I am so delighted to share this week’s episode with the iconic Anna Newton of the Wardrobe Edit. Anna is THE blueprint for a writing & sharing about style online, and I truly enjoyed chatting with her. Recording this episode was the highlight of my month. I truly hope you enjoy as much as I did.

Transcript

Maureen: You’re listening to Intuitive Style, where we believe that everyone has style. I’m Maureen Welton. In conversation with fantastic guests, we explore how to tap into our style intuition so that we can dress authentically and live fully. Today’s guest is Anna Newton, OG content creator, published author, YouTuber, and the creative mind behind The Wardrobe Edit on Substack. Anna, welcome to the show!

Anna: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. We were just saying I haven’t recorded a podcast for the longest time, and I don’t think I’ve ever done one on fashion.

Maureen: Today is the day to get it started. There are some amazing shows about fashion, so I hope to see you on some more of them if you want to.

So I did want to just say before we get into it that I’ve been following you long enough that I wore the Giorgio Armani Luminous Silk on my wedding day, per your recommendation.

Anna: And did you love it?

Maureen: Yeah, I had been wearing it for a while, and I actually got my makeup professionally done. My makeup artist tried to color match me and she was like, “This Giorgio Armani that you have is a better color match and better than what I was making custom.” And I was like, okay!

Anna: Okay. It’s the best. I wore it on my wedding day too. That foundation is such an OG. It’s been in my makeup collection for years. They’ve reformulated it. I don’t know if it’s a worldwide thing, but in the EU they’re bringing out some really strict regulations around certain ingredients, so we’re getting a lot of foundation reformulations, which is kind of exciting. Aside from this, I’d say foundation is my second most exciting pursuit in life.

Maureen: Just wanted you to know that your recommendations are solid.

Anna: I love that.

Maureen: One of the recent series that you’ve been doing that I’ve loved is where you’re working with different personal stylists. Can you share a little backstory on the series and how it’s been?

Anna: Oh my gosh, that has been so fun. So last January, I did a kind of “shop your wardrobe” series. A lot of people do a no-buy in January, and I was like, how can I create content that sits with that and is still fun and exciting and encouraging people to wear what we already have and just have a month of experimenting in a way? Last year I did do a session with Allison Bornstein. I’ve done a few sessions with her over the years and just loved every single one. I think it’s quite a scary thing to work with a stylist. It feels quite vulnerable. It’s quite personal, having a meeting with someone you’ve never met before and going into your wardrobe. So I’ve really enjoyed doing those over the years to show people that it’s not a scary thing. It’s not something you have to do when you’re in complete dire straits with your wardrobe.

I think that’s a common misconception, that you only work with a stylist because you’re out of ideas and feeling in a really bad place with your style. It can definitely help with that, but even if you’re in a good place with your style, it’s still valuable. Personally for me, a lot of my friends in my real life are busy, they have kids. Maybe they care about what they wear, but it’s not something they’re writing an online newsletter about.

It’s been really fun to work with stylists in almost having a super stylish friend give you great ideas, come up with new ways to wear old pieces, give you little styling tips and tricks. I thought for this year I would build on that. I already had a session booked in with Allison Bornstein and I was like, how about booking with Reva Luft? What about Anna Baldwin? What about Kelly Klein? What about Angie Uh? It just kind of snowballed from there, and before I knew it my whole January calendar was full with stylist appointments with these people who I’ve mostly connected with on Substack.

I enjoy their content from a reader’s perspective, so it felt really special to be able to work with them on that series. I’m a fangirl of these people, and I got to work with them and showcase their talent. Ultimately I came away with well over 150 new outfit ideas. It’s crazy. My phone is just full of outfits that I can wear. I got to share that with my readers and show them that having a styling session is a really fun thing you can do. You’re supporting independent women who have created their own stylist businesses, and there were so many ideas.

Every single one was different. I didn’t go into each one with a specific spin in my head of who would help me with what, but it was really fun that I have the same wardrobe and each person brought a bit of their own personality and ideas to the table. It was really fun in the hour sessions that we had. By the end of it, I was always writing them before I went to bed. Because of the time difference, I was normally doing them at like 5 p.m., eating my dinner, and then desperate to sit on my laptop and write the post. The post was in me and I needed to get it out. It was really fun to find the different angles with different people and how they all brought something completely unique to the table.

Maureen: Yeah, it’s been such a fun series. I’ve been lucky enough to work with both Allison and Angie myself, and I’ve had different stylists on the podcast. I couldn’t agree more as far as the value you can get from working with a stylist, especially in a short-term way where it’s a one-off session and you’re just styling in your closet together. I think it’s so helpful to get out of your own head of what you might do and try out things you might not have tried before. Your series is obviously great because you put in so many photos, which is so helpful because we get to see how everything comes together. I know I was inspired by how you were styling a flannel shirt. I lived in Seattle, so it has a very specific meaning to it. Seeing you wear a flannel shirt in a totally different way, I was like, okay, you can give new life and new stories to garments. I thought that was particularly fun.

Anna: The flannel shirt was an interesting one because I think every single stylist gravitated toward it and used it in an outfit somewhere.

Maureen: Really?

Anna: Yeah, I’m pretty sure in every single session we ended up using it, but everyone used it in a slightly different way. Kelly did this trick where we tied it around the waist. Allison did a trick of wearing it open and using it as a sandwich layer between a white shirt or white T-shirt and a leather jacket. In every single one it was funny to see the same pieces styled in different ways. It’s almost like my true personal style is an amalgamation of all of those looks that everybody made. You could almost take pictures from each of the sessions and know which person did which. I think that’s fascinating when you’ve all got the same base material.

Maureen: I’m curious, have you felt different getting dressed since doing the series?

Anna: I’ve just written a post on this. It’s going to be out next week because I was like, I should hope so. Five hours with some of the best in the business, and we overran quite often, so it was more than five hours in a huge way.

I think it’s actually shifted more than I thought it would. I thought I’d just do these sessions and then have a roundup post at the end and be like, here are the 10 tricks that I’ve employed since. But it isn’t so much the styling tricks that I learned, although there are definitely things I’ve put into practice. It’s been a bigger shift in terms of what I have in my wardrobe and how precious I feel about it. That’s maybe not the right way to say it, but in my session with Reva Luft she said, “Your wardrobe is precious real estate. If things are in there, they deserve their place.” I ended up doing this massive wardrobe cull out of nowhere. One day after one of the …

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maureenwelton.substack.com