The short answer on Carolina Herrera Belt: pick one anchor piece, keep the palette to two colours, and let the shoes decide how formal the whole thing reads. Repeat one element, a metal, a texture or a colour, and an outfit looks deliberate. One piece should lead and the rest should stay quiet; two competing pieces read as an accident. Buy to your trouser waist, not your natural waist. The groups below run from the decision that matters most to the ones you make afterwards.

What decides this is width, buckle and leather quality. Everything else is preference. Two from the first group show the range: barenecessities.com's Fascinate Garter Belt at $45, and Frye's 30mm Belt W/ Contrast Stitching at $58. The first is the easy entry point; the second is where the money goes. Buy to your trouser waist, not your natural waist. A higher price mostly buys materials and finishing, and occasionally it buys nothing at all.

Match the belt to the shoe and the outfit reads finished. From the second group, aninebing.com's Nicola Belt - Zebra ($185) is the one that earns its place, because it works in more than one context without being restyled. The third group is smaller and deliberately narrower, belts, for the decisions you make after the main one. None of this needs the whole group. One piece from each is usually enough.

There are 20 belts here from 14 brands, $30 to $390, all in stock when this was written. We would not buy all of them, and neither should you. Betsey Johnson's FRUIT CHAIN BELT MULTI at $30 is the low-risk way in, and Otte's Dorian Frame Belt Grainy Calf at $390 only makes sense if this is a category you already use constantly. On carolina herrera belt specifically: the difference between the top and the bottom of this list is real but smaller than the price gap suggests. Nothing here is included because it is famous, and price is not used as a proxy for quality anywhere on this page. If you take one thing away: pay for the thing that touches your body and economise on the thing that sits on top of it.