Personal shoppers: I need your recommendations, before I slump into middle aged matronhood for ever and never dare leave the Inferiority Complex again

[motherinferior]

I hardly ever start threads these days, but oh please fellow MNers, I need help. Especially as I'm working three days a week in a Proper Office, where jeans are permissible but you do have to look quite presentable, and some of my lovely colleagues regularly pop out to spend squillions on a nice new frock.

I really do seem to have lost the plot, style-wise, over the past seven years (oddly enough, the ones coinciding first with motherhood and then with turning 40, and then with motherhood part 2). I don't want to turn into a Proper Laydee but I do need quite badly to revamp my act a bit and drag it out of quite such current mumsiness.

Where would you recommend? Am a shortarse, probably not quite as enormous as I think I am as I fit a size 10 around the bottom and 12 around the norks, red hair, still a bit of a vintagebohohippywanabe, don't do flat shoes, do do norks. Can spend some cash but not squillions...

Oooh can we have another personal shopping night out? I'm good at lolling on sofas drinking wine and giving opinions (and they don't even have to be clothes related!)

That sounds fabulous. Anyone else? Please?

Don't know anything about personal shoppers, never having used one, but do know lots about attempting to avoid middleaged matronhood for the office, having gone "back" to work after a 10 year gap

What I did was to look around at what the other women in the office were wearing and copy the things that I thought looked good and weren't mutton dressed as lamb but were stylish and (a total must for me) tailored.

Basically I worked out more or less what I wanted before I went shopping and then went out and found as near to it as I could.

Have now managed 2 years of part-time office attendance without anybody falling off their chair laughing or getting sent home for being dressed inappropriately

Debenhams have a good personal shopper service

John Lewis

But I can't talk, I have slumped into middle aged matronhood, I look a fright atm. And I've never cared much about fashion, even when I was young.

I do the makeup and painted toes thing...am wearing a skirt today. Quite a nice skirt, but I fear it's mumsy. Really, suspect most of me is mumsy at the moment.

I've been there a month, and nobody actually laughs at me to my face, including the rather glossier babes (in their jeans) but, you know, one worries.

Today's skirt is a printed one, flowers, originally from Primark, quite nice really. I wear it to the office - indeed am going into the office later; am wearing drawstring green T-shirt from Kew, and will put on probably my silver ballet pumps.

i wouldn't wear jeans to work when you are trying to build up your style confidence - it can only be pulled by people who think about clothes all the time.
I went and bought some stuff from Hobbs when i started going into an office again- still a little mumsy, but gave me a base to work from to build up to trendy, which is best done, as cammelia said, by copying people.

i think if you are feeling mumsy and are over 40 then john lewis isn't going to help, much as i love it.

you need boutiques, whistles that sort of thing. (not that i know a great deal about them but they sound right to me!)

selfridges....for the one expensive capsule piece followed by loads of stuff from 'spirit' downstairs which does yer oasis/topshop/miss selfridge etc etc etc etc.??

The copying, frankly, is why the jeans. They are nice jeans. Straight-legged. It's a magazine office.

I like the sound of boutiques.

Should have said incidentally in OP I DO do flat shoes. Only do flat shoes!

selfridges has gone mad on gucci handbags and other blingy horrors, i think they've lost the plot. fenwicks?

but jeans need a so-up-to-the-minute -its-still smoking handbag, shoes, jewellery, top. is it (gulp) a fashion mag? if so, get a personal shopper at selfridges and spend a grand.

noo - fenwicks is ultra mumsy. harvey nicks?

dulwich then, after a couple of quick glasses of chablis - so far I've been too frightened to step over the threshold of any of them.......

can I come too? I'm wearing the black Laura Ashley skirt that I wore when I was pregnant, fgs! (it is nice and stretchy)

i'm not surprised you're para MI....is it FASHHHION?

It's a women's mag with Fashion Bits in it, although I am - you will be amazed to hear - not doing fashion . (The fashion staff are very nice, incidentally. I did suggest they just take me out and make me over.)