How to Not Wear Black: Find Your Style and Create Your Forever Wardrobe

The book is about flattering clothes for your shape and offers advice on developing your personal style. She is a big proponent of buying less but better clothes. This book is not about wearing the latest trend but nor is it about wearing boring basics. The title refers to her belief that wearing a black uniform is not always the most flattering and adding a little color to the ensemble lifts your look.

Really enjoyed this book. Sometimes fashion books are repetitive, this one had information on the "neat hourglass" figure type which I appreciated. I always get a good idea or two out of books like this.

1. Title is misleading in two ways: there's a lot about black. Nothing new; this book teaches nothing about how to have a style of one's own.2. A list of "must have items" like the (ugliest and banal) Breton top and LBD. Imagine all people would wear the same. This is not how you develop a style of your own.3. There are body types. That's it. Examples of how to dress for your body type -- none, except for wear a print to emphasise and a solid color to conceal. Really? Is that what I spent my money on?4. All models are skinny and under the age of 30. Where is the diversity? Only young can have style?5. A plethora of quotes... I guess the book sells by weight. What a waste of tress.6. Color: black doesn't suit everyone, nor does stark white. Wearing a black blazer and a white shirt makes you look like a waiter.7. Not everyone can wear dresses.I have learned NOTHING new from this book. Outdated advice from the 90s with 'sprinkling' of current fads like the ugly track pants. Style is not fashion. Definitely not ugly fashion.

As someone who almost always wears black, I came to this book looking for practical ways to expand my sartorial horizons. Instead, I found a lot of quotes from Coco Chanel and old advice rooted in body shaming.My main annoyance with this book is just how little time and attention dedicated to incorporating color or prints. There is one chapter dedicated to it. Throughout the book the author also strangely recommended a lot of black staples: tuxedo suit, little black dress, little black jumpsuit, etc.This book is mostly about how to dress femininely and put together with individual chapters on pieces of clothing (handbag, jeans, athleisure, shoes, etc.) Which is fine I guess? But the outcome of this book isn't finding "your forever style", it's getting very specific advice to fit the author's style.There were a few pages (yes, pages not chapters) that were helpful. But overall I found this book to be not fitting with the title and rather uninspired.

I have for the past couple of decades slowly lost my confidence in how to dress and when shopping have opted for items that allowed me to blend in unassumingly in mainly black and dark clothes, they became my safety net. This book made want to change that and once again enjoy getting up in the morning just to have fun putting an outfit together. I started by doing Anna's 666 method where you give your whole wardrobe a huge sorting out, this was painful but made me realise that I had lost that fun element of my life that is expressing yourself in a way that expresses who I am. I'm giving this book to all my friends for Christmas and I look forward to seeing them in colour once again too.