There is a wide variety of dressing styles, and any one person might have two or three different styles for different occasions or different moods.
A lot of my clothes are really "everyday" clothes -- clothes chosen so that when I am wearing them, I am apparently feminine, but in them I am intentionally "just another woman", not flashy, not intentionally sexy, not ugly -- just female. You have probably noticed yourself when you go to a shopping mall, that there are a lot of women who are... well, "average". Now as I am a guy that likes women, I happen to find that a lot of "average" women are "kind of nice looking", so by "average" I do not mean "plain" or "ugly" -- though not necessarily meeting the social consensus of "pretty" or "beautiful". A lot of women who, if you were walking in the mall or taking a bus or driving along, whatever, and had your mind on your own day to day concerns, that you would just glance at and quickly pattern match to "female, within norms of looks, within norms of fashion, within norms of behaviour"... and then you promptly stop paying attention to her because you have other things on your mind and she is neither a threat nor a particular opportunity. And a lot of my clothes aim square into that category: to "just be a woman", to just be getting along with life, not someone to pay attention to.
I have other batches of clothes that are more noticable, mostly because women do not commonly wear such things any more even though they once did; or more noticable because they happen to be particularily nice examples of common clothes. A nice skirt, or a nice dress -- they make me feel very feminine, and happy, and a number of people look over and see me in them and say, "That's really nice; it looks really good on you!". Oh, it's a wonderful feeling, just to be wearing those things and to be acknowleged as being, at that moment, radiant and womenly.
Then I have some other clothes, chosen to be deliberately sexy or deliberately "party style" -- clothes chosen with a conscious intent of displaying sexuality, or of "looking hot". Or chosen in thought of enticing people to think of sexuality when they see me -- which is not the same thing as wanting them to want sex with me personally. If a guy glances over at me and thinks to himself, "Nice!!" and that puts him in the mood to go and make out with his partner, then I would have been entirely successful. But these kinds of deliberately attractive clothes are emotionally troublesome to a lot of cross-dressers (including myself) -- we like to feel like we are desireable, but then the whole homosexuality question stomps all over us and we don't know anymore what we really want. I am still somewhat confused about this kind of thing myself; all I can say is that I know it to be true of myself that sometimes it is important to me to act sexualized; this is related, I am sure, to having gone through so much of my life without overt sexuality, and my feeling a need to express myself as a sexual being... which happens to be a lot easier when I'm in a female role.