Kumari Nayan Tara Singh offers tips to those who aspire to carve out a career in fashion styling

In today's world of social media, uploading pictures on such platforms has become a trend. People upload pictures of their food, their daily beauty regime, shopping videos and dancing videos. Because of social media's increasing impact on people, they want to always look their best. They have turned image conscious and have started paying more attention to personal care. This has led to a huge demand for fashion stylists. Several companies see opportunity in this field. One may opt for this profession as a hobby, as a moonlighting option or as a serious career option.

What is styling: Fashion helps transform us. The way we dress, the way we show ourselves to the world is all about styling, which is more about a person than about fashion. Styling helps grow one's self-esteem. It makes you look much different than what you actually are. It has the ability to transform someone into a completely different person. It helps you stand out in the crowd. It is not only about the clothes, it is in fact much more than that. If handled appropriately, it can change lives. The best example to explain this is the story of Cinderella, in which a simple, poor girl gets transformed and looks like a princess. That is the magic and impact of styling.

Benefits of styling: It boosts confidence and may help boost one's career. A woman can balance her family life and engage in personal styling as a part-time career.

Skills required: For being a fashion stylist, you need to have some basic traits like empathy and an eye for choosing items, apart from being trend conscious and know basic sketching to convey and display your creative ideas to your client. Your created look should be comfortable, sexy, elegant, beautiful and attractive, all at the same time, which requires creativity and exploration. This warrants following the latest trends, following celebrities, bloggers, designer and other stylists. The best part of this profession is that one never gets bored of it. Stylists are the ones who can bring life to any imagination by mixing and matching outfits and accessories. By working in collaboration with make-up artists, hair stylists, directors, and photographers, fashion stylists create the best of the fashion impact.

How to style: Styling involves shopping for someone else, choosing props and accessories along with clothes.  It involves meeting different people, knowing them inside out, knowing what is going to suit a particular body according to shape and skin tone, knowing his personality, tastes, likings, disliking and comfort zone. Experience matters as well; the more you engage, the more you learn from your mistakes. Market survey is also important in this field to know about the availability of fabrics, their colours, accessories and the most popular trends. Knowing your budget and creating a complete look within that is important as well. The whole look includes fabric, accessories, make-up and props that will be used for a photoshoot if you are doing styling for a magazine or advertisement photoshoot. The hairstyle and make-up should be well coordinated with cloth and accessories. For example, a simple white shirt can be styled in different ways. Addition of a simple belt on top of the white shirt or dress adds a lot of excitement. People judge you by your dressing sense. So a personal stylist himself needs to dress quite well. One can also start his styling career by styling friends and family members as this will add to experience and boost confidence. For styling someone, you should know what occasion you are styling for-is it for a regular day-to-day activity or for some special occasion. A stylist's job is to make a person look like a star, transforming him completely to a better and more socially acceptable person.

Styling as a career option: This is one of the most glamorous careers to take up. One can work as an image consultant, do styling for celebrities, or engage in personal or brand styling. One can start from being an assistant fashion stylist where he can assist any established fashion stylist. Later with experience, he can start his own styling company. There is also scope for becoming a fashion editor, photo stylist, wardrobe stylist, design coordinator, personal shopper or a makeover stylist.

Styling career option in India: This is one of thosecareers where your work, creativity and talent will be seen and appreciated bya huge audience. One can start by working in a fashion and lifestyle boutiqueagency or with public figures on their look for a particular occasion orevents, such as photoshoots for music videos, advertisements, movies, serials,magazine covers; media interviews; award ceremonies; press conferences; orparties. The network and contacts that one creates over time with influentialpeople will ultimately lead to bigger and more interesting opportunities.Earnings vary depending on the skills, expertise and experience of an individual.Once one has gained experience in this field and has successfully established anetwork of clients, one can easily grab impressive pay packages, withadditional perks and incentives. Celebrity clients pay handsomely for suchjobs.