The short answer on Tank Top and Jeans Outfit: pick one anchor piece, keep the palette to two colours, and let the shoes decide how formal the whole thing reads. Proportion does more than colour: volume on top wants something narrow below, and the reverse. Repeat one element, a metal, a texture or a colour, and an outfit looks deliberate. The shoulder seam should sit on the bone, not past it. The groups below run from the decision that matters most to the ones you make afterwards.

What decides this is shoulder seam, sleeve length and opacity. Everything else is preference. Two from the first group show the range: veronicabeard.com's Draymond Striped Shirt at $398, and tibi.com's Feather Weight Ribbed Cut Out Tank Top at $375. The first is the considered buy; the second is the one to start with. Hold it up to the light. Opacity is the thing product photography hides best. The shoulder seam should sit on the bone, not past it. A higher price mostly buys materials and finishing, and occasionally it buys nothing at all.

If the top is the point, keep everything below it plain. From the second group, normakamali.com's THE HANDBOOK FOR WOMEN AND MANTRA SHIRT ($65) 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, tops, 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 tops here from 13 brands, $40 to $398, all in stock when this was written. We would not buy all of them, and neither should you. normakamali.com's CROPPED SHOULDER PAD TOP at $40 is the low-risk way in, and veronicabeard.com's Draymond Striped Shirt at $398 only makes sense if this is a category you already use constantly. On tank top and jeans outfit 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.