Avoiding that cheap look

Cheap clothes, high end look. Even on a small budget, you can dress exquisitely. You just need to know how to pick your attires.

If you want to look like you spent a lot more money on your clothes than you really did, you need to stay away from these things.

Gathered seams
Designers like these because they can make clothes more forgiving and help hide fit issues that arise when you use flat, smooth seams. Also, sharply tailored garments are more difficult to make, more expensive, and can be worn by fewer people. Think about it — the better something fits you, the worse it is going to fit pretty much everyone else.

Embellishments
Embroidery, sequins, beading, and studs look amazing when they are applied by skilled craftspeople using high-quality materials, but not so much when they are done by machine on a Shs3,000 T-shirt. Even if an embellished piece looks fine in the store or in a picture, you know that once you start wearing it for real, it’s going to fall apart, and nothing looks cheaper than a jeweled sweater with missing jewels.

Knits and sweaters
Cotton knits and jersey in dark or saturated colours (black, navy, rich jewel tones, and bold primaries).
These are great at first, but wash them a couple of times, and the colour starts to fade and they are noticeably fuzzier than when you first bought them.
Lace
Once you have held real, high-quality, handmade lace in your hands, the kind of stuff they use to make wedding gowns and couture dresses, you know that the flat, flimsy, machine-made stuff fast-fashion brands use really doesn’t measure up.
Sure, occasionally cheap lace can surprise you, but if your goal is to look like you spent more than you really did, it is best to leave that cheap lace dress for someone else to buy.

Prints
The smaller and more complicated the print is, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong (aka for it to end up looking cheap). Small, complicated prints like paisley and tiny, multi-colour florals are therefore harder to make look expensive.

Imperfect fit
A proper fit is by far the most important factor in making your clothes look more expensive. If a sleeve is too wide, or a shoulder is too narrow, or a pant leg is too long or too loose, the piece is going to look cheap. Period. Even if it costs a million dollars, if it doesn’t fit well, it’s just going to look like garbage.

Sloppy finishings
Whether you are out shopping, or just looking over the pieces in your own wardrobe, little things like loose threads, uneven creases, loose or missing buttons, and prints that don’t quite line up, can make even an expensive garment look totally cheap.

Mend them or simply do not wear them.