainability practices and things like that.
But on the consumer front, I think size inclusivity and adaptive, disability friendly inclusivity are just absolutely the bar, as my friend Alicia Cole, who is a stylist, says, "The bar is in hell for plus size fashion," and that is true. And so…
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and it all goes back to anti-fatness, right? Because a brand -
Sophie Strauss: Totally.
Anne Helen Petersen: - it's not that they don't wanna make money off of people who are in larger sizes, it's that they don't wanna understand themselves as a fat brand, right? Like, just that fear at the core, which is so fucked up.
Sophie Strauss: There's a million reasons, right? It's a lack of, right, just even viewing fat people as humans worth designing for, of not wanting fat people seen in their clothes. Sometimes it is, I would say a systemic inertia around some of the logistics of, and I'm not saying this to justify why it doesn't happen, I'm just saying, like, this is the way this has deepened hideously in this industry, is there's not a lot of people who have put the time and energy into understanding pattern making and size grading for plus sizes. And so that knowledge is not as abundant as it should be, and the people who have taken the time to learn about it, it's just fewer and farther between, and then have invested money in perfecting it. Again, it's like 99% of the time, ironically, it's, like, these tiny, tiny little brands who are scraping by on razor-thin margins who just either the designer themselves is fat, and they're like, "I want to wear my own clothes, so I'm gonna get good at this." Or just care and are like, "We can fucking do this." And it's ridiculous. And unfortunately, in the last two or three years, we had a sort of moment of, are we finally gonna be more size inclusive in fashion in general and have better size ranges and stuff? Or are we going to just have, you know, go up to a size 12 and say sorry, and pretend that fat people don't exist?
And I think with the rise of GLP-1s, the fashion industry has essentially taken this kind of quietly and not so quietly as an opportunity to excuse themselves from the labor of servicing what is quite literally a majority of the marketplace.
Anne Helen Petersen: I will briefly shout out both Big Undies and Burnt Toast, Bernardino de Soulsmith's Patreon and especially Virginia's jean series, Jean Science series, where she talks a lot about, this was so illuminating to me how so many… Part of the problem with the pattern cutting, as you pointed out, is that they just try to apply larger size across the board. Like, they're like, "Okay, well, if we're gonna get a bigger size, then we're gonna just make it longer and wider." Like, essentially apply it…
Sophie Strauss: Yeah, and then you end up with a sleeve that's, like, eight feet long and 70 yards wide.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, zero attention to how bodies actually, like, are different sizes.
Sophie Strauss: Yeah, it's, it's really awful. Yeah, I would love to shout out, just on that note a couple places.
Like, to me, my favorite store on the planet is Berriez, B-E-R-R-I-E-Z, in New York, but they have an online store, and they do other pop-ups. Berriez is a mostly vintage and secondhand but also carries some emerging designers, store in Brooklyn, and she carries from size extra small through 5X. She sources meticulously.
It is a thankless job. Emma is one of the most stylish, fabulous people I've ever met. I find a lot of my favorite designers, as somebody who very consistently wears a size medium, through her because the work she's doing to find, and not just find, but also train and pattern and sample. Like, she both sources vintage, but she also will work with independent designers who don't have size inclusive size ranges to do plus size runs and help them actually get their patterning and their grading right, and I cannot recommend her enough. We also have Connolly Goods in Canada, who does a lot of denim and workwear. I know that Corinne is a big fan of Connolly.
I got to work with Connolly a couple months ago, and she's just an angel. And that's for, her specialty when it comes to jeans is 100% cotton denim, but with an elastic waistband, so you get the durability and quality of a non-stretch jean, which is really, really hard to find, like, over a size 14 or 16. But you also get the size flexibility of an elastic waistband. And something made ethically, locally, because the reality is, for the most part, plus sizes are serviced by the fast fashion industry. And that needs to change.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, so now we’re going to keep going with this conversation for Ask Anne Anything. As I mentioned up top, we have three specific style conundrums from listeners, so if you want to hear more practical tips from Sophie, head to patreon.com/culturestudy. Sophie, this was such a pleasure. I'm so happy. This was like everything that I could have imagined.
Like, I really wanna go and shop my closet right now.
Sophie Strauss: Yes!
Anne Helen Petersen: I was like, "I'm gonna wear something for this podcast that is very me," but I also don't want it to be very too obvious that I was dressing for the podcast with the stylist.
Sophie Strauss: Where I'm only gonna see your shoulders.
Anne Helen Petersen: Don't, you can see my overalls.
Melody Rowell: I almost said something when you logged on. I almost said like, "Ooh, cute."
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, Melody! [Laughter]
Sophie Strauss: I do get that. People tell me all the... It's sort of like the two things that people try to do when I do a session with them is, like, they either try to clean their closet before I come over, or they try to dress up a lot for me 'cause they wanna impress me. And I'm like, "It's kinda like waxing for the gynecologist." I'm like, "You don't need to do... This is, you don't need to do this."
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, this is like my hairstylist is always like, "Please don't wash your hair. I want it filthy when you come in." And I get so self-conscious about how my hair looks, and she's like, "Shut up. Like, I'm gonna make your hair look good," so, yes.
Where can people find you on the internet if they wanna hear more from you, learn more about you, everything?
Sophie Strauss: They can find me at sophiestraussstyling.com. That is my website that has how to book with me and work with me, or if you want to join my newsletter and membership program, Style School, that's also there.
And then I am very active on social media. They can find me on Instagram @sophiestraussstyling.
Anne Helen Petersen: Amazing. Thank you again.
Sophie Strauss: Thank you for having me.
Anne Helen Petersen: The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Petersen, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me on Instagram @ AnneHelenPetersen, Melody @ Melodious47 and the show @ CultureStudyPod. Thanks so much for your support.