Discovering Your Inner Style - 8 Steps to G.U.R.U.

Does not add anything to what any other book on personal style will tell you. As any other book on style, it describes number of styles and provides the reader with a quiz that you can take in order to determine your dominant style. The styles are not your regular "Classic", "Bohemian", "Bombshell", or "Eclectic". Instead, this book uses slightly different names "Natural", "Classic", "Polished", "Artistic".

Also it uses different names for color types: instead of Spring, SUmmer, Winter, Fall, it uses Bright, Subtle, Strong and Deep, but that's where the difference ends.

The book has a lot of contradictory information. For example, it tries to combine your inner personality traits with a closing style and body shapes. That's the part I find contradictory as author suggest that a particular personality trait suggest a clothing style which in turn suggests a body shape. Well, I took the quiz and based on the results, my body shape should be "apple", while in reality it is hourglass. Thus I was not able to user author's recommendations.

In real life I have not seen any connection between personality and body shape, and very little connection between dominant personality trait (i.e. communicator, mediator etc) and clothing style. For example if your personality train it a "Mediator" or "Communicator", does not necessarily mean that you would look good in clothing classified as "Natural" or "Artistic".

Disappointing...

The Pocket Stylist

One of the most useful books on dressing yourself. It talks about 3 body types: apple, pear, and hourglass, helps you determine which one do you belong to, gives you an idea of what type of clothes would look good on you, emphasize your best features and conceal your worst... Also it will teach you how to take your measurements correctly, where to buy clothes and accessories while staying within your budget, organizing your closet and much more.

In addition to 3 body types, the book takes into consideration not only skinny women of these types, but also those who are bigger than average. Therefore, there are 6 types listed in the book: A,B,C,D, E, F. Where A is pear shape regular, B - hourglass, C - apple, and D - pear ample, E - ample hourglass, and F - ample apple shape.

The book is pretty compact in size and can be easily carried with you

Style on a shoestring

It was just OK. Nothing extraordinary and nothing new. I'd recommend The Pocket Stylist instead. There is info some might useful but to most it should be common sense. For example on how to pick the right fit. Does one really needs a guide to be able to tell if an item fits well or whether you can see undergarments' lines on your clothing or not?

I also found that most recommendations on the styles did not take into account specific body types. I could be wrong, but I got an impression the author was using a particular body type as a model for this book.

The book starts out talking about undergarments and wearing correct undergarment for each outfit, how undergarments should fit etc. Then it talks about how other clothing items should fit and what to look for to get the right fit. Also there is a lot of info on thrift stores and when to shop for what to catch good sales, some on organizing your closet, picking the colors and what each color means. There is also a section on what not to wear.

What I found useful was some info on the pockets, pocket alignment and shape. Information on thrift store was also somewhat useful, as well as the section on what not to do. Overall the book isn't bad at all, just not as informative as one would expect from all the positive reviews.