15 Style Tips You Can Learn From Women's Street Style

One of the joys of being a man, as I understand it, is gazing at women, and street style photographs are a boon for that pastime. Sure, women gaze at images of other women to admire a razzle dazzle outfit, or marvelous hair, or great legs, or a neat smirk (well, ideally), but men gaze at those same images slackjawed and mutter something about “a certain je ne sais quoi."

Well, now I’m going to show you a certain je sais ce que. Photos of serene giraffes dressed in actual cumulus clouds and Balenciaga boots are fun to look at, but they can also teach you loads about how to dress yourself. Here are 15 lessons you can learn from the recent slew of street style babes and bambis.

Rachel Seville is a writer living in New York who believes in miracles. Read her blog, Pizza Rulez, here and follow her on Twitter here.

1. There’s never just one way to wear anything

The way you looked as you booked it half-hungover out of a boiling hot lecture room and into the frozen air of your college quad—while also trying to address the social fallout of accidentally texting a girl “is this normal for a guy? see pic” last night—actually looks sort of awesome when done with purpose! You’d think there’d only be one way to wear a sweater, but there is never any one way to do anything, except get to heaven (which involves a really uncomfortable foot massage thing and having a clean bill of health from the fine folks at HotorNot.com). So sling a pair of Tretorns laced together over your shoulders like boxing gloves. Get a safari hat with a chin strap and let it hang down your back (could this be the #menswear answer to Croakies?!). Let your mind run wild. Fashion is a Tubbytronic Superdome and you are the boss don vacuum cleaner who owns everything he touches.

2. Go monochrome with prints

PRINTMIXING is where it’s at, say people, or at least some wretch belched out by Florida who is writing fashion copy for a fancy magazine. Wearing plaid on floral on paisley can be cool, but a bag of diamonds and a free car and Joe Biden putting his arm around you and saying, “Don’t worry, from now on, I’m paying for everything” is cooler. Also cool? Wearing several similar prints in one go. Take this spacey clash of the geometric titans. It looks radically pulled together. A jacket and shirt in similar patterns or colorways will do the trick, or—don’t kill me—a nigh-matching shirt and tie.

3. Wear your pajamas

Men might do a smoking slipper here, a pajama top there, but women have been going full metal pajama for some time. And to quote some smashed girl you met at McDonald’s and went on two dates with, “I’M LOVIN’ IT!!!!!” I wear my blue and green paisley pajamas on the reg, lounge like a lizard at parties and always get asked where I got my “cool printed suit.” Suckers!!!!

IMPORTANT: Avoid looking like you’re copying that indie movie where that plump kid wears jammers and hugs John C. Reilly a lot by having your pajamas freshly dry cleaned prior to wearing.

4. Hip grooming can carry an entire look

This model’s look is radiantly blah. That is until she turns around and you see her hair has been arranged by two Japanese birds named Kahoru and Mississippi. You can get away with a “zzz” look with a slick or swoopy hairdo...or a manicure?

5. Borrow an entire outfit

Men like to wear their own clothing. Which is so limiting because most clothing is not yours. The sign that you’ve “made it” as a female street style star (I hate myself for writing that) is the ability to borrow an entire outfit head to toe. Which you should do. Get the PR folks on the horn and get that Dries conduttore coat for a night or those Ian Velardi plaid pants. “But Rachel,” you’re writing in the comments—which are penned with such demented fervor that I imagine you write them while foaming at the mouth and bleeding profusely from a self-inflicted stab wound from a $600 pocket knife on which you’ve engraved your Disqus username—“You can’t just call up a PR and GET SOMETHING.” You can if you call up and open, “Hello, this is the mayor. I need a Dries Van Noten coat. Jonathan Franzen is standing behind me.” It’s all marbles from there!

6. Do it yourself and by “it”, I mean “yourself”

This girl wrote all over herself. When I was in third grade, this girl wrote “DON’T TOUCH” all over herself and got sent to the nurse’s office and then we never saw her again. But in fashion, that sort of wherewithal is street style ingenuity. Do it yourself doesn’t end at chopping an inch of fabric off your jeans. Paint “PHILOSOPHY” on your forearms. Draw a mustache on your face in pen. Cover your face in war paint for a fashion show or show up to your friend Frat Steve’s party in full sugar skull regalia. Everyone will make fun of you, but you subscribe to a higher truth (maybe hand out business cards that say “subscribes to a higher truth”?).

7. Volume!

Men, you are an alligator and your clothing is a Burmese python eating you whole. Women, on the other hand, like to go swimming in fabric. It makes us look like balloon bouquets. You too could be a balloon bouquet. Wear shoulder pads. Put spats your shoes. Get some nutty Oscar Wilde shirt cuffs. Put mousse in your hair. Put a moose on a leash.

8. Wear a Costume

Conventional wisdom would tell you that if a garment looks kind of “costume-y”, you should wear it with something that detracts from musical theatre potential. Emily Weiss wore these military pants with combat boots and aviators. So, she looks like a paratrooper named Susan Branchbird from the yet-to-be-written Wes Anderson movie The Miracle Branchbirds, about a family of militant birdwatchers whose 19th century Hungarian bird sanctuary is threatened by a nationwide ennui crisis (Bill Murray’s in the trailer in a cravat like, “The moon wagon redfeather is not extinct. It’s more...tinct” and we all laugh like morons). And that is why you should wear your leather and sheepskin jacket with aviator goggles and chew a cigar while wearing this.

9. Overdress!

“HALF THESE IDEAS ARE MEST,” you’re all queued up to comment, but be patient. I’m actually pretty sure all the ideas are “mest”! Take this one, for example: overdress! Think of how many times your girlfriend texted you something like: “I think I might wear a sequin ball skirt to this bar with just like a casual top lol” and you responded: “Sorry. Wrong number, brah.” And then she shows up and looks like a kazillion bucks! You could look like a kazillion bucks in your tuxedo pants and a denim shirt! Skip the cummerbund, unless you want to wear it as a hat.

10. You don’t need words to be witty

This Thom Browne skirt makes, like, three jokes where your "ILLUMANTI" #20 faux jersey T-shirt makes roughly one. A sly print—there’s gotta be some label that’s making Versace-like prints of jungle animals engaging in interspecies copulation—or a little sprezza like a bull stick pin are way easier ways to seek admiration through that elusive non-scornful laugh.

11. Have a better time

If your faces are to be believed, you’re generally having the worst time. “Poor me,” you’re thinking, “this cigarette could be my last until I pull another one out of the carton. And then I have to light it.” Take a note from those stupid inspirational word art things posted by that girl you pity-follow on Instagram: “You cry because you’re different, I laugh because we’re falling love.” Or whatever.

12. Find a friend who looks exactly like you

Nothing looks better than you except two yous.

13. If you’ve got the most famous thing, focus on the most famous thing

Oh boy, can getting the most famous thing—like these Saint Laurent combat boots—be exciting! You want to wear them with all your other most famous things, as if to say, “All my things are the most famous things, so I haven’t a dab of anything un-famous to wear!” Don’t! Wear it with the dumbest, most obvious things. The only reason someone buys the most famous thing is to show off the most famous thing, so don’t hide that lambskin quail hunting vest under a bushel.

14. Stand better

You might think it looks neat to troll about in your cool outfit smoking cigarettes and waggling your arms around, but this actually just tells everyone you religiously read Four Pins and pretty much nothing more. Look at this gal, whose tiptoeing makes it look like she’s never been so goddamned excited about little Jesus portraits and vases that look like bouffants in her entire life. Looking good in an outfit means nothing if you start moving and it all falls apart.

15. Sports y'all

Remember when Hanne bopped around NYFW in February wearing ski goggles and we just had to deal with it because we are not worthy? And then she wore them as a fascinator a few weeks later in Milan? Lesson: Always be trolling sports stores. Or the “seasonal” aisle of CVS. Or your weird aunt’s garage. Or the hardware store. You never know where you’ll find a kimono, or a sweater crawling with white sheep and one black sheep smack in the middle, or a pile of dickies you can wear as neckerchiefs, or moon rocks you can rub in your hair.