An image consultant advises an individual client about their appearance, personality, what to wear, and what not to wear.
- It’s all about helping the individual client to look and feel fabulous on every occasion by understanding themselves better and helping them to express who they want to be, with personalised, bespoke advice.
A fashion stylist ‘styles’ for a marketing campaign so that a company can sell their hair product, car, watch, shoes, insurance services, etc.
- If there is a human model involved in the campaign, the fashion stylist will ‘style’ the model to fit the campaign and/or this one promotional event. The stylist is not remotely interested in the model as an individual.
Example
Let’s use this large, chunky necklace as a way to demonstrate the differences in real life:
Personal stylists working in the media and advertising start with the product they have been given to sell, e.g. a large, chunky necklace
- A fashion stylist selects an appropriate human model who will make that particular large, chunky necklace look wonderful
- After all, they’re being paid by the makers or promoters of the necklace, not the model
- The model is just a clothes horse on which to display the goods
- Notice from the photo that those paying for the marketing campaign deem it quite acceptable to chop the model’s head off for the final promotional image…
The image consultant, on the other hand, starts with the living, breathing human client
- And diagnoses which colours, shapes, styles, patterns, scale, etc. all suit HER personally
- Taking into account the client’s lifestyle, what she needs clothes for, her budget, and her personality, the image consultant will then decide whether to even consider the large, chunky necklace for that particular client, or whether to discard it and recommend something more appropriate
Why do you need to know this?
Because some styling companies/academies/institutes out there use the words ‘image consultant’ in their marketing bumph and this alone may encourage you to train with them, when, in actual fact, their course is designed to teach you to become a fashion stylist.
I have spoken with loads of people who set out wanting to become an image consultant and then signed up for one of these courses, only to realise AFTER they had invested their hard-earned pennies that they were actually learning to become a fashion stylist!
It’s worth mentioning that many styling companies/academies/institutes across the globe kindly recommend my Colour Analysis Training to their own students because, as they say in their own words, “the colour content of our styling course is brief.”
But this is so often after the horse has bolted…
Do your due diligence before you part with a penny!
If you really, truly, definitely want to offer image consultant services
to help an individual, living, breathing human being look and feel fabulous on every occasion, e.g. colour, style, shopping, wardrobe, etc. then you must understand, and be able to diagnose, colour inside out and upside down first!