Professional image consultant, personal stylist and colour analysis training with depth, rigour and ongoing support
The Academy of Professional Image was founded by award-winning image consultant, colour expert and educator Imogen Lamport, AICI CIP, to provide the kind of comprehensive training she wished had been available when she entered the image profession.
Since 2006, Imogen has trained aspiring and established image consultants, personal stylists and colour consultants from around the world, combining colour science, visual principles, style, personality, practical consulting skills and business knowledge.
AOPI training goes beyond teaching you what to do.
We teach you why it works, how to apply it to different people, and how to develop the judgement and confidence to work with real clients.
Whether you’re beginning a new career or expanding your existing professional skills, our goal is to give you the knowledge, practical experience and ongoing support to become the kind of consultant your clients can trust.
Why I Founded the Academy of Professional Image
I didn’t come into image consulting because I had always instinctively known what worked.
Quite the opposite.
I wanted to understand why.
I’d spent much of my teenage years sewing my own clothing, discovering that some things worked for me and many others didn’t. I knew I couldn’t be alone in wondering why.
Why does a garment look fabulous on one person and completely wrong on another? Why do certain colours bring someone to life? How do proportions, scale, contrast and personality change what works? And how do you translate all that knowledge into practical advice for a real person standing in front of you?
As one of my top values is growth, I kept learning, researching, experimenting and working with real clients. The more I learned, the more I realised how much depth there was to this profession.
In 2006, aspiring personal stylists began approaching me and asking me to teach them what I knew. The Academy of Professional Image grew from those requests.
My aim was never simply to teach students a set of formulas they could repeat with every client.
I wanted to teach consultants to think.
To understand the principles behind colour and style. To recognise individual differences. To ask better questions. To adapt their knowledge to the person in front of them. And to have the practical skills and confidence to create genuinely useful outcomes for their clients.
That philosophy still sits at the heart of every AOPI training program today
Why Train with the Academy of Professional Image?
Understand the Why
We don’t simply teach rules and formulas. You’ll learn the principles behind colour, proportion, visual perception, personality and style so you can apply your knowledge intelligently to clients at any stage of their style journey.
Learn From Real-World Experience
I’ve worked with thousands of clients and trained consultants since 2006. And in the training you too will start working with your first clients, so you leave having experienced real client consultations.
Learn a More Nuanced Approach to Colour
Discover the innovative personal colour analysis system, the 18 palette Absolute Colour System, developed in 2009 by Imogen Lamport to make colour analysis logical and work for every skin tone. Find out more here.
Understand the Person Inside the Clothes
These days AI can give someone basic personal styling tips and a very poor personal colour analysis. What it doesn’t understand is the person inside the clothes. Image consulting and personal style go beyond just clothes. Wardrobes hold so much more: their identity, desires, fears, beliefs and emotions.
People come to image consultants not necessarily because they don’t have anything to wear (even though they often feel like that) but because they’re navigating changes in confidence, body, age, and roles just to name a few. And where this frequently shows up is in what they wear.
Personality and psychology are two important aspects of helping clients define their style identity so that they can dress in a way that is congruent with their life and feels authentic, so it’s easy to maintain.
This is why in training we cover neuroscientific aspects of style along with using psychological type as a resource to help us understand our clients more easily, and it’s why I was a co-creator of the 16 Style Types, a psychological type approach to understanding the intersection of personality and personal style. You can find out more about it here.
Develop Practical Consulting Skills
During your training we provide you with a range of tools and resources to use with your clients, from understanding their style values to doing colour and style consultations, wardrobe edits and personal shopping. The training is experiential, along with having a deep grounding in the theory.
Be Supported Beyond Your Training
When your training is over you’re not on your own. We provide 12 month guided mentoring programs for each of our courses – in colour, personal styling and image business development.
On top of that, there are monthly group mentoring calls on Zoom, where you get to come and ask questions, share experiences, learn and grow from other consultants. You get lifetime access to these calls, so you’re always supported. Plus if you can’t be on the call live, you can email in your question then watch the recording afterwards.
Imogen is also always available to answer questions and offer support and guidance via email if there is something pressing.
We are here to support you and assist you as you build your own colour or image business.
Meet Your Trainer: Imogen Lamport AICI CIP
At a glance
- Professional image consultant since 2004
- Training image consultants since 2006
- AICI Certified Image Professional (CIP) since 2009
- Creator of the 18-palette Absolute Colour System
- Co-creator of 16 Style Types
- Recipient of the AICI Jane Segerstrom Award, 2019
- Former AICI International VP Business Development, 2012–2016
- Twice President of AICI Australia
- Qualified Psychological Type Practitioner
- B.A. Communications
- Founder and author of Inside Out Style
- Author of five books
- Over 3,000 articles on colour and style on Inside Out Style
Imogen Lamport, AICI CIP, is an internationally recognised, award-winning image consultant, colour expert, author and educator known for her science and psychology-based approach to personal style.
For more than two decades, Imogen has been fascinated by one deceptively simple question: why? Why does a colour make one person look vibrant and another appear tired? Why can an outfit be technically flattering yet feel completely wrong? And why do intelligent, accomplished women so often find getting dressed surprisingly difficult?
That curiosity has shaped a career exploring the intersection of colour, visual perception, personality, identity and clothing.
Imogen is the creator of the 18-palette Absolute Colour System and co-creator of 16 Style Types, which explores the relationship between psychological type and style. She founded the Academy of Professional Image, where she trains the next generation of image consultants, personal stylists and colour consultants, and Inside Out Style, her extensive educational resource dedicated to demystifying the art, science and psychology of personal style.
A Certified Image Professional with the Association of Image Consultants International, Imogen is a recipient of the prestigious AICI Jane Segerstrom Award. She has served as President of AICI Australia (twice) and as Vice President of Business Development on the AICI International Board.
Rather than prescribing fashion rules or telling women what they “should” wear, Imogen gives them the knowledge to make informed choices for themselves. Her philosophy is simple: when you understand why something works, style becomes less about following rules and more about expressing who you are. This is what she’ll teach you when you choose to train with the Academy of Professional Image.
Her aim is to provide the most comprehensive and advanced training programs for both the beginner and the established stylist
Mission
To educate and empower image professionals with the knowledge, practical skills and confidence to help their clients use colour and style as tools for authentic self-expression and positive change.
We believe excellent image consulting requires more than memorising rules. It requires a deep understanding of the principles behind colour and style, the ability to recognise individual differences, and the judgement to adapt that knowledge to each client’s personality, colouring, body, lifestyle and goals.
Developing Better Tools for Image Consultants
In 2009, after years of working with clients whose colouring didn’t fit comfortably within the systems available to me, I created the 18-palette Absolute Colour System. It was designed to provide greater nuance across the diversity of human colouring, including different skin tones, ethnicities, ages and stages of life.
Discover the Absolute Colour System here.
She has also developed comprehensive Style Files to use with clients to ensure that the client’s goals and outcomes are met in every consultation.
As a co-creator of The 16 Style Types, with Jill Chivers and world-renowned type expert Jane Kise, the 16 Style Types team also developed a program for image consultants to use with their clients to help them understand their client’s personality more fully and how best to work with them.
The AoPI Philosophy
Image Consulting Is About People, Not Perfection
Image consulting isn’t about turning every client into the same fashionable ideal.
It’s about understanding the individual.
Every client brings a different body, colouring, personality, lifestyle, history, culture, budget, preferences and goals to a consultation. The role of a skilled image consultant isn’t to impose a set of rules upon them. It’s to understand the principles of colour and style deeply enough to help that person make choices that work for their life and express who they are.
That’s why AOPI training combines technical knowledge with curiosity, observation, communication and practical application.
We want our graduates to leave knowing more than what works.
We want them to understand why it works, when it works, and when a different answer might be better.
International Recognition and Professional Leadership
Since 2006, Imogen has been active in the image consulting industry and became AICI Australia Chapter President for the first time, she then served again on the local board in 2022 as VP Education and then again as President 2023-2025.
Imogen was VP Business Development for the International Board of AICI 2012 – 2016.
In 2019, Imogen was awarded the Association of Image Consultants International’s most prestigious award, the Jane Segerstrom Award, for actively supporting and promoting a positive image in our society. This was recognition by the industry, celebrating her globally award-winning blog Inside Out Style along with her innovative 16 Style Types.
She has presented sessions at numerous AICI International conferences around the world since 2010, from Florida, Orlando, Hawaii, Washington, DC and Chicago in the USA, to Mexico City, the Dominican Republic, Malaysia and the Philippines.
She achieved her AICI Certified Image Professional status in 2009, and all the Academy programs are accredited for AICI CEUs by the leading professional image consulting association, AICI.
Graduate Testimonials
Thanks Imogen, I appreciate your personal training style with the focus being on the people, as opposed to a ‘product’. The training was both full of content and practical exercises. I feel I can achieve my goals as a consequence.
Melanie de Sousa – Distinct Image Consulting
If you’re considering colour and style training with Imogen at the Academy of Professional Image I highly recommend it!
Imogen generously shares her knowledge and expertise ensuring that every topic is covered in great detail. Her training style is relaxed and she injects stories of experiences with past clients to make the information real and relatable. The training manuals are very thorough and they’re a great reference resource after training has finished. Also, if there’s a concept you’re finding difficult to grasp, Imogen is always willing to spend additional time to help you understand.
I researched so many image colour and style training companies before choosing the Academy of Professional Image. I chose based on the comprehensive syllabus and Imogen’s reputation within the global image consulting industry (AICI).
Imogen has been a great support to me since training, and her ongoing guidance and mentorship is second to none.
As a professional stylist with over 8 years of experience, even after doing multiple colour courses, I couldn’t find a colour system that truly resonated with my clients or me. So many colour systems were flawed, contradictory lacked clarity that a client could easily interpret and apply. I wanted to deepen my understanding of colour science so that I could confidently guide my clients through the transformative power of colour with precision and confidence. Imogen’s expertise and passion are unparalleled, and her training exceeded all my expectations.
Thanks to her training, I now feel completely confident in analyzing color, educating clients on how to successfully apply their palettes, and delivering empowering and accessible education around colour in their wardrobe. This training has been invaluable to my business, completely enhancing the way I can now further support my clients, also delivering opportunities for increased profitability within my business.
I couldn’t recommend Imogen’s training more highly, and I am proud to have Imogen as a mentor and support in the industry with her wealth of knowledge and inspiration.
