Fashion Style Guide - Great websites to help you look your best!

Fashion and Style Tips from Real Women

Fashion magazines are great. They're glossy and pretty and aspirational, and fun to read in bed on a rainy day with a big cup of tea, but one thing they're not is realistic, and I should know, I was a fashion editor. For someone who truly loves and understands the art and the business of fashion, magazines like Vogue, W, Elle, V, and Harper's Bazaar make sense. They wrap you up into a whimsical world of fashion and tell you a story out of which you can pick out the "morals" or overarching themes to understand the seasons trends. For the average girl looking to dress well though, despite a love for fashion, sometimes fashion editorials can be just plain confusing. Lately however, there has been a surge of amazing online fashion and style options that offer great fashion collages and style storyboards, personal outfit snapshots, sale tips, fashion advice and style guides from bloggers and regular women that provide amazing inspiration for looks that you can actually achieve!

One of my favourite sites right now is Lookbook.NU where regular fashionistas and fashionistos post snapshots of themselves in all their stylish glory. Visiting this site and sifting through all the fashion styles has given me so many great ideas, like how to use a belt vertically to raise one side of a hemline for fashionable interest. 

Chictopia is another great site for personal fashion and style inspiration. As the largest online fashion community, it gives "everyone a voice in fashion." Similar to Lookbook.nu, here you can find a gathering of snapshots of some amazing and super fashionable personal style. You can find out what is trending from real people (not advertisers and magazine editors) and you can even do a fashion swap with other fashionable users. Browsing by your body type is another great feature - not every outfit works on every body, and this is something that I always struggle with when reading fashion magazines because with super skinny models, of course everything is going to look good on them! 

Not to say that the people who work at magazines are fake hehe, but they do have advertisers to please, and sometimes their ideas of style are a little more advanced than anything the average girl is willing to fashionably risk...but not to fret, there are a handful of great sites out there that offer collages, style storyboards, and editorial layouts from a very personal point of view.

Polyvore is the mecca of stylish storyboards, all posted by fashion-minded users who are simply just nuts for great style. I love the idea of these style storyboards because they incorporate not just fashion but beauty and travel a lot of the time too! My fav site though for really painting a stylish picture is...

Style Storyboard Although its only one girls point of view, she's got a great one. She puts together outfits that make it a no-brainer for you to look super stylish and completes her storyboards with soundtracks for the inspiration, art, culture, food, travel and more! Every storyboard really is like having not only your own personal fashion stylist, but stylish life coach hehe.

Hope these sites will help you all to put your most fashionable foot forward and most importantly, to feel good and have fun with fashion!! Feel free to comment with any fashion related questions - I'd be happy to answer! xo