PR8 Your Brand, Your Look Don’t let people tell you that looks don’t mean anything. Especially today, with the proliferation of social media and the need for audiences to identify personally with the brands that they adopt, you need to be sure that your looks are tailored to the brand that you create. You may believe that the opposite should be true: that you should tailor your brand to your looks. However, creating a brand is about creating an image, and the fact is that the way we were made doesn’t always fit the image we want to convey. It really does make more sense to imagine who you want to be, the brand you want to create, and fit yourself into the mold. Obviously, you don’t want to build a brand that is so fantastically different from the person that you actually are that it’s not believable to anyone; you do, however, want to imagine the very best person that you can be – and go one notch higher. Let’s face it: everybody roots for the underdog in the movies, but nobody wants to sit next to them on the bus. You want to be the cool kid. It’s easy, especially for those of us who have been out of college for a few years, to get stuck in a looks rut. Women may sport the tall hair of the 1980s or the ubiquitous Rachel cut of the 1990s, and men keep their hair shaggy or gelled depending upon the decade in which they matriculated. Clothing proportions change, and shoes – for both men and women – get rounded or squared toes. Moreover, there’s a lot of mileage between 20 and 30 – and the difference between 30 and 40 and further is really, really far. It’s not to say that you can’t be fabulous, as they say, at any age. However, what makes us fabulous in any given decade depends on appropriate grooming and suitable attire. Nothing makes a person look older than forgetting our age and emulating the flavor of whatever month in which we used to be cool. Your brand needs to be at about taking advantage of your age, not trying to mask it. If you’re in your 20s, adopt a hip, wunderkind brand; your 30s opens the door to appearing experienced enough to be visionary. By your 40s, you are experienced and capable, but young enough to recognize the cutting edge, and in your 50s, you’ve got enough time under your belt that you can tout yourself as someone who has weathered the storm. This is not necessarily the time to look at magazines to determine the right look for your brand. Women’s magazines especially love to guide their readers in the right look for the right age, and I have to say they aren’t always right. Well, maybe they’re right if their readers are wealthy socialites or fashion magazine editors, but most of us have to really work for a living – and that means being taken seriously. Being taken seriously requires us to not look ridiculous. The best advice I can give is to really study the person you’d most like to be, and figure out a way to emulate them – and then give the look your own personal touch. If you can’t figure out how to do this, ask for help. With the need for every single person in Hollywood to have a personal stylist, there has been a proliferation of stylists on the
Internet. Every town has stylists. The thing to be wary of is that some of them have no style, of course, so hire someone reputable. If you’re not quite ready to take that step but have enough money to get excellent clothes and expensive grooming, go to the best department store in town and use one of their personal shoppers, and go to the best salon or barber shop in town and use one of their senior (this is important) purveyors of fine grooming. If you really are just starting out, offer your most stylish friend drinks and dinner in exchange for an afternoon of shopping and haircutting. The shopping should include the search for a cohesive wardrobe of the best basics you can afford with a few of-themoment splurges, and the hair chaperoning should include stopping you from doing something so silly at the suggestion of the stylist that you can’t leave your home for three months and you end up having to put one of your old college photos up on your Web site.