My Time (and Sanity!) Saving Style Tip: Use Pinterest To Help You Get Dressed

Add a flower to a natural hair style (another Pinspiration!)

One of the best things about my job as the CW Star is being invited to awesome events around the city. It also can be one of the most stressful when I’m deciding whattheheck should I wear?!

I love clothes and I love shopping and I have the enormous, stuffed-to-capacity walk-in closet to prove it.

Still, in all of those clothes it can be difficult to figure out what I should wear to a particular event.

Invariably, I will procrastinate on picking out my outfits until the last possible minute, panic because I don’t know what I should wear then immediately begin ripping through my closet and running around town to a hundred stores trying to find the “perfect” outfit. Minutes before I need to leave for the event, with my heart rate at 1000, I will be completely exasperated and conclude there is absolutely nothing available on God’s Green Earth for me to wear. Dejected, I’ll decide that I’ll just have to throw on whatever. Of course, when you’re getting dressed in that mindset, it’s impossible to look fabulous because a major part of looking fabulous is feeling fabulous. Ugh. It’s the worst!

If this sounds like you too, we do NOT have to live like this! Recently, I’ve stopped (okay mostly stopped) allowing myself to get to that point by continuously stockpiling a list of what I like to call my STYLEspirations.

Enter Pinterest.

If you’re not on Pinterest, you should be. It’s the coolest social media site (content sharing service, whatev) there is if only because, unlike Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Vine, Google+ and whatever other social media accounts are sprouting up every day, it actually improves your life! (Facebook, on the other hand, is a documented depressant.)

Among other awesome things, Pinterest can actually help you get dressed! Well, they won’t physically help you, but there are COUNTLESS outfit ideas on that site! Don’t believe me? Click on the “Explore” tab, scroll all the way down to “Women’s Fashions”…and thank me later.

Whenever I have down time (or even when I don’t, because I am totally addicted to the site and thus can’t help myself), I scroll through those fashions and repin outfit ideas to my “Clothes and Hair” board. Recently, I even created an “Outfit Idea” board just for those looks that I know I can recreate based on what I already own. No shopping required!

Sometimes, when I’m still in bed in the morning, I will pick up my phone and scroll through my board and look at outfits I’ve already pinned to try and get inspired for an outfit for work that day. I consider it good practice for those major events that require more thought.

As an example, here is just one of many STYLEspiration I got from Pinterest:

I love this Chevron skirt, but it looks like it may have been a Maxi DRESS that she put a sweater, scarf and belt on top of to make it look like a maxi SKIRT.

So, after seeing this picture, I decided to make a maxi dress I have look like a skirt.

Taking it a step further than the Pinterest picture that inspired this outfit,  I actually folded the dress up inside of itself. The belt was snug enough to hold up the end of the skirt inside without pinning (but I could have safety pinned it if I wanted) then I put on knee-high boots and leggings.  A couple of months later, I remembered this outfit and then put on a shirt with the dress to make it look like a skirt!

You see? It really works!

Or if you already have something in mind, such as red jeans for instance. You can type “red jeans” in the search box and you’ll see tons of images featuring pins with that search topic in their captions. Those pins will give you an idea on how to wear your awesome red jeans based on how others are wearing theirs! This is truly life-changing when it comes to clothes!

I hope you’ll join me in saying NO to I-Have-Nothing-To-Wear freak outs by compiling your own list of STYLEspirations. And if you’re on Pinterest, let’s inspire each other! Follow my boards on Pinterest at AlissaInPink then send me your Pinterest Profile link via twitter @CWStarColumbus and I’ll follow you too!

Happy Pinning…and here’s to having a calmer experience when getting dressed 🙂