Fashion is more about taste than money - you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it... — Carmen Dell'Orefice

Fashion is more about taste than money - you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it's all about the fit. I do the alterations myself - I'm quite a seamstress - it's the influence of my Hungarian mother.

Author: Carmen Dell'Orefice

Insight: There's something quietly radical about what Carmen is saying here: the best-dressed people aren't necessarily the richest ones. They're the ones who actually know their own bodies well enough to make deliberate choices. You can spot this immediately—someone in a tailored thrift store find often looks better than someone drowning in designer labels that don't fit quite right. That confidence comes from understanding what works, not from the price tag. What's interesting is how personal this becomes when you do your own alterations. You're forced to really see yourself—where you're narrow, where you're broad, what actually flatters versus what you thought should. Most of us outsource this knowledge to marketing or influencers, then feel perpetually wrong in our clothes. But the moment you pick up scissors yourself, everything changes. You stop blaming your body and start taking ownership of how you move through the world. That Hungarian mother detail matters too. There's a whole ethos embedded in that—the resourcefulness, the refusal to accept "off the rack" as final, the idea that care and skill matter more than consumption. It's not about deprivation; it's about dignity. When you make something work for you specifically, you're not just dressing better. You're claiming something most people outsource without thinking.