This is the second post in a series of posts I am doing about my reflection on my personal style evolution in 2023 and my goals for my personal style in 2024. My first post was about my favorite clothing items that I collected in 2023 and can be found here.
For my final post on 2023, I wanted to discuss challenges I had with building my wardrobe this year and what I’ve learned. While there were a lot of challenges that I could talk about, there was one in particular that continually surfaced for me this year. It was a somewhat philosophical question I found myself continually asking: can I separate the concept of my personal style from my personal style as dictated by the internet?
My Personal Style and the algorithm
Like many others, my renewed interest in my personal style coincided with both the growth in my disposable income and the steadily increasing popularity of fashion critique and discourse on social media. When I first started making serious efforts to evolve my personal style, I did the first thing many people in their mid-twenties likely do; I started saving hundreds of outfit posts and color palettes on TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. But despite the amount of content I was absorbing, it felt like my personal style was somehow plateauing instead of progressing. I was losing sight of what I enjoyed about my closet, and defining what I wanted from my closet felt difficult and overwhelming.
More and more, it felt like what I was identifying as my personal style just so happened to be overlapping with whatever fashion trend was running through my social media feed at any point in time. Spiraling down rabbit holes consisting of trendy hashtags like “gorpcore”,”clowncore”, and “blokette”, my personal style identity felt like it was wandering, just as Alice did when she fell through the looking glass. I began to wonder if my tastes were truly my own or if my taste was something handpicked for me by The All-Knowing Algorithm.
As I tried to take a step back and reassess what I really needed from developing a personal style, I realized that my first step in my journey should have been to nail down a precise definition of “personal style”. Based on my short couple of years navigating personal style, this is how I would define it: understanding how the core qualities of your lifestyle, your values and beliefs, your aesthetic tastes, and your environment interact with each other to form your external identity (how you choose to present yourself to the world). My trouble with using social media as a primary source for fashion inspiration partially stemmed from the fact that I was only using it to try to nail down one piece of personal style – my aesthetic preferences. I forgot that I had to understand what influences my aesthetic preferences – e.g. my beliefs, my self-knowledge and my lifestyle. In less words, I failed to develop the context in which my aesthetic tastes could evolve.
The Importance of Context to Personal Style
Context has become one of my favorite words because it reminds me that everything must be situated in relation to what’s happening around it. Nothing occurs in a vacuum – everything is connected. My favorite creators and journalists in online fashion spaces are people who are well-versed in fashion history and can explain the significance of moments in fashion within their respective historical and sociological context (I hope one day I’ll be able to do the same). Similarly, the most interesting examples of personal style I’ve seen come from people who have a deep understanding of themselves and the context that informs their personal style. This year has taught me that understanding the context within which your personal style develops is key to unlocking a style that feels lived-in, dynamic, and authentic. These are a few things that give context to my personal style:
- My musical tastes
- My favorite movies
- My character and my values
- The character and climate of the city I live in
I think the challenge with using social media as a resource for developing personal style is that while it can be a source of inspiration, it doesn’t often provide spaces where we can develop our identities holistically or acknowledge what multifaceted and complex beings we truly are. Everything on social media is designed to engage our attention – but not necessarily to provide the space for us to disseminate why some things grab our attention more than others.
This post is not to delve into all the moral grey areas that come with being someone who exists on the internet nor is the purpose to dictate how anyone should engage with the internet or social media. For the purposes of this post, I will simply say that I don’t think it can be a replacement or stand-in for lived experience. And while I think the internet is a great resource for education, I don’t think it’s necessarily the place where we can develop and understand our personhood. And I think we need both education and lived experience to have “good” personal style.
Developing “Context”
Some might disagree with my definition of personal style, or even how to determine what good personal style is, which is perfectly fine. I just think that if you are like me, and do not want to succumb to the algorithm’s demand for us to purchase more and more clothes in pursuit of the “perfect” personal style, then I suggest looking into what having personal style means for you and what you want to get out of it.
As for me, my intention for my personal style moving forward is that it will always be planted in a seed of truth of who I am as a person and who I want to be. It may not be the most outstanding, the most unique, showstopping, or worthy of social media virality – but it will authentic and it will be honest. And that’s all I think I can really hope for.
Below are some questions I have used to ponder on the connections between my identity and my personal style – feel free to use them if you find some value in them!
Questions about my external world
- What environment do I live in (social, climate, relational)? What aspects of that environment do I enjoy? What aspects of my environment am I critical of?
- How do I want people to feel when they look at me or my clothes?
- What is my level of comfort or tolerance for standing out or “going against the grain”?
- What do I want from my closet? (i.e. wear outfits that make a statement, help you perform a function, convey something about your personality)
- What types of garments make sense with the climate and weather patterns of my environment?
Questions about my internal world
- What are my core values? What am I passionate about?
- What do I like about myself?
- What do I wish people knew about me?
- What are my hobbies? How do they impact the way I live my life?
- What media do I consume and why?