Own Your Style Decalogue 3. Digest Trends

Trend broadcasting

Every year, designers at the top send down the runway their fashion proposals which, within the limits of their creative sensibility, offer slightly different silhouettes, proportions and colours than previous season's. Those are the Trends. Then the rest of the fashion industry broadcasts it to the world, and you can see them everywhere, from high end to high street.
Those things that are always fashionable, the Classics, are also reinterpreted every season within every designer's sensibility, but on different pieces, scale or materials. I'm talking, for instance, about the saharienne (the safari jacket, that 1968's YSL creation), the trench coat, or the blue jeans. The classics also trickle down the fashion ladder in all price ranges.
The idea is to keep things interesting in order to keep us buying. And they do both.

Trend fun

Trends are great because they let us have fun with fashion. They add interest to what could be an otherwise immutable wardrobe. Boring.

Trend digesting... Don't be a fashion casualty.

Trends are like a chocolate shop's display window: because it is there, it doesn't mean you have to eat it all.

1. Trends have to be dissected for what suits you: your body shape, height, weight, and lifestyle.

For instance, if full skirts look good on you, take advantage of the Mad Men influence on fashion in the last half decade and buy some pieces. If doesn't suit you at all, they may be ways of getting away with it if it's that important to you. Accessories are actually a great way of doing that.

2. Trends and wardrobe-building.

In conclusion, trends are just opportunities to stock up on what goes well your style, and perhaps to incorporate something new into your wardrobe.
But don't get to the point of buying a necklace and find that you need to buy a whole new outfit to go with it. That is exactly the opposite of how good wardrobe building works: instead of adding interesting pieces to your foundation ones (theoretically more expensive and bought as investments to last you years), you would go the other way round. That kind of logic would indeed be very "Alice in Wonderland".