I learned this through Kabbalah, which is not a sentence I expected to write in a newsletter about clothes, but here we are. Energetically speaking, and I realise that phrase will make some of you roll your eyes, which is fine, roll them, and then keep reading, the year begins now. Not in January, when we're all exhausted and it's dark at four in the afternoon and the resolutions we make are really just punishments dressed up as intentions. Now. September. The moment the light changes and the children go back to school and something in your body changos before your brain has caught up with it. I didn't invent this. I just finally stopped arguing with it.
I've also just come back from Spain, which I need to talk about for a second because this summer was different. I have a complicated relationship with going home, anyone who has parents and a childhood bedroom and a family that operates at a specific emotional frequency will understand this without me having to explain further. My usual pattern has been… arrive, last approximately one month, flee in a state of low-grade panic making promises to myself about next year, and then find myself back there the following summer doing the exact same thing. This time I cracked something open. I stayed. I actually stayed, past the point where I usually bolt, and instead of surviving it I somehow started savouring it. Every morning like it might be the last one. Which sounds dramatic but actually just felt like being present for something I'd been half-absent from for years.
I want to share so much more of what I learned about myself this summer. But my Substack is about fashion - and more specifically about the thing underneath fashion, which is identity, and how we wear it - so let me tell you what all of this has to do with your wardrobe.
Everything, it turns out.
Writing this from the hairdresser because some of us refuse to waste a good blow-dry.
There is a very specific feeling that happens in transition periods, and if you've ever experienced it you'll recognise it immediately, you open your wardrobe and nothing feels right. Something has changed in you, and the clothes haven't caught up yet. You're standing there in the clothes of the person you were three weeks ago, sun-soaked, unscheduled, operating on holiday logic where a linen dress and the same pair of sandals every day felt not just acceptable but actually perfect, and now you're supposed to walk back into your real life, the meetings and the school runs and the emails and the version of yourself that other people need you to be, and the wardrobe is offering you nothing useful. Everything feels like the wrong answer to a question you can't quite articulate.
This is not a YOU problem. This is a transition problem. And it happens because most wardrobes are organised around two modes - holiday and not holiday, relaxed and structured, summer and everything else - with nothing in between. No bridge or formula for the exact moment you're in right now, which is not quite either thing.
Here's what actually helps, and I want to be specific because vague advice about ‘building a capsule’ is not going to get you out of the door feeling like yourself on a Thursday in September.
The first thing is to stop trying to feel ready before you get dressed. You won't. Transition periods feel wrong partly because you're waiting for the internal shift to happen before you make the external one, and it almost never works in that order. The clothes come first. You dress the person you're moving toward, not the person you're still half-being. This is method dressing in its most practical form, not a mood board exercise, just the daily decision to dress for the chapter you're entering rather than the one you're leaving.
The second thing is formulas. Not outfits, not rules ok!? but formulas. A formula is a combination that works so reliably you can reach for it without thinking, which is exactly what you need when your brain is still somewhere between the terrace you were sitting on last week and the school WhatsApp group that has already sent fourteen messages this morning. For September specifically, the formula that works for almost every woman I've worked with is, one summer piece kept in play, anchored by something with structure. A holiday dress with a blazer. A linen shirt tucked into tailored trousers. The sandals you lived in all August, worn with something that says you're back. You're not abandoning summer entirely. You're just giving it a frame. It immediately feels more intentional, and intentional is how you get from standing paralysed in front of the wardrobe to actually leaving the house feeling like yourself.
The third thing - and this is the one that makes the biggest difference long term - is to actually look at what you own right now, in this season, with fresh eyes. Not the eyes of the woman who packed for Spain in June. The eyes of the woman who just came back having learned something she didn't know before. Because she might find that things she'd written off actually work. That combinations she never tried make complete sense now. That her wardrobe has more in it than she remembered, if she's willing to look at it as the person she currently is rather than the person who bought everything in it.
This is exactly the kind of work I'm doing with clients right now - going into wardrobes at the start of this new season, which is the real new season, and finding what's already there. My first client of the new season is thirteen years old. Her dad booked the session, not because she's spoiled, actually the opposite. She has no idea where to start, and before anyone bought her another bag of clothes that wouldn't work together, someone decided to ask a professional first. Which is, frankly, the wisest thing I've heard all summer :)
The rest of my September is filling up the same way, with women who plan ahead, who prefer to start their year now rather than waiting for January to force the reset. If that sounds like you, the Style Strategy Session is where that work happens. Your wardrobe, your life, this chapter. We figure out what works, what doesn't, and what formulas will actually carry you through the next few months without the daily negotiation.
And if you're not sure where to start, the Wardrobe Pattern Assessment is free right now, you just need to be subscribed to access it. I can't promise that stays forever, because this newsletter is only going to get more useful from here, but for now it's yours. Less than three minutes. No shopping list at the end. Just clarity on where you actually are.
Welcome back. It's the real new year. Dress accordingly.
— Carolina