Dissecting Inspiration Into Individual Elements: An Example

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If you’ve been reading INTO MIND for a while, you know that I consider inspiration boards (or mood boards) to be one of the most essential tools for refining your personal style, because they allow you to play around with different elements and visualize how they could all work together to form a unique, coherent concept. In my last post, I summarised the process for developing a style concept like this: collect inspiration, identify main elements, create an overarching theme and fine-tune.

Collecting inspiration is easy, the tricky part is figuring out how to actively use that inspiration and extract individual elements that you can incorporate into your own wardrobe. But what exactly counts as an individual element? This post is meant to give you a few pointers on things to spot in your mood board, both very tangible elements like specific colours or items, but also more abstract elements, like an overall theme, a mood or even a memory that your mood board evokes.

Bear in mind that the same set of pictures can be interpreted in lots of different ways. The elements that you extract from your mood board will largely depend on your own underlying idea of style and the millions of associations you have built up over the years. In short, there are no rules when it comes to dissecting a mood board, I can only give you a few ideas on what to look for and how to dig deeper. The sample mood board at the top features a range of different images, all of which could serve as inspiration for your overall personal style, your wardrobe, your beauty routine or even your living space. Below you'll find some examples of elements that I would extract from the mood board but - if you are up for a little assignment - see if you can spot the following elements for yourself first, before scrolling down:

  1. A SINGLE COLOUR
  2. A COMBINATION OF SPECIFIC ITEMS
  3. A MOOD
  4. A SINGLE ITEM
  5. A BEAUTY LOOK
  6. A COMBINATION OF TWO COLOURS
  7. A SILHOUETTE OR PROPORTION
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Which elements would you have picked out from the mood board?

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