You can have a lot of fun shopping for kids clothes if you learn how to put together cool outfits. It is not very difficult, but there are some criteria that you must take into account and you will always know what to buy. Whenever I prepare a new outfit for my website, I use a different approach. Over time, I have looked at many different styles and discovered a way to combine great outfits with children’s clothing. While I agree that there is no “one right way” to do it, I do believe in some ground rules.
The good news is that you can start with any item of clothing. Most people start with a shirt or sweater, even I did at the beginning. But then you can find a cool accessory that you really want your child to wear; then you should create an outfit with kids clothes around that accessory. In other words, you can start with any item of clothing, but that item will already describe what the ensemble should look like as a whole. With this in mind, I think the best approach to putting together a new outfit with kids clothes is to find some random item that your child would love to wear. My favorite example is belts. You may come across a belt that you would like to see your child with. That is a very good starting point to shop by outfit!
In order to build an outfit around any item of clothing, you need to understand the relationship between these items and how they make up an outfit for your child. To clarify my point, let me explain what it is like if you didn’t understand all of these relationships: Let’s say (hypothetically) that you only knew how to choose pants and shoes to match your kids’ shirts. You should always start an outfit by choosing a shirt first! If you started with pants, you wouldn’t know which shirt and which shoes to choose, because you’ve only learned how one shirt influences the rest of an outfit; and not how pants influence an entire outfit. So to give you an example, I’d like to go back to wearing belts – I’m pretty sure not many start out with their guys’ outfit by choosing a belt first. But the belt always decides which shoes your child should wear. A black belt means black shoes. Now that you know what shoes your child will wear, you can easily find matching pants. By now you have half the outfit and all that’s left is a shirt and maybe a sweatshirt (and in some cases a hat).
Another very important rule is not to change any item previously chosen. So to use my belt example again: once you’ve chosen your shoes, you’ll probably find pants below. If you come across pants that you really want your kid to wear, don’t go back to the shoes and change them for the sake of those pants. This will only mess up the outfit because it will make it inconsistent. What you would have to do is put these pants aside, finish the outfit you just started, and then start a new outfit that you build around those pants. I can’t stress this enough: don’t go back to an already chosen item of clothing and change it. You have to go ahead and finish the outfit step by step.
So here are my three basic rules for combining cool outfits with kids clothes:
1) Start with any clothing item that inspires you and loves to see your child wear.
2) Identify the relationship between that specific item of clothing with the other parts of the outfit.
3) Choose each item one by one. Don’t go back and exchange a previously chosen item for a new one. Instead, build a completely new outfit around that item after you’ve finished the already-started outfit.
