I Can't Define My Personal Style and I'm Okay With That
Coming off of the heels of another New York Fashion Week, I feel like my brain has been in a bit of overdrive thinking back on all of the outfits I saw both on the runways and on Varick Street and it’s been nice to have some time after the shows to process everything I saw.
But learning to go beyond seeing and start questioning the cultural, financial, environmental, and often political implications of what we wear is still something I’m trying to train my brain to get a bit better at. In the age of influencers who are quick to say “I love this product,” or “this was my favorite collection,” I’m trying to bring a bit more of a critical eye to things when I can.
That’s why you’ll occasionally see me publish a YouTube review that isn’t 100% positive or why I go out of my way to read work by the one and only Cathy Horyn who pointed out that the Sandy Liang FW20 collection (that I truly loved from this season) to her felt like looking at “two or three collections in one.”
And then I did what any millennial in 2020 would do and while trying to digest all of this information about culture and fashion in a general sense, I had to also look inwards and check myself against what I was seeing. I mean if I look at my closet right now, maybe I’m seeing two or three wardrobes in one, and if I’m being brutally honest, I’m probably seeing four or five!
And if my closet seems like four or five different wardrobes in one…then what does that say about me? Maybe it’s a reflection of the fact that in the last four years I’ve had four different jobs even though many of those changes happened without me really trying to make them.
Existential fashion crisis aside, I think deep down I have always struggled a bit to find my personal style, which was always confusing to me as someone who desperately wanted to be identified as a Fashion Person. Even this blog post I wrote in 2017 about finding personal style was less of a helpful step-by-step tutorial and more a brief musing about the fact that I liked pairing patchwork jeans with patent leather boots. (Nothing wrong with that by the way, but it doesn’t really answer the question.)
I remember my style being much easier to define earlier on. 2004-2008 was tomboy central. I shopped pretty much exclusively at PacSun and refused to wear anything super girly. When I worked at Free People in college, it was boho city. There are still some key pieces from that time in my life in my closet like tunic-style dresses, wide leg pants, and a collection of hair accessories. And after that is where it starts to get blurry.
I remember watching High Fidelity (the movie) a while ago with my dad and thinking about the idea of choosing five favorite albums and it was hard for me, not because I didn’t have musicians I loved but because I rarely sat and did an album listen in chronological order because of iTunes followed by Spotify. So what if fashion is the same way? I don’t just have one retailer or designer that I shop from and because of that my shopping is a lot more haphazard than it used to be.
I distinctly remember going back-to-school shopping with my mom and purchasing a handful of items all together and I can’t remember the last time I bought more than one or two things from a store in one sitting. I also feel like because of all of the job changes in the last four years I’ve somehow lived an additional four fashion lives. Plus, my shopping has decreased drastically in the last 18 months because I’ve been more focused on putting any money earned back into my blog and business.
I think that there are common threads (pun most sincerely intended) in my closet like color and fabric. You’ll see red, white, black, and blue dominate the majority of my closet and the fabrics I go back to over and over again are cotton, leather, denim, suede, and chiffon (duh). Overall I think my style is a little bit girly mixed with edgy.
I think that I like the complimentary elements of my closet and I like the challenge of shopping my closet to put together new outfits and find different ways to wear things. I see my style as a mix of my past and present styles and there really isn’t one way to define that. When I interviewed KarenBritChick for Fashionista last year she summed it up really well. She says: “I really can't stand feeling like I have to define my personal style because I don't like to label myself, which I tell my followers as well. I struggle to define my style and I almost prefer that someone defines it for me.”
What about you? Can you easily define your personal style or do you see it as a mix of a lot of things? Let me know in the comments.
yours,
Austen
Photos by Jessie Alcheh