The Thoughtful Dresser competition - the winner

Thank you for all the wonderful entries, which I really enjoyed reading.

Many of you offered sage advice from parents and grandparents and much of it amounted to what is fast becoming the mantra of The Thoughtful Dresser - don't buy cheap clothes.

Toby Wollins' father laid down the invaluable rule that clothes should always fit on the shoulders; the cloth falls from there so if a garment doesn't fit properly there, it won't fit anywhere.

I adored Ingrid's Hungarian immigrant mother's advice 'Wear it like you mean it!' and it would have been in the running for the winner had I not already posted something much like it in a previous Thought for the Day.

I discovered the truth of Bernie's 'If it matches nothing it goes with everything' when I bought a cream handbag. And kagoo had a significant variant: 'Don't worry about whether this goes with that; if you buy what you love, everything will go with everything.'

V pointed out that 'the mistake a lot of people make is that they dress from a place of abject terror.' Very true.

Eve Gerrard, who is a philosopher, advanced the following erudite piece of wisdom: 'Fashion enables us, for a brief period, to see the beauty buried in even the most hideous of colours or shapes. However crude the colour or unflattering the style, fashion can temporarily transform it into something rich and strange and desirable. The vision doesn't last, of course, as the back of our wardrobes attests.' A brilliant description of how fashion works.

Cal's mother pointed out 'Never wear black to a party, no matter how beautiful the dress you will fade into the background because the men will be wearing dark jackets.' I observed this at several Christmas parties.

I loved Isabelle's 'Wear your inner beauty on your sleeve, but I was looking for an entirely original thought, and googling, I did find this one in use elsewhere.

So the winner is (drum roll) the very first entry, from Betty Sue whose grandmother advised her: "What is the difference between fashion and style? Fashion is cleavage, style is collarbones"

Fantastic and accurate observation.

Congratulations Betty Sue, and if you would email me at lindagrantblog[at]googlemail.com , I can arrange for your prize to be delivered. And your thought to be credited to you in its own stand-alone Thought for the Day.