The HMS Glossary

Terms I made up to help us talk and think and unlock style. Updated regularly.

• ABMO (Always Be Making Outfits). When you stay home in sweats, make it cool. When you hated what you wore all day, try one more take before taking it off. Set side 20 minutes to play around with one item.

• BASH (“the BASH test”) — before you buy anything, consider if you’re Bored, Anxious, Sad or Hungry. If any is a yes, wait.)

• Best in Class: These are workhorses in your wardrobe. They have a distinct utilitarian purpose. But buy the best looking ones and they can cross over into every day looks. For example, your Alo Yoga knee cap leggings, which you need for workouts, will also make for a hotel lounge ‘fit with a button-up and flats. Read more here.

• Bridge Colors: a bridge color is what it sounds like, a bridge to soften the landing between two colors that are jarring. A bridge color can be another version of a color you’re already using, a lighter neutral (say beige/greige/olive/ecru/white/cognac), and sometimes another same-value/unexpected color. (Written about here.)

• Chips-in-the-Mouth Shopping: Solo online shopping where you’re just blindly doing it, maybe shamefully, without true joy/intention

• Clockwise Challenge: An exercise to undertake when you hit a Culling Plateau (see below). Instead of wearing whatever you’re in the mood for, you force yourself to wear what’s physically “next” in the closet, going in clockwise order. It removes the emotion and forces the reckoning, of yes, I paid a lot/love the idea/chased this item BUT realistically for me/my lifestyle/my body/my evolution it just doesn’t make sense. More on this here.

• Closet Pyramid: A way of looking at your wardrobe and understanding what you need more/less of, inspired by the Food Pyramid. I walk though it all here.

• Conscious Culling: Taking inventory and whittling with intention but ALSO taking the step of probing the whys and noting takeaways as you cull.

• Culling Plateau: A situation in which you have this idea that you want to clean out your closet, but at a certain point you hit a wall and keep feeling torn or saying “I still like this. And this. And this.”

• DNA (or Style DNA): A combination of 3-5 adjectives that together define your style and serve as an “is this me?” filter. See how to define + use yours. I also help people with this. Here’s what I do and how to get started.

• Domino Dressing: A technique for getting dressed where you start with one or more of the items you wore and enjoyed the day before.

• Fireballs: Fashion items that gain a high intensity, seemingly quite sudden popularity in fashion world, highly present via social, to the point where you may find them unignorable and irresistible, possibly without even considering whether you like them or they feel like you.

• Golden Children: Your go-to pieces that you know work unfailingly, always, with everything.

• Hamburger Patty Theory: If you manipulate something too much, like when typing a shirt, it ends up looking … manipulated. Try to just hit it and move on.

• Inventorying (sometimes I call this “HMS Inventory”): Trying on every single one of a particular category (and ideally photographing them). It could be a big category like skirts. Or a more narrow one if you have less time, like black blazers.

• Lady Killers: Pieces you own that will always take the “too lady like” affect out of an outfit.

• Lemon Drops: My attempt to rebrand bunions.

• LMA: The last-minute adjustment that makes an outfit feel like something, e.g. a red sock. Get my current LMAs.

• Lofted Settledness: The feeling you get when you put yourself together in a way that honors your style DNA (makes you feel like you), reflects your aspirational mood (makes you feel how you want to feel) and fits the situation at hand. It’s a very particular blend of comfort, plus something more, a certain kind of joy/pleasure/rightness that’s almost ebullient and can be present in the most ordinary moment. Read about Lofted Settledness and how to find it.

• The Mastery Myth: The misguided notion that you can “master” anything style related, i.e. find THE perfect jeans (that will stay perfect) or fully “do” every inch of post-holiday sales across all the sites, and the pursuit of this kind of “mastery”

• Money Pit: An item you bought, likely didn’t wear, and then keep sinking money into. You have it shortened. You have a stain removed. You buy another thing to wear with it. You think: Maybe if I cut the sleeves off …

• Museum Syndrome: A manufactured notion of museum-level collecting when one is not in fact a collector/curator. Symptoms: You won’t sell items that no longer fit because they’re “important” (vs. emotional) and also use notions of important, significant, last collection, historic to justify purchases.

• The Museum: A selection of pieces in your closet that you don’t intend to wear. You’re not waiting to fit into them. Those you get rid of. These have sentimental value. Or just give you great pleasure when you see them.

• Netherland Items: “Netherland items” — neither here nor there, like flat shoes that hurt. Be flat and comfortable. Or be stunning AF and we can valet to dinner.

• Nowhere Fit: Not big and swaggy. Not slick/sharp/to the body. Just meh. Just nowhere. Do. Not. Buy. Read about it here.

• Open-to-buy List: A list you keep of things that you are amenable to buying IF the right one comes your way. It’s not a shopping list; you’re not going out and crossing them off this list. But if you find yourself shopping, say in a vintage shop, you can pull this list up as a reminder and to help center you.

• First Pancake Look: The initial outfit you try with a piece or an idea. Like the first pancake, it can taste great but you’re not yet in that groove. Push forward to get lots of perfectly golden, round options more easily as you go along.

• Poison (see also “Wrong,” below): What an outfit needs when it’s all just too perfect, too pat, too matchy. To feel truly like style, something needs to be off.

• Rosehip Jelly: Formerly known as “cellulite.”

• Shopping Thermometer: Are you hungry, angry, exhausted, sad, bored, anxious, or feeling off about your body? Then you are not well enough for shopping. Always take your temperature.

• Sleeper Hit: Something you buy that turns out to be far more useful and therefore satisfying than you imagined. When shopping a sale, try looking at potential Golden Children not Transformers, so not the big bold high impact items, but the quietly useful, like a white tee you would not have bought full price, and you may end up with a Sleeper Hit.

• Sniper Shopping: Uber intense, highly specific, tactical, specific-item takedown shopping. There is a hyper gaming element that sets in where ultimately, in a calmer state, you might even question: “Wait, do I even want this thing, like, genuinely?”

• Transformer: A piece that punches really hard on your modifier and has the power to totally change your outfit. They are the instant add-on to make something feel so “you.” So my modifier is “Miami.” And when something feels lackluster to me, I’ll try a transformer like this huge (almost foot long!) white cuff. Read more.

• Treasured Sometimes: The pieces in your closet that still fit, you still like, but take a little thought, like they don’t just go with everything the way a Golden Child does.

• UBLO: Unidentified blazer-like object.

• Whole 30 Syndrome: After my Whole 30, I was like “GIVE ME ALL THE COOKIES. I WAS SO GOOD FOR SO LONG!” This is what can happen after a major closet cull. You bring one thibg in. Then the floodgates open and you’re back where you started. With more guilt. It can become an endless loop.

• Wrong (see also, “Poison,” above): “Until it’s wrong, it’s not right.” Meaning, when an outfit is all too well matched, too on the nose, it’s not there yet. It lacks interest, oomph. This is when you might want to try an off color, a shoe that feels like it doesn’t belong at all, a sock.