Signature/STYLE is a collaboration between Rachel Nachmias and Christine Scaman.
Rachel Nachmias loves fashion design and loves to reflect on how the beauty, excitement, and imagination of the runway can be expressed in the wardrobes of women of all body types, colouring, and age groups.
Dressing more beautifully elevates all of us. The smallest of changes can make such vast improvements in how we look and feel, if only we knew which to choose.
Rachel lives in Philadelphia and is in her late 20s. She has studied at Parsons the New School for Design, earning her degree in Fashion Design and interning with several high fashion designers in New York City. Before pivoting her career towards helping regular women look and feel beautiful, she worked as a freelance fashion and costume designer.
Despite all the years of training in fashion, Rachel struggled to find her own signature personal style. Like many women, she once had a wardrobe made up of a string of exciting garments that had crossed her path, and nothing to wear. She had tried systems that prescribed a wardrobe of basics “every woman should own” (too formulaic and impersonal), as well as those that focused on honing personal preference (too abstract and impractical) with not much to show for it. Then, one fateful day, she came across a system that matched the shape and idea of the woman with the shape and idea of the clothing by identifying the common Archetype and she knew this was something she had to share with the world.
After years of research and refinement, Rachel has finally created a method of dressing that honors and amplifies each woman’s gorgeous and unique physicality. In garments, accessories, and hairstyling appropriate for her Image Archetype, a woman can be beautiful, believable, and respectable, while remaining totally herself. Further, she understands that a beautiful trend that does not flatter her is not a reflection of her attractiveness, but just something to appreciate from a distance. Rachel teaches each client to be the expert of her own appearance, making a fabulous and flattering signature style achievable for anyone.
Fashion is equally colour and design. A garment created in a different colour is a new piece of clothing. To offer clients the most complete advice, Rachel felt compelled to add Personal Color Analyst to her credentials, and trained with Christine.
Christine is in her mid-50s. She lives in Canada near the Windsor-Detroit border crossing. With 20 years as a veterinarian behind her and three children beginning career paths of their own, she felt that a life change was in order. To follow a voice that was nudging towards her love of colour and makeup, she felt that training as a colour analyst was necessary. With decades of practice in scientific method, the Sci\ART system was the immediate choice. The basis of this classification system was sound.
She took the training in April, 2009. Over the next five years and several hundred clients, she found renewed faith in the accuracy of the system with each analysis. She also listened to excellent suggestions that clients offered about how the 12 palettes could be used more effectively after the PCA appointment. In attempting to answer her own questions about human colouring and building a client-friendly user base for today's shopper, the 12 Blueprints website and training course took shape.
As part of her after client resources, Christine's clients received periodic emails containing various images of garments with detailed explanations about why the colour belonged to their Season's palette and how to recognize it in stores and websites. In time, she saw that women of the same colouring could have very different body types, but the format appeared to recommend every item for all women of that Season. Clients loved this service but an it was time for an upgrade to better reflect the entire person. A renewed version tailored both to a woman's colouring and her image archetype would be of immense value.
Here, Rachel and Christine's paths begin to converge. Both had recognized systems that could change lives more profoundly than merely appearance. As the inside and outside become mirrors of one another, a woman attains elegance and confidence when she speaks in her own unique, strong voice. However, for both systems, more client support, clear and effective education for contemporary tastes and shopping situations were in need. If the consultation ended with an Archetype or a Season and a few pictures of clothing or a swatch book, a woman could not reach her highest visual potential. She could not find the peace that comes of knowing oneself and the freedom of self-expression.
The story now finds us in November, 2013. Rachel travels to Canada to take the 12 Blueprints analyst training course. Both women believe more strongly than ever in the power and beauty of wearing one's own colours and lines, faithfully translated in clothing. It took very little time and conversation to envision a collaborative newsletter to continue providing this very helpful resource for all women to make some sense of the fashion world.
We are all buying clothing regardless of whether we follow the runway, magazines, or celebrity looks. Indeed, although interesting and often beautiful, those aspects of fashion can also be the most confusing, leading us towards less-than-best choices and garments returned or discarded. Knowing which part of the fashion world applies to ourselves and how to modify a trend to look modern and flattering at once, is difficult without guidance, consuming too much time and cost.
In a joint effort, Christine and Rachel now bring you Signature/STYLE, the first ever short-cut to being able to identify your best styles and colors in a real life shopping situation. Delivered direct to your inbox quarterly, Signature/STYLE will consolidate the expertise of Christine and Rachel into an easy to understand guide to expressing your innate design in clothing. Their sincere hope is that by putting this information out into the world, more and more women will be empowered to be in the driver’s seat of their own image.