Forget dressing to impress others – try ‘mirroring’ them instead

The best place to take style inspiration is from your own life. Not from a film or a celebrity or a designer’s moodboard, but from your real world. The thoughts in your head, the roads you walk down, the people you can reach out and touch. This is the stage you are on, so dress for it.

Imagine your life is a movie, and you are the costume designer. What would you pull out of your wardrobe tomorrow morning? You would start, I think, by establishing character. This sounds far-fetched, but it’s just a fancy term for what you do already even if you don’t consciously define it as such, which is tell people a bit about who you are via what you wear. There are a few basics to factor in next – keeping warm, staying dry, is there time to iron that – before your thoughts naturally move toward what’s on your schedule. Some days have clear plot points. You might be hosting a child’s birthday party, so you want to project approachable cheer; you could be attending a meeting to which you need to bring authority and calm. On days like those, the style script writes itself.

But winter weekends tend to lack much in the way of helpful stage direction. Life is low-key and a little formless. January social occasions don’t tend to be the black-tie kind. At this time of year, meeting friends for a coffee, or one pal for a walk, might well be the sole event in your weekend diary. These are by definition social events, because the whole point of them is to spend time with other people. But they are not the kind of social events for which there is a dress code.

Does it matter what you wear to meet a friend you’ve known for ages for a Saturday morning cup of tea down the road? Fair question. But to put it another way: what matters more, actually, than a cup of tea with a friend you’ve known for years? What is the logic of taking care about what you wear to work, and then treating time with the people you love as a non-event?

The best place to start with dressing to meet friends is to wear something that they would like. Some time ago, on my way to meet a friend, I saw her walking towards me – and then realised that the woman was not her, but my own reflection in a shop window. At which point I twigged that, without thinking, I had got dressed as the friend I was going to meet. (She favours painterly colours and artisanal textures: I had dug out a fluffy check scarf and paired it with a mustard tweed blazer.)

This thing of dressing in a kind of tribute to the person or people I am meeting is something I do all the time, I now realise. And not to name drop or anything but I recently heard Kate Moss on a podcast talking about how she does it, too. Body language experts call it mirroring, which is when you imitate the stance and gestures of someone you are talking with. Mirroring occurs naturally when we connect with someone, without us realising what we are doing; it can also be used consciously as a tool for building rapport and trust.

In style, mirroring works the same way. Teenage friends who spend all their time together often dress identically. When you grow up and your lives are less entwined with your friends, mirroring clothes can be a way of knitting you a little closer together. Not to go in fancy dress as the other person – that would be creepy – but to wear a necklace that you know they will love, or a jacket that makes them exclaim that they have one almost identical at home. It should be a subtle tribute, not a rip-off: yes to a vintage band T-shirt of that album you listened to on repeat on holiday; no to going out and buying the outfit they were wearing last week.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and also the most effective. To feel seen is one of the things we need and want from our friends, and dressing for a meet up in a way that illustrates how well you know them makes a friend feel seen. But this is nowhere near as altruistic as I am making it sound. People-pleasing rarely is. What we call people-pleasing is often about the need to make other people think well of you, so it is as much about your ego as theirs. Dressing like the friend you are on your way to meet is the surest way to remind them what a thoroughly likable person you are. And who doesn’t like a rave review?

Hair and make up: Sophie Higginson using Hair by Sam McKnight and Victoria Beckham. Model: Lily Fofana at Milk. Jacket, £125 and skirt £65, both from Sister Jane. Earrings, £17.99, Zara. Sandals, £130, Boden