I won’t spend time repeating the circulating conversations about how to find personal style or if personal style is dead or not. I want to focus on why, all of a sudden, it seems that one’s personal style is an existential crisis or more symbolic of a midlife crisis that young adults are having. Why does not knowing the answer to this question disturb us so much? I think much of it has to do with this limbo we all feel in our identities as technology severs us from ourselves. Every trend that plays with this dual persona we now all imbibe in - the real or the virtual - seems to tug at this tension that our identities and relationships in a technological world do not feel authentic. Authentic does not mean real (although part of the concern is the artificialness of the internet) but authentic, like an absence. A hole in our relationships that cannot be fixed through posts. We get sucked into that hole but struggle to learn how to articulate ourselves to a mass. How do I explain myself and my feelings so someone can see them as real? Should I just be “relatable” or is “relatability” just another fake thing that someone can catch me on? How can I communicate that what I am showing you is really me? Which is not a question that we have always had to ask ourselves. Yes, there has always been the idea of a two-faced person or fakeness, which inevitably, we have engaged in being people in this world and negotiating how we want to relate to others. However, now it feels that in expressing ourselves to the world that is now accessible through our devices, most creators spend more time questioning if they will be perceived as authentic rather than asking themselves what authenticity means to them.
This questioning of self. This absence that seems to be collectively swarming all of us has created an existential dilemma that is partially caused by a mimetic form of relating that the internet encourages. Mimetic meaning a repetitive relationship to an iconography that can produce feeling, self, catharsis. However, it is becoming harder and harder for us to determine if the identities, feelings, and relationships we are forming in this new digital age are real. Or if they are simply what we are being told we should feel and we are just mirrors to an algorithm. I think that the answer to personal style is simple: it’s inevitable. Just directly in the name, personal style, however you dress, your body will be yours. I think though, I will modify my meaning of yours because part of this crisis of personal style comes from the fear of being ordinary, unoriginal, and lost in a sea of trend and repetition. If what we consider personal style is simply extravagant maximalist trends placed on our bodies, then maybe I’ve never had personal style. And if rejecting personal style by becoming simple and minimalist is also a trend, then is that me gaining my personal style, or is that just me following trends once more? The question that everyone is really asking is how do I grapple with the fact that my identity is not mine?
Our identities do not belong to us. They are constitutive of our relationships to one another, the Earth, to material, to desire, and to ourselves. The desire to own yourself and your identity and to feel complete is often rooted in a neoliberal idea of ‘the self.’ It is what drives us to pursue more and more niche sides of these algorithms just for all of us to be taken to the same corner of the internet. How did that happen? I placed all the right search terms. I used every unknown collection, designer, cut, and term (avante-garde) that I could find that was supposed to lead me to the people who knew how to be different and who had identity. Unfortunately, wearing a tabi does not mean that you have adopted the relationship that Martin Margiela has with the world. Deconstruction is based on the unraveling of the self. The unraveling of material to its rawest form. Where the material can be stripped and reused and re-worn and reworked into other garments and items of clothing, deconstruction shows us the precarity of identity. That we can own ourselves. Yet, a lot of current relationships to these brands and the Avante-garde in fashion on social media seem to be in the pursuit of distinguishing oneself from the heard of other fashionable people. I am not like them; I am different, and I know the cutting edge. But maybe you are not. Maybe there is a reason that going to a fashion event, everyone is wearing a tabi to signify their fashion status. This fashion status is used to signify not capital regarding money (at least not always) but identity capital in a world where everyone is having an identity crisis. It is a large irony in the refashioning of these works that creates a philosophy that sees itself in the world. In the case of children going to school or working in their parents' business , In lower working class where the fabric originates. The Earth, that gives us material to sew. And turning these relationships inside out so that we can see the stitching is for us to see that relationship and wear it on its sleeve. That this piece is not complete. The relationship between these two pieces of fabric is delicate and fragile and requires care to maintain. That its origins have not been polished is to see its reality. It exists amongst a natural world that we all exist in, and I am constitutive of all these people and the organic material that constructs me.
I think many of us fear that we may be incomplete projects. That we will never find ourselves. People’s interest in fashion and styling themselves has increased drastically since the pandemic, which has been amazing, but this relationship to fashion has mostly come digital. We are beginning to see the fragmenting of identities of style and ourselves in the process of dressing our bodies. Why does it create such a panic if personal style is dead? That we all go to a uniform? That we all become a singularity?
I grew up wearing a school uniform for 9 years, up until 8th grade. Very formative years for my identity. Some argue the most formative. Yet, I’ve never questioned if that period of time not being able to wear what I wanted every day meant that I did not have my own style or identity. I showed style in my own 12-year-old way. I wore chokers from Kohl’s, hated painting my nails at the time (this will last till senior year high school) so I left them bare and wore my ray ban glasses when I realized I had bad vision because I wanted to be like the characters in my books, and converse or nikes so that I could always play soccer during recess. I hated wearing my shirt tucked in, and I preferred wearing skirts instead of pants despite hating painting my nails - a relationship with my femininity that I always think about. There were so many things that I naturally did that gave me a great sense of self despite, for the most part, being dressed like every single person around me, but sharing that uniform with all of them also connected me to them. They were my second family after being there for 9 years. Not many get to say they are still friends with their friends from elementary school, but I am lucky I get to. Going to high school, things were different. It was a new school, and I didn’t know anyone in my new class who had grown up together, but the biggest change was having to figure out what to wear every day now that I had no uniform. The realization of doing so made me hyper-aware of wanting to fit in or not fitting in through my clothing. Seeing the hierarchy of clothes and also seeing clothes as a negotiation of friendship. I’m using all these big things but in reality this was not my impeding thought on the day to day. I just wore what I wore, but then there were moments I was confronted with this dilemma: do I wear what I would or do I wear what I think I like or do I wear what others will talk to me in? The chokers were switched out for dainty jewelry. I played around with color rather than the black and red edgier look I was wearing. And most of this was just growing up and finding new things I liked and expressing myself, but there was also way more questioning about what that meant in high school vs. in middle school, where I just added whatever I wanted to and didn’t think twice about doing it.
Long story short, I don’t think going into a uniform necessarily means you have no personal style or your personality disappears, but we have to ask where this fear of being like and related to the people around you comes from. Especially as the world becomes more striated and hierarchical, the decisions we make every day, down to our choices to what we wear, feel more and more declarative today. A statement, an orientation towards those around you and yourself.
I said I wasn’t considered for answering this question, but I just can’t help myself, can I? Personal style is not dead it just technically never existed. You, a person, if you are seeking a style that is individualistically you that only you can do, that only you have seen yourself done, unfortunately, that is a made-up fantasy that is getting you to buy more things, spend more time searching on the internet, and then you all get disappointed when everyone is wearing the same three designers the internet led you to because you pursued individualism. But, if you are asking how I find my personal style, how do I find myself? How can I understand and pick out who I am in this cacophony of people and things that construct me? Then my answer is that you embrace those things. You identify what about those relationships are sentient to you. Meditate on the care you hold for others, the world, the Earth, the decisions you make, and why you make them. Those relationships are who you are. Those choices are who you are. Those desires, those philosophies, as Rian talks about in her videos on personal style (recommend), will help you process yourself. And time. Let yourself, your body, and your mind breathe. 25-year-olds asking other 25-year-olds if their personal style is dead makes me laugh because our life experiences have barely scratched the surface, yet we are rushing to complete ourselves in this project of life, which cannot be rushed. We will grow, we will change, and we will adapt, conform, and differentiate, but if you do not know your politics or orientation to the world and your position in it in relation to others, then the style you look for is an illusion. An imago, simply mimetic of an algorithm.
If all you take away from this is that I said to wear a uniform, then please re-read because I do not actually have a position on what you should look like. Too many people’s concerns about this question are about the items or the image at the end of the answer. This is not a Pinterest board; you are not a Pinterest board, an Instagram post, or a TikTok of compiled images and videos. You are a person who moves and breathes and lives in a world with others. We share things. The air, the ground, water, the materials that make our technology, and the materials that produce our clothes all have origins that we all use. But to ignore that sharing is what creates exploitation. It is why people can separate their desires for style, fashion, and identity from the exploitative practices of fast fashion towards the environment and human beings. It is why we can all chase this pursuit to engage in fashion and technology with social media and accessories (I am specifically looking at you rayban meta and fashion partners - AI just…a whole other thing of exploitation and degradation) yet so much of the fashion world that is so reliant on this technology to signify their identities refuses to discuss any of the exploitation and genocidal practices that take place in the African continent, in the genocide in Congo, in Ghana’s Kantamanto market that just recently caught on fire. The clothes you wear on your body inherently connect you to all of these places. It places you and orients you to the world. If you choose to see and relate to your clothes, that way is a choice. And that choice is definitive of you. Obviously, there are several circumstances that make this a difficult way of seeing your clothes, one of which is the cost of buying sustainably. Personally, I think that this argument requires us to buy into the fallacy that fast fashion is successful because everyone is buying sustainably. Fast fashion is successful because people buy unsustainably, and these companies know that they can get someone to buy 20 shirts for 5 dollars and then convince them in 5 months that that shirt is out of season and unoriginal, but these new 30 shirts are now, cutting edge, innovative, and will make you stand out. Sustainability does not need to start with buying something more expensive and better quality. It can start with changing our consumer relationship and orientation and belief that the purpose of styling ourselves is to feel individual and separate from our world. Keep being expressive. Keep taking up space and standing out, but the authenticity that everyone is searching for comes from the why you are doing it. That is why it requires acknowledgment that there are others who can help you discover that. That others are a part of who you are, and that is transformative. That is healing. It is scary, but it creates so many possibilities for how we structure our clothes, style, and self in context to a larger world and to a people.
This article is done, but I really want to highlight the Market fire for a second just some thoughts:
A lot of African clothing in the markets across the continent is secondhand from the globe. Just focus on that. Where do our clothes go? Many of these markets receive the secondhand clothes of the world. Specifically, the Kantamanto Market is the largest secondhand market in the world. Receiving over 15 million discarded pieces from the Global North. If this is not a sign of the overconsumption of fast fashion…moving on. Also, the overconsumption of just thrifting and buying secondhand has a political relationship. This market is just one example of that relationship because it tethers us to each other to have to trace where these clothes are coming from, and why these markets exist.
The impact of weather and climate that creates these fires and the sustainability practices of the fashion industry are indescribably linked. You cannot separate them.
Fire returns material back to dirt. Fire is such a decimating force. It alone makes material precarious. Fire’s existence. I can’t think about the Los Angeles fires, and then this - two places that feel so close to who I am, and fire is the only element that can destroy something into nothing. It will return a material back to organic matter as if it never existed. It makes this world feel so fragile, objects fleeting, and the impermanence of goods. It makes me question how I can relate to material with the understanding that it’s temporary. That I am temporary?
The livelihoods of so many people were decimated by this fire. The clothes that people need are gone. It's saddening. It’s also horrific. All of this can happen, yet the world never stops. It just keeps pushing forward. Like it's pushing through my body, asking me to move, and I just have to keep refusing.
Displacement, movement, gathering. It seems to be the constant of the world.
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