Building a Small Wardrobe That Photographs Well

I appear in more photographs in a month than I used to in a year. What I learned quickly is that a large wardrobe is not the answer, a disciplined one is.

Pick a colour story and stay in it

Mine is maroon, deep teal, royal blue, ivory and gold. Everything I buy has to live with everything else. This sounds restrictive and is actually liberating, because nothing in my wardrobe is stranded.

Fabric weight over brand

Structured fabric photographs as a clean line. Thin, shiny synthetic photographs as glare and creases. Given a choice between a cheaper garment in good fabric and an expensive one in poor fabric, the fabric wins every time.

• Heavy cotton and crepe for daywear.
• Silk for anything on a stage or in front of a camera.
• Nothing that creases if I sit in a car for forty minutes.

Repetition is not a failure of imagination. It is a signature.

Repeat things deliberately

I wear the same maroon silk repeatedly and I have stopped apologising for it. People remember a consistent image far better than they remember variety, and the anxiety about being photographed twice in one outfit is entirely manufactured.

Where I spend and where I do not

I spend on a small number of well-cut silks and on tailoring. I do not spend on trend pieces, on jewellery, most of which is borrowed or inherited, or on anything I would need to buy a second garment to wear underneath.

The test

Before a piece stays, I photograph myself in it, badly, on a phone, in ordinary light. Half the things I love in a mirror do not survive that test, and it is much cheaper to learn that at home.