Styling for Family Photos
Styling for family photos has been a personal favorite of mine since back in my Stitch Fix days, and dressing kids since my Mac & Mia days! I take it way too seriously and lay everything out in advance, but let’s be honest, something always comes up at the last minute and makes it hard, but we work against that! That said, I wanted to put together a blog post that sort of gets into my brain about how we style the family for photos.
The main take away? A variety of textures. The different textures makes a huge difference. What is more obvious and tacky than a full family in performance fleece?! There’s such a fine line between coordinated and matchy/matchy. I try not to shy away from a pattern but play off that pattern as well. Easier said than done, I know, and pattern mixing takes some practice, but it’s doable.
I usually start with me or one of the girls. I am drawn to the same colors, typically, but it’s hard to make things look a little different each year. This year, when I spotted my dress on a popular blogger and checked that the price point was “manageable,” I grabbed it. The color scheme and the frilled bottom are directly up my alley and this dress shape and material generally looks nice on my body type. Something I pay attention to when styling for photos is that I’m super comfortable. I wore a short dress last year and by no means am I embarrassed by my legs, but I also don’t LOVE how they look in every photo, plus you have to worry about self-tanning, so I knew I wanted my legs covered in some capacity this year. This dress was a winner (I wore a Spanx thong with it to keep things smooth). Next, I spotted Goldie’s outfit at one of my favorite boutiques and I grabbed it. I loved the vintage-inspired flowers and these little sherpa print clogs are from Target, they’re so cute. From there, I focused on Bodie (Georgia is always easy). He loves another checkered print cardigan he has so I figured, this one matches, the brand is legit, he will wear it again, good to go. Bodie can’t get enough of these Old Navy jeans so we stuck with those, grabbed new Vans and he was a done deal. Jeff was surprisingly a bit of a problem! We grabbed him a cute work shirt from J.Crew and we thought it would be perfect with khakis he wears to work a lot – I can’t explain exactly why, but he put them on yesterday and man it didn’t work. The shirt was too long and just didn’t jive. A classic white shirt and his Revtown jeans did the trick! Lastly, Georgia! I was really struggling with her look but this cute Noralee dress did just the trick and I loved the extra texture it provided the group as a whole – plus, the matching headband? I die.
I’ve linked everything I could, here:
GEORGIA: dress | headband | shoes (similar)
BODIE: cardigan | shirt | jeans | shoes
Here are some family photos from past years, hopefully you can see what I was trying for and take note of the texture each year, it really is the key to success! As always, we work with Rachel Rowland Photography, and I’m so grateful for her professionalism and talent, always!!
