What is personal style?
This is part two of an informal essay series titled “Honoring my personal style," in which I explore what it means to have personal style in the era of internet influence and mass consumerism.
What is personal style?
It’s an interesting question, because so much of what we like is the result of what we’ve been exposed to. The first time my friend visited my parents’ house, they told me that how I decorated my own apartment suddenly made total sense to them.
“I know why you like this thing, and why you do things this way,” and so on and so forth. I’m very interested in “taste” as a concept, as nebulous as taste is, so I’ve pondered these things a fair amount, but I’ve never actually written about them. The prospect of writing on taste or personal style has always felt daunting because it’s necessarily complex and philosophical. I told myself it would require citations or engagement with esoteric texts — laborious internet research into the depths of mind-numbing content machines. Writing anything shorter than an entire book felt like a disservice to the many laminated layers of this thought croissant, so to speak, that I haven’t taken the time to sit down and actually consider the subject with intention.
That hesitancy ends today. For whatever reason, I now feel that writing on this seems like an immediate need. So, let’s go down the rabbit hole together. And please excuse me in advance for any moments of incompleteness, or any lack of source material. I will not be referencing sources (no mentions of Foucault and Heidegger here!) and engaging directly in the “discourse” unless this presents itself to me as a natural thing to do. I know people have written about this before and none of my ideas are unique. Instead, on the internet it feels like I am only contributing to the cacophony of people wishing to be heard. All I can say to this is “so be it,” because I do need to get comfortable with the not unlikely reality that I could spend my entire life writing things with very few people to read them. I digress.
Personal style.
According to Chat GPT, “personal style” refers to the unique way an individual expresses themselves — typically through their appearance, behavior, communication, and choices. In short, it’s a “consistent” way someone presents themselves to the world, shaped by personality, values, culture, and taste.
I think it’s safe to say that our “personal styles” can change over time and that they may have myriad expressions, but I am attached to the notion of there being some enduring “personal style” that rises above all the noise as years inevitably pass. Surely, this “personal style” shifts depending on the cultural context, much like our genetics predispose us to like, be, or do certain things depending on how we are raised, where we are raised, how much money we have access to, or what life experiences we have.
I heard it said recently that some of us may be genetically predisposed to alcoholism, but whether or not we develop into alcoholics depends on environmental factors and personal choice.
There are some parallels to be drawn here as far as personal style is concerned. For whatever reason, one of us may prefer green to purple, but this is not only due to the associations one might have with purple or green. I like to think there is some level of “liking” something that depends on nothing other than who we are as a person at our core. Of course, this “liking” something cannot be extricated from all the factors influencing our propensity for liking this thing, but it can still exist as the base, the launching pad, the seedling. The initial means by which compounding factors can feasibly cause a distinct preference to sprout.
That said, it’s tough to claim that anyone’s personal style is truly “unique.” It is frequently said that everything creative is a remix of other things, and this also applies to what we wear and why we wear it, how we decorate our house and why we decorate it that way. The quest for true originality is possibly a moot one, but maybe this is only due to our unimaginative definition of originality. For instance, you’d be strange to claim that Picasso’s work is thoroughly unoriginal just because it’s a remix of all the things he was influenced by. Our own personal remixes — composed of technically “unoriginal” parts — can nevertheless prove original in their totality.
After writing the above lines, I took this idea a few steps further with a thought experiment in my brain: Could there be 100 “clean girl aesthetic” women walking down the streets of SoHo in New York City on any given Saturday afternoon (and I assure you, there probably are), and even though they’re all wearing the same pair of yellow Onitsuka Tigers and wide-leg jeans; some variation of the same black structured blazer and gold statement earrings, might each “personal style” represented in this throng of young, Instagram-ready females be considered unique, simply because each person wearing the items is a unique person with an expression unique unto their sui generis self?
Look back on any period of history in nearly any society and people of similar backgrounds dressed similarly to each other. Jane Austen film adaptations come to mind immediately. All those empire waist dresses and the low buns with the middle part and the curled pieces of hair hanging on each side of the face. I can hear my mom saying: “Why do they all have to wear their hair like that? It drives me crazy!”
Elizabeth Bennett wearing an outfit nearly indistinguishable from all the other outfits other women of her status were wearing back in Regency England does not make Elizabeth Bennett a fool or basic or a clone or someone who hasn’t figured out what she wants in life, etc. But there is this burgeoning cultural trend online that suggests a lack of personal style (or, because they’re often conflated with personal style, a lack of uniqueness or intention) indicates a lack of self-fulfillment of understanding. There is, of course, a lot of irony in the fact that the people aiming to be the most unique or intentional about expressing their uniqueness all come to resemble each other anyway, which is something I’ve written about previously. As special and niche as they want to be, they are nearly all internet sick (“chronically online”) to the point that nothing they do or wear or buy can exist separately from the fact that they were influenced to do or wear or buy these things. Even more than the rest of us, who are perhaps superficially “unoriginal” but not claiming originality, the chronically online “look at me and how great my style is” sort of person — of whom I know and observe plenty — goes through the world believing that most other people are not as intentional as they are, not as well-versed in what they like and therefore, wear things just because they need to get dressed in the morning and certainly not because they’ve put meaningful thought into it.
So in this world world where personal style is increasingly celebrated as a hallmark of self-actualization, and where so many people gain confidence from what they post online and how they appear, visually, in this content that they post, a certain kind of hypocrisy or shallowness proves sniffable when so many people nevertheless continue to dress almost identically to each other, adopt the same poses as each other, and present all of this in the trappings of “Look at how intentional I am about everything in my life,” “Look at how much attention I pay to aesthetics.” And yet, all of these "intentional people” who pay such close attention to “the details” appear to be in nothing more than a state of chronically online imitation, their own autonomous expressions slowly devolving into some form of commercialized pastiche that evolves according to the proliferation of microtrends.
Is this personal style? Is a friend taking a photo of you casually crossing some New York City street — a posed shot, purely orchestrated — and posting it to Instagram an accurate representation of your personal style? Is it what you want to wear on a day-to-day basis? And perhaps more importantly, is it not just what you want to wear, but what you actually wear on a day-to-day basis?
This is not to say that we all always dress in alignment with what we perceive to be our personal style. There are many reasons someone might not wear something that they like, or that speaks to them as something they’d like to wear given different circumstances. If I could just lose the last ten pounds, many of us have the habit of saying, I would wear this dress again. “If I could only afford to buy a pair of Manolo Blahnik kitten heels,” one woman says, "I would wear them constantly.” If I had her body, says another, I would rock those low-rise jeans — no question.
Personally, there are plenty of things I “like” that I do not wear — sometimes this is because I don’t think they flatter my body, other times it’s because they’re uncomfortable or too expensive. There have also been plenty of times that I’ve showed up to my office, or to school, and I dislike my outfit so much that I feel an intense need to return home and change. Maybe I’m wearing a shirt for the first time and it doesn’t feel right. I look in the mirror and I don’t like what I see. I might not like what I see because I feel that I don’t look good in what I’m wearing, but I may also not like what I see because what I’m wearing — for whatever unclear reason — does not look or feel like me.
I heard a YouTuber say recently that she likes bohemian style. Sometimes she wishes she could be “Chloé girl” but she knows she isn’t one. When she puts on a flowy, prairie dress, it’s just wrong. She has the ick. The ick from her own reflection.
And so I ask: Is it really your personal style if you would not wear it?
Periodic changes in weight and periods of maternity aside, would you wear it? Does it flatter the body type you have most of the time? The body type you feel like you aren’t bending over backwards to maintain, where you are healthy and comfortable? And then, if you would wear it, would you like it? Would you feel like yourself in it?
These are the sorts of personal questions that have simplified practical notions of personal style in my brain. It’s not just what you like the look of, but what you actually want to wear. And then — acknowledging that your life stage or personal finances might limit things — it’s what you do wear. To the office. At home. Playing with your kids. To a gala. To hike in. To eat Christmas dinner in. To get married in. To go to the movies in. These sartorial choices will likely evolve over time, and that’s normal. But when you realize that you’ve tried plenty of different things already and you’re no longer as susceptible to the influence of a trend, when you can go shopping and have an idea of what you’re looking for, what you like, what you look good in and feel comfortable in, you feel a certain kind of relief. Less buyer’s fatigue. Better quality. Less waste. Better mental health.
It’s not for the internet. It’s not for other people to see what you’re wearing. It’s not what you think you should like. It’s not because you need to keep up with what’s popular, what’s different, what’s new. Let’s be honest with each other.
If it’s really your personal style, it’s only for you.
In the next installment of “Honoring my personal style,” I’ll write about personal style in the context of aesthetic procedures. If “personal style” is what makes you feel your best, can cosmetic work ever be a part of it?