are you doing your new year's clothing audit?
it's 2024, personal style is no longer something you create over time but something you magically possess at twenty, and everything is an aesthetic
When I was about nineteen, if someone had told me that a vast majority of my future wardrobe would be black, that my SSENSE wishlist would mostly be monochrome (I went wild and added a beige piece today), I wouldn’t have been too surprised. My mum openly spoke about how she preferred wearing black but did not do so just for variety’s sake. I would soon realise—whilst fumbling my way around the shared laundry room at university in a foreign country—that washing dark colours with dark colours is the way forward, and a wardrobe dominated by black just makes wash day easier. Awfully tedious and practical though it may seem, we make boring decisions when we try to take care of our possessions and aren’t drowning in wealth (although the latter does sound lovely and I would not complain if that were to be my reality instead of whatever budgeting hellscape this life is).
Author’s note: I looked up “richie rich” in available stock images, and it put up this photo. Richie Rich now stares at Louis Vuitton stores from the other side of the road in the pouring rain, as one does.
Personal style is something that stylists on TikTok have been beating young people over the head with while said young people keep crawling into the comment sections of every other video, asking where they could buy that specific shade of lipstick and those “gorgeous pleated trousers”, which then, in turn, leads to video essays on the death of originality in the age of social media. Some sympathy has been going around as well, along with a sense that the younger generation, who make up the demographic these videos are marketed towards, haven’t been granted the time to experiment and come to their own as far as manifesting personal style goes. In my opinion, the narrative around “elevated basics” and “capsule wardrobes” over the past few years hasn’t helped the fashion scene either. I can’t bear to look at anything that would fit seamlessly in a standard capsule wardrobe (just in case, someone has a capsule wardrobe of Issey Miyake and archival Helmut Lang—I’m not talking about you, I’ll look at your fits all day) without finding myself involuntarily yawning, the same way that some people sneeze the moment they smell Kayali Vanilla 28 (I don’t, but perfumetok tells me that some people do).
I remind myself that the average person is neither interested in nor particularly engaged in fashion conversation. They find ways to express themselves, their interests, their references, their gender identities, their sexuality, and their current music obsession through other forms that aren’t sartorial. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Fashion conversation may encompass passively consuming content—your fashion TikToks, reading 032c at the newsagents as a part of building ritualistic daily habits, having the Vogue Runway app installed on their phone, and scouring the stories on Hypebeast. Immersion in fashion inevitably also involves consumption in a more material sense. The more I find myself reading up on what is contemporary, the more I am convinced to purchase objects that embody said contemporary ethos. I can’t buy Margiela spring 2024 couture—I am not even allowed to be in the room when it is paraded around—but I’ve been inserted into the conversation surrounding it passively. There have been so many attempts at unpacking the show, the porcelain makeup by Pat McGrath, the walk of the models, the sense of irony and “eat the rich” that people feel when seeing something extravagant and unusual. A debate can be had that wearing nondescript sweater sets in navy whilst being an exploitative billionaire would make one much more sympathetic to the crowds baying for blood than someone in an outlandish Margiela couture piece. I must add that in my experience, the sweater vest-wearing billionaire is both richer and is more likely to cause undue harm to society. But that’s a different debate.
Rian Phin did entire video essays discussing personal style, all well worth the watch if you’re interested in the conversation. But listening to Rian did make me wonder where we stand when caught in the crosshairs of personal style and individuality, whilst ultimately both signalling to and attempting to belong within certain communities. Are young people trying to express individuality through their sartorial choices as far as personal style goes? If so, their efforts may well be in vain. If they’re trying to belong to a community, that’s a better endeavour to strive towards.
I find Western individualism a tedious taint on modern existence—a melodramatic hill that I often fruitlessly die on, especially with colleagues at work (absolutely do not recommend, it’s not worth it)—but when we talk about personal style, it seems to bear with it the connotations of being about the individual. It’s your personal style, consequently, it is meant to outwardly signal who you are as an individual, and what makes you so incredibly unique that you have managed to express your essence within your sartorial choices, whether they be led by functionality or aesthetics.
There are two ways we can argue the futility of striving towards personal style as a form of individual expression.
Firstly, our individualities are a collage of references and experiences, very few of which are utterly unique—if any for most of us. People have been desperately seeking relatability amongst celebrities—a strange demand from a group of people who are also simultaneously aspirational—in order to establish some form of common ground, and have been finding, to their surprise, that sometimes ordinary things are what they share in experience; heartbreak, love, grief, bereavement. Perhaps the masses also seek relatability among the aspirational to further bolster some sort of delusion that if they too were to be among the rich and the famous one day they wouldn’t lose the authenticity that they pour into things such as their personal styles.
Secondly, we use clothes to signal to others, despite all the insistence of dressing for oneself. I expect the other outerwear aficionados to recognise my coat as Max Mara when I wear it, despite the absence of logos. People in Margiela tabi boots are signalling to others in tabi Mary Janes. The outward aesthetic of people in the boots versus those in the Mary Janes may be completely different, but they are birds of the same flock, a community of fashion slightly subversive. I do not understand the rather vitriolic anger a lot of people not interested in subversive fashion have towards the tabi boots—perhaps it’s the cultural context of having grown up with tabi socks (আঙ্গুল মোজা, as it was to me for years)? Ultimately those in head-to-toe Rick Owens or Ann Demeulemeester or even Prada are sharing something about themselves with their community, and these designers might be a signal of an individual’s personal style but they also make them belong as one of a flock, thereby rendering the individual in personal style as moot.
There’s a group of industrious people online who find their personal styles in their bargain charity shop purchases—although nothing’s quite a bargain in London, not since the East London lot decided thrifting was cool rather than a necessity in many situations for people with different purchasing powers. Still, if I pull out of my myopic view of the city I live in, people thrift globally, online and in-store, and curate their personal style through the clothes and accessories they purchase that way. But the inherent nature of thrifting lies in borrowing other’s references and aesthetics for one’s own and reinterpreting them in ways informed ultimately by trends and the cultural zeitgeist. The resurgence of maximalist Y2K followed by the quiet luxury trends—two aesthetics that can easily be acquired in charity shops across the Western world—is no coincidence. (Author’s note: My distaste towards quiet luxury can be a different discussion on another day, but I’ll put a bookmark in my head.) Ultimately the explosion of colours and prints, the beat-up denim skirts and cargo pants, the small bags in neon polyester and worn leather alike—all thrifted—harked back to the personal styles of those now well into their forties, and thus signalled to a community both growing on the streets as I see them, but also transcended time to belong to a community from decades past, not unlike those who only wear archival Helmut Lang.
Ultimately these were a lot of words to say that personal style isn’t something unique and deeply individual; people will always be unnerved by the avant-garde so if that is your “personal” style, expect other social media people to comment on how utterly ghastly they think you look; and you sharing your personal style with a whole community of people is a good thing.
Final author’s note: The Grammarly extension spent the entire time telling me that the adjective personal is redundant here, as your style is inherently personal. I feel like that too is part of the conversation, but perhaps more so in the domain of linguistics and nomenclature of trends.