Fashion on the Hill: THIH Blogger Kyra Gets Wardrobe 180° Treatment

Kyra to get makeover. Stripes (and Anabel) to stay.

Fashion on the Hill will be spotlighting the  personal wardrobe transformation  to a better-fitting, chicer and more stylish look for one of our more prolific bloggers, a busy Mom of a toddler and part-time professional, Kyra DeBlaker-Gebhard through the  kindly pro bono work of  style and branding talent Wardrobe 180°, profiled here a couple of weeks back.

We will be following the process in a few installments so we can all take steps along with Kyra to get our closets and our look ready for everything the Hill has to offer! Our subject, Kyra, is 32, from the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, NJ, lives near the H Street Corridor, has an 18-month-old  daughter that dotes on her, recently started a part-time job, and is happily open to new experiences and experimentation.  One of these is turning around her look, which is wedged between her recent youth and her full-on Mommy and Me mode.

Kyra said she was ” tired of looking like a sad mom [we don’t think so, Kyra!]  who appears to be clinging to her twenties” and “some help to feel more like the young thirty something I am. I also said that I’d love a look that would be suitable should I be magically picked up and dropped in Europe, kind of effortlessly chic, pulled together.”

Enter Jenn Bussell. Bussell is a Wardrobe Stylist  and personal brand coach whose company, Wardrobe 180°, specializes in helping clients make over their look with closet and life assessments.

Jenn said our lovely and vivacious  Kyra was stuck between desiring the carefree, younger clothing of youth, very girly looks, in fact, including some of the cute skirts and tops she buys for her daughter from kids’ catalogue vendors like mini-Boden, but  instead selects  more frumpy and plain clothes when getting herself dressed. Kyra, like many new moms, acknowledged self-esteem and body image issues cluttering her mind, if not her closet. (You’re not alone!)

The good news is Kyra has an identified look–stripes and a core color of navy– and is “good about cleaning her closets, and getting rid of items she does not need or which do not fit,” according to Jenn, a trait that puts her “10 steps ahead of most  people.”

“She knows enough to get rid of it but she  hasn’t figured out how to replace it,” Jenn said, after recounting a three hour visit last Friday.

Kyra gravitates toward stripes–she has striped t- shirts, striped sweaters, striped 3/4 length shirts in her wardrobe–paired with solid pants. About 80% of her closet is cotton, and casual, with a couple of very traditional suits, but nothing in between, according to Jenn.

“I asked her, ‘what do you aspire to?’ She said she aspires to a French or European style chic,”  Jenn said. Kyra’s classic striped Breton tops, regaining popularity  this year, are a core part of her casual look, but, with a young daughter, “she doesn’t try as hard as she used to,” Jenn noted. Well, Jenn had an answer for that when she arrived on the scene last Friday. She pulled out a red chunky necklace (lots ‘o’ colorful jewelry from the vendors at Eastern Market hath our fair Kyra–she loves bursts of color), and “asked her what kind of effort it would take to add this, and she said ‘none’.”

Thus began the personal and closet assessment by Jenn. Kyra’s next steps are to streamline her current wardrobe, double-check everything in her closet for size and invest in some good storage totes and put them away–or show them off as conversation pieces.This includes the removal of everything of sentimental value but which doesn’t fit or is not worth tailoring.  She also must benchmark her closet with Wardrobe 180°’s 20 wardrobe staples, which include day and night jeans, three layering tanks, a pencil skirt, an A-line skirt and, thankfully for Kyra, a striped sweater or shirt.

Kyra, these do not include a baguette.

“As an experience, it was great! I have already tried using some of the layering tips we have talked about and picked cute flats to wear Saturday instead of my tired, old flip-flops. And I just made a purchase from Land’s End to add to my basics,” Kyra shared. “They have a new collection called the Canvas collection. Very American chic. I also am going to purchase a few things from the LL Bean Signature line that I went over with Jenn,” she added.

“The one thing that really resonated with me was that she accepted my love of stripes and didn’t try to tell me to stop wearing what I like. And she was just very easy to talk to as well. She arrived at 10am, and I was sad to see her leave at 1pm.”

Next  comes the shopping outing –Kyra, a Hill denizen of five years, wants to stay local and perhaps shop at Union Station. We will follow Kyra as she plunges into her navy, Parisienne soul-within-a-soul and defrizzes, defrumps and gets going. Wait … she’s already almost there, she just doesn’t know it.