Style Icon: Joan Holloway

Continuing with style icon week! A style icon is a personal saint of your style world and serves many purposes--such as a starting line for a killer outfit or a persona to channel when things get tough at work. These women reveal a part of yourself and encourage you to foster other virtues. Their style is to be admired, dissected, and emulated but never copied--each should make you try to be a better version of yourself.

Joan Holloway is a natural choice for a style icon. Mad Men has been inspiring the fashion world since it started airing in 2007. Joan won me over instantly with her easy grace, classy business clothes, and complete self-possession. She's polite yet blunt, elegant and put together. Most of all she's good at her job, makes it her art and excels at everything she does. She uses her femininity like battle armor, she is very calculated in how she dresses and what she reveals to those in the office. She uses her love life to blow off steam but keeps her personal life perfectly separated from her professional career. She maintains her facade at all times and keeps other people's secrets as well as her own. She has more integrity and honesty than anyone in the office. She clothes herself in shift dresses and high-waisted pencil skirts and never shows cleavage, as a curvy girl this realization completely changed my work wardrobe. Joan taught me how to show off my curves without exposing my body--a lesson every woman should learn.

Youch!

Style it: Look for jewel tones, little sleeves, scarf-like details around the high-neck, and a pencil silhouette. I've always had good luck at Banana Republic ($150) and J.Crew ($198) for shift dresses, keep in mind that spindly models do not show off the Joan-like possibilities of such dresses!