The Uniform That Nearly Made Me Resign

When I worked at the prison, there was talk about civilian staff having to wear a uniform. In the education department we wore our own clothes as long as we adhered to the dress code.

I can still remember my reaction. It was a physical feeling in my stomach at the thought of it. A white shirt tucked into black tapered trousers with pleats at the waist, (the kind that flatters no one EVER) accessorised by the blackbelt with a leather bum bag for keeping your keys in. Gorgeous. I remember thinking I would have to resign.

Which sounds quite dramatic when you consider we were talking about a shirt and a pair of trousers.

Except I knew that dressing like that would affect me deeply. I wouldn’t feel like myself and it would affect my confidence and impact me doing my job. It would change how I showed up at work.

This was years before I started working with style professionally. Before Funky Diva Vibes existed and I had a Sausage Machine to explain the invisible rules and “shoulds” we absorb without realising.

I just knew that clothes could change how I felt.

I’ve been thinking about that again recently because, after deliberately moving away from the “stylist” label, I think I overcorrected.

I’d become increasingly uncomfortable being described as a stylist because of assumptions about what that meant. I wasn’t ever interested in sharing outfits of the day, telling people what was fashionable or producing lists of things every woman over 50 should have in her wardrobe.

The styling world is full of rules and “shoulds”, which, has never sat comfortably alongside a woman who now takes a Sausage Machine around with her.

So I stopped really talking about clothes.

The problem is it meant I stopped talking about an area where I have deep expertise and has always been an important part of my work.

Reading through old testimonials recently has confirmed that the deeper transformation I talk about through Funky Diva Vibes has been there all along. I just didn’t use that language for it before.

Weirdly for somebody who has spent a large chunk of her career working with them, I’m not really that interested in clothes.

I’m interested in how clothes make people feel.

There’s a big difference.

Most people can probably remember wearing something at some point in their lives that made them feel bloody fabulous. Maybe it was an outfit for a special occasion, a jacket or pair of shoes that put a bit of a spring in their step.

You catch sight of yourself and think, “YES.”

That feeling changes something.

▪️You stand differently

▪️You move differently

▪️You walk into the room differently

There’s an energy that comes from feeling completely comfortable and confident in what you’re wearing, and other people pick up on it.

🩷My word for that is “comfydent”🩷

What creates that feeling will be different for everyone and can change depending on where you’re going and what you’re doing.

I can feel completely comfydent dressed to the nines when I’m going on stage. Put me in exactly the same outfit for a wander around Sainsbury’s on a Tuesday afternoon and I would feel over dressed.

The clothes haven’t changed and I haven’t changed, but the situation has.

That’s why I’m more interested in helping somebody understand how they want to feel than giving them a prescriptive list of what they should wear.

Obviously, I know all the theory. I’ve spent years learning about colour, body shape, proportion and all the other technical stuff that sits behind personal styling. I have decades of experience in fashion and textiles too.

And that knowledge matters purely because knowing what works for your proportions can give you confidence. Understanding why certain colours make you look brighter while others seem to drain the life out of you can be useful information too.

What I believe is most important is what happens next. Once you know the theory, you get to decide what you want to do with it.

▪️You might follow the advice because you love the result

▪️You might tweak it because something else feels better

▪️You might decide you absolutely love something that technically breaks every styling rule in the book and wear it anyway

If you understand why you’re making that decision and you feel bloody brilliant in it, who cares?

That is Funky Diva energy.

It’s the difference between blindly following a rule because somebody told you that someone with your body shape shouldn’t wear something and having enough information to make your own choice.

The really interesting stuff often appears when we start looking at those choices.

🤔Why don’t you wear that colour?

🤔Who told you that you shouldn’t wear that shape?

🤔Where did the idea come from that something was too young, too bright, too noticeable or simply “not for people like me”?

Sometimes there’s a perfectly practical answer. There are fabrics I don’t wear because I can’t stand how they feel. There are clothes that just don’t work for my life.

Other times there’s a story attached that somebody has been carrying around for years without ever really examining it.

ThIs is where clothes become interesting with the work I do.

Someone might come to me because they’ve looked in their wardrobe and realised that nothing in there feels like them anymore. They might know they want something to change but have absolutely no idea where to start.

My job isn’t to replace their existing set of rules with a shiny new Lisa-approved set.

I help them understand what they like, how they want to feel, what influences have shaped their choices and where their own tipping point sits between feeling more confident and starting to feel uncomfortable because they’ve gone too far out of their comfort zone.

That tipping point matters because Funky Diva energy doesn’t have to mean walking into Aldi dressed like you’re about to headline at Glastonbury. Unless that genuinely is your Funky Diva daily vibe, obviously, in which case crack on.

For somebody else, moving towards their Funky Diva era might mean trying the brighter glasses they keep picking up and putting back down. Wearing the earrings they normally save for best. Choosing a different shape of trousers or finally buying the coat they love instead of the sensible black one they think they ought to have.

Those choices can evolve too. What feels like an eight on the FD scale today might eventually feel like a four because you’ve become comfortable there and want to explore a little further. It’s incremental.

Looking back, I think that’s what I understood instinctively all those years ago when somebody threatened me with a white shirt and black trousers. Clothes were never just something I put on my body before I went to work. They affected how much I felt like myself.

I’ve spent the last few years developing Funky Diva Vibes, talking about Squishes and “shoulds” and the Sausage Machine of Conformity, and somewhere along the way I thought I needed to distance myself from personal style so people understood that my work went deeper than clothes.

Turns out, I didn't need to throw the clothes away. I needed to articulate their place in the bigger picture.

Because how we feel on the inside can absolutely be affected by what we put on the outside.

And helping somebody understand that relationship well enough to make their own choices, break whichever rules they fancy and feel completely like themselves when they walk out of the door has been part of my work all along.