follow fashion trends and fads
or
develop a personal sense of style that makes you nice to look at by the majority of the human race.
I pick the latter. Bend the trend or ignore it completely to create your own best looks. That best look doesn’t have to ignore fashion altogether, for example spicing up a classic pants and turtleneck in a neutral with a really great bag and shoes in this seasons colour and shape, making sure the glasses frames are current, makeup, hair colour and cut are current.
I think you can be stylish at any age or size/shape, but it doesn’t matter what size/shape/age you are there are people who can’t dress appropriately. I’ve seen skinny friends struggle with the wrong fit or cut in dressing rooms just as much as me with my plus size figure. Size is not the problem. Taste and the ability to judge fit, colour, proportion etc are.
It’s a skill like any other. Hopefully a mother teaches her daughter but otherwise, take books out of the library to learn. It’s like an art course. Learn to sew to fine tune fit or create the clothes you want in the sizes, colours and styles that flatter.
Then there is the matter of freedom of choice, and tactful good manners.
We pretty quickly get to know who wants the truth and who wants a happy lie when they ask us our opinion. Consideration for others means that we don’t intrude in their choices, but we are perfectly free to have an opinion (unvoiced unless asked) and free to make our own better choices.
What is appropriate often depends on proportion. For example if someone wears a big top, they need tighter fitting pants, and if they wear a long sweeping skirt, it usually looks nice with a tighter fitting top, with a little skin showing. If the bottom is covered up, show a little skin above, and vice versa.
But the skin doesn’t have to be your worst area. It’s all choices. I like the skin on my lower legs but the upper arms—not so much, while my decolletage is still pretty nice. Long over short, short over long.
Then there is fit, and that has NOTHING to do with size. Good fit is good fit no matter what the label says the size is. I have shopped with model size ladies who don’t look good in every thing they try on, any more than I do at a plus size. That is the painful part of shopping. It takes a lot of time and continued effort to find the items that look and fit near perfect.
Cut the label out if it bugs you. But buy the right fit.
Learn which colours enhance and which make you look like a corpse underwater for days.
And then social specifics like not wearing white to a wedding and wearing dress up clothes to black tie, and somber stuff to a funeral. That has to do with respect for others, something that people with manners understand easily, and self centered clods never will. The clods are easily spotted and they can be avoided.
People who dress badly aren’t always clods though. Those with a heart but no taste are still welcome in my company. Poor taste is a very minor sin but heartlessness can’t be changed at all.
For people who want to wear pjs in public, they need to think what kind of impression they want to make, and if they want to come across as socially illiterate, or socially stunted, then by all means bring on the flannel pj bottoms. If they are a hooker and are trolling for business, then by all means wear those micro minis with high heels (it looks less hookerish if the shoes are flat, proportion again). Throw in fishnet hose for good measure.
If they love being pointed out and stared at, or laughed at, or the subject of cruel age related jokes, then the sheer see thru leopard print at a funeral is a definite statement of who they are, and it is their right to come across as tasteless and trashy. But they shouldn’t whine later about never being asked out, or having strangers hit on them.
But for the rest of the planet, most of us just need a little help in learning how to fine tune what we want to say with our outfit, our look, and that takes a bit of skill which can be learnt.
And if they can’t or won’t learn, I’m not going to shun them or laugh at them because perhaps they have other talents that are really valuable like warmth and genuine caring or a wild sense of humour.