Which is slightly inconvenient when your job involves putting yourself in front of people.
Lately, I’ve found myself posting less, talking less, generally spending less time worrying about whether I’ve shown up in all the places we’re apparently supposed to show up. It wasn’t intentional, life simply carried on, and somewhere in the middle of client sessions, workshops, school runs, and everything else that comes with being a single mother running a business, I stopped paying quite so much attention to the noise.
What surprised me was how much space that created.
I’m a woman with far too many opinions, endless observations, and a running commentary happening in my head at all times. I can turn a conversation about a pair of loafers into a discussion about identity, and spend twenty minutes explaining why someone’s favourite handbag probably says more about them than their LinkedIn profile. The ideas were never the issue. :)
There is a version of content creation that looks like contribution but is actually performance. Showing up consistently, hitting the right topics, editing everything so it lands well with the right people. I have been doing some of that…. and I am bored of it. Not of the work, of the performance around the work. There is a difference and I think most women reading this know exactly what I mean because they have been performing in some version of that same way for years.
A few weeks ago, I was hosting a styling session in Marylebone. I sat in a room with a group of senior executive women and we talked about wardrobes, identity, and what it actually means to dress like yourself rather than for the room you are walking into. And something about that evening made me stop and sit with a question I had been avoiding.
How much of what I put out into the world is actually mine, and how much of it is dressed up for approval?
I read Patricia Field’s book recently. She styled Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada, Emily in Paris. One of the most influential women in fashion for decades. And what came through on every page was not expertise or strategy or a method. It was complete and total indifference to what anyone else thought she should be doing. She was so entirely herself that the work became inevitable. Reading it did not inspire me. It gave me permission to recognise that I am already doing that. That the thing I have been moving toward is not somewhere ahead of me. I am already in it.
In six months I turn 40. I expected to feel some version of pressure about that. Instead I feel something closer to relief. Like the last few years have been slowly removing everything that was never really mine, the performing, the dressing for roles rather than for myself, the waiting for the right moment to say the thing I actually think. I stopped waiting. It feels extraordinarily free and slightly inconvenient for anyone expecting me to stay in a lane.
Here is what I actually believe about style, said plainly without the content wrapper around it. Most women do not have a wardrobe problem. But a self-knowledge problem. And they avoid solving it because looking honestly at what you wear means looking honestly at who you are presenting to the world, and sometimes that is uncomfortable.
Jennifer Aniston has essentially been wearing variations of the same outfit for decades (jeans, white tanks, simple tailoring, great hair, aviator glasses)… Nobody ever seems particularly bothered by the repetition. In fact, people admire it. Which I find fascinating because women spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying that they are boring, predictable, repetitive, not evolving enough, not changing enough. And yet one of the most consistently stylish women alive has spent thirty years looking almost exactly like herself.
I don’t think women come to me because they want more clothes. If that were true, Zara would have solved the problem years ago.
What they’re usually searching for is much harder to buy. They’re looking for that feeling of recognition. The relief of opening a wardrobe and seeing themselves instead of a collection of decisions made for different versions of their life.
That is what I want to help women find. Not a wardrobe that looks good. A wardrobe that is so completely theirs that getting dressed stops being a daily negotiation and starts being the least complicated thing in their day.
Tonight at 7pm I’m going live on Instagram with Treasures of Brazil, a beautiful independent jewellery brand in Marylebone whose pieces are handcrafted from natural materials by women who make things with intention.
We’ll be talking about style, identity, self-expression, and how to build looks around your hero pieces.
Come as you are.
Join us at @carolina.marsoli.
And if you’re curious about what your wardrobe might be saying about where you are right now, before you buy anything new or change anything at all, the Wardrobe Pattern Assessment is the place to start.
You’ll receive it straight to your inbox following the subscribe bottom.
With love,
Carolina
