Guest Blog Written by Ashleigh C. Henry
When Reinvention Isn’t the Answer: Finding Your Style Through Integration, Not Overhaul
In moments of transition, we often reach for reinvention. But true attunement with yourself doesn’t come from changing everything at once. It comes from integrating who you’ve been with who you’re deepening into being. The verbiage of “becoming” is often used and it can create a sense of hierarchy between who you are and who you desire to become. My work as a lifestyle designer, with a heavy hand in coaching women to deepen into their trustest selves, meets at the intersection of reinvention and the aftermath of reinvention. The aftermath is rarely discussed as often as the upheaval of reinvention.
Susan’s work as a stylist is to help you align your wardrobe with your life- curating pieces that express your personality, lifestyle, and evolving identity with ease. But what if you’re not sure of your identity yet? What if your identity is fluctuating? What if you’re in the space of reinvention: a new career path, a cross-country move, the birth of your third child, or even a personal rebirth?
This article acts as a guide to see your mile markers along the way: restoration, growth, expansion, and contraction. If you know where you are along your identity pathway, you’ll soon know who to call for help if you get turned around on the way. Susan and I are here to support you in the process of each season; Susan’s work goes far beyond “finding your style”- she helps you express who you are through clothing that feels attuned to your whole self. My work complements hers by helping you deepen your sense of identity before matching your external world to your internal one.
The Restoration Season: When Your Wardrobe Needs to Exhale
You’ve most likely looked in your closet after a big change in life and wondered why the hell you ever chose a minimalist wardrobe, yeah? Or perhaps you’re in the midst of burnout and you’re continuously choosing the same four outfits on rotation for a month whenever you leave your home because it’s become a touchstone, right? A sense of safety and stability in the midst of a season that feels like burnout, overwhelm, or energetically charged in some way? The ultimate question becomes: what do I wear during this life transition?
Perhaps you’re grappling with your identity after a high-friction divorce or seeking to add more maximalism to what’s been a beige and neutral heaven? I’ve been there and many of my clients have expressed that their business portfolios no longer look like their true personal brand because they’ve moved from black-and-white career wear to fluid and flowy dresses, with pops of color all over the place.
The restoration season is the pause after burnout, heartbreak, or big change. This is the what-to-wear stage during the life transition stage when simplicity, softness, and comfort matter most. Instead of striving for a “new look”- that asks your nervous system to stretch even more, in an already stretchy time- this is the season that’s about creating space to rest and reorient. Think breathable fabrics that move with you not against you, favorite neutrals, silhouettes that feel like safety, and ultimately, pieces that feel like presence not performance.
Your body in the midst of a restoration season may feel: stretched to capacity, bothered by certain fabrics, disinterested in the tightness of certain styles, and may be best categorized in one word (cozy).
Your body is looking for a sacred, supportive, cozy anchor that you can reach for day-in-and-day-out in this season.
The Growth Season: Rebuilding Confidence Through Everyday Expression
The restoration phase still acts as a season of personal growth through your wardrobe. Your body being supported by cozy stability breeds a natural interest to feel good, get bored, and then move into the growth season. The experimental phase, if you will, after rebuilding your confidence through identity, style, and anchor pieces that connect you back to your body while your heart, mind, and soul are in the process of digesting and metabolizing the season you were in. Here, the focus shifts from survival to exploration.
You’re experimenting again, not to impress, but to remember your range. This phase might look like adding color back in, trying a new texture, or revisiting pieces that make you feel like yourself again.
You’ll start to look for ways to anchor the new bits and pieces of your lived, deepened identity through new fabrics that still feel soft and supportive on the skin- but you’ll be open to some tightness, some “discomfort” for the sake of experiencing play. Ruffles may not always feel great on the skin, but when you look in the mirror…you’ll feel the fluidity of play with every curve. You’ll be seeing yourself in pieces that help you exist beyond comfort.
This is the era where your confidence begins to illuminate through your personal style choices because your renewed sense of identity is ready to crack the door open just a little bit. If the restoration season is the exhale, then the growth season is the first deep breath back in. This is the season where your self-possession builds through micro-doses of play. Each outfit becomes a small re-patterning: your body learning that visibility can feel safe, that self-expression can feel grounding, and that the mirror can be a place of reunion, not critique or simple coziness.
The Expansion Season: Dressing for Visibility and Voice
If the restoration season was your exhale, the growth season was your first deep inhale, then we’ve now arrived in the expansion season and the expansion season is for a full-body stretch. You’re inhabiting your sense of expression because you’ve regained your rhythm- now you’re ready to be seen in micro-portions of your identity. This is the season that reminds you that all of your identity cannot be illuminated everywhere all at once. You recognize that you can show different facets of you in different forms of stylistic expression.
Expansion looks like your own defined boldness with intention. Perhaps for you it looks like dressing to feel empowered and styling yourself for pure and unadulterated confidence: structured silhouettes, statement accessories, or tailoring that matches your inner clarity. This is truly where collaboration with a stylist helps translate inner growth into outer presence.
Your voice and renewed sense of identity after the first two seasons of evolution will become your anchors for your reinvigorated personal branding wardrobe. Even if you’re a corporate woman in your late 40s or a girliepop with an influencer deck dressed to kill, you’ll have a “personal brand” simply by being a person with characteristics and inhabited style that the folks around you notice about you and your wardrobe. Ultimately, they’re noticing your internal identity being fully embodied in your external world, influencing their external worlds with beauty and grace.
In this season of your personal style, you may feel open and integratedly alive. You may have a new tolerance for fabrics and sensations that once felt like itchy, little bugs on your skin, but now feel enlivening. Your posture and movement may have shifted through the last two seasons- your shoulders once caved in for cozy or almost fully open in expansion has now shifted again- and you have your shoulders fully back, your heart seems “open” to the external eye, and your voice and gaze are steady in every room you walk into.
This is the season of forward momentum and external expression that has everyone asking you “who is your stylist?” and you get to say “well, first, I had to inhabit my true sense of identity” and you’ll know to send them to Susan Padron or Ashleigh C. Henry first!
The Contraction Season: Refining What No Longer Fits
If the restoration season was your exhale, the growth season was your first deep inhale, the expansion season is for a full-body stretch, then your contraction season is about editing with discernment. Just like pruning helps new growth, this is the space where you’re able to edit your closet- and your identity- with precision. This is a time to release what feels performative, and to invest in what truly reflects your current, deepest sense of self.
Decluttering with purpose involves style, identity, and self-awareness for the embodied portrayal that you’d like to give the world each and every day. Style is for you and it acts as a ritual for your everyday life that rewires your subconscious to notice this new sense of identity.
Subconscious reprogramming, cycle syncing, nervous system support, bodily awareness, and somatic retraining are all fancy words for the layers this article has brought to the surface. We’ve walked through these layers together by weaving the four phases together and these phases very much mirror your feminine cycle.
Even if you no longer have a cycle, your body still may feel certain parts of each phase because it remembers. You can still experience cyclical-like rhythms or phase-type fluctuations even after a hysterectomy or in menopause. Consider which of these phases of your cycle and which of these seasons in the article mirror each other and then deepen this consideration and notice the seasons throughout the year: winter, spring, summer, and fall.
Style is a representation of so much more than clothing, colors, or fabrics- it’s the soft lining of every phase and system we know so deeply as women.
Edit within your contraction season accordingly, refine what no longer fits in every sense of the word, and then if you’re brave enough…apply this to your pie of life. The pie of life includes: body, health, emotional and spiritual well-being, relationships and community, purpose and work, environment and home, wealth and resources, and play and pleasure.
And, of course, if you desire support, I teach this work through Ashleigh C. Henry Life Coaching and inside of The Harmonious Living Program.
Style as a Mirror for Your Becoming and Your Deepening
Style and identity have so much more connection than most will let on. You can take risks in your wardrobe when you stretch your capacity for risk, aversion, and discomfort within your internal self. Your physical body will only respond to external factors as well as you can respond to external factors…internally. If your internal self is in a season of upheaval, why wouldn’t you then be reaching for the restoration season wardrobe? Why would you force yourself into the expansion season?
Integration doesn’t mean forcibly blending everything into sameness. Identity and style integration means allowing each season of the self to inform the next. Whether that means slowing down, cleaning out, stepping out, or letting go, your wardrobe can be both a reflection and a ritual of that evolution.
Your personal transformation may begin with a desire for your external wardrobe, but you may feel more integrated if you first begin with an internal shift. To have a holistic approach to every season of growth allows you to expand in ways that will linger for seasons to come.
Ashleigh C. Henry is a speaker, writer, and life coach guiding high-achieving women toward a life they can actually inhabit. Through her signature frameworks- Sacred Reorientation™ and Holistic Harmony in Life and Business®- she helps clients soften their ambition, reclaim their pace, and return to the deepest version of who they are. Her work lives at the intersection of identity, grief, leadership, and sacred self-trust.
Website — www.ashleighchenry.com
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/ashleighchenry/
Linkedin — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighchenry/
