I’m Calling It: Personal Style Is Dead

When was the last time you spotted an incredibly dressed individual in the wild – not so much in that they’re necessarily fashion-forward, or outrageously outré, or even particularly imaginative, but simply in a way that looks so damn good?

Perhaps it’s that blasé little plushie hanging unironically off their purse, or charcoal dress pants that hit at just the right length, or a searing slice of midriff peeking under a fabulously-fitted tee. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with clothes and everything to do with how they conduct themselves – their grace, poise, and presence. 

Yet, there’s something so magnetic about their whole look. 

It’s a fleeting feeling – you’re unsure if you’re in love with them, want to be them (or embody them, if only in part), or want to be more like yourself around them. But there’s startling clarity, too; you know that if you don’t immediately follow them around and find out where they’re going, you’ll be left behind. 

Much like, as critic Greil Marcus surmises, how the rest of rock-and-roll felt of the Beatles when they first heard A Day in the Life.

We see this all the time – in films and photographs. It’s an early-aughts Madonna leaving the gym sweat-soaked in an exotic mishmash of Chloé, Ed Hardy, and Adidas (“You can smell the endorphins from the screen,” Liana Satenstein quips). It’s a late-nineties Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in a crisp white shirt and faded blue jeans, glamorous as ever. It’s Jane Birkin and her fabulously beaten-up Birkin.

In real life, though? Probably close to never. Because we live in an era when personal style – of the truly personal variety – has ceased to exist. 

And maybe that’s not the end of the world.

The World is on Fire, but We’re Still Buying Shoes

Or so reads the title of the 2023 book by Alec Leach, former style editor to Highsnobiety. You see, here and elsewhere, we’ve long decried the proliferation of TikTok’s micro-cores for killing fashion week (and really luxury fashion in general). 

But it’s Leach who hits the nail on the head: fashion today is less about fashion and more about “moments to broadcast” and clothes “more like memes than products.”

Just look at today’s tastemakers for evidence. There was a time when our sage style connoisseurs would judiciously dictate the silhouettes of the season (“One time I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops. So, I bought army pants and flip-flops.”) Now, we’re subjected to an onslaught of GRWM videos imparting wisdom on how to achieve the cottagecore and/or clown-core look on a budget (bonus points if you can manage to pull-off both.)

And god forbid a trend lasts too long, for then it becomes *gasps* cheugy.

José Criales-Unzueta of Vogue further argues that the shortening span of trend cycles and their convergence with industries like entertainment and technology has turned fashion into a spectator sport.

Naturally, therefore, just like you’d fast-forward through any sport that plays out for too long (just me?), TikTok’s cores weave in and out of the pop-culture zeitgeist at alarmingly record speeds, leaving in their wake a flagrant trail of our overconsumption problem in the form of unopened packages.

The Emily In the Room

A slight digression: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, some 48 million people were born in the United States between 1996 and 2007. 

What is the no.1 most popular name among them? Emily.

Emily is an annoying American in Paris; Emily is a criminal played by Aubrey Plaza and a classic author of English Literature. Emily is also a multi-hyphenate celebrity/model/media mogul who briefly dated Harry Styles. As the New York Times observes, “Turn a corner lately, or turn on a TV, and there she is: Emily.”

But perhaps the most prescient naming of Emily was in The Devil Wears Prada, a role coincidentally played also by an Emily (Blunt). Emily Charlton is a self-professed Clacker, a devotee to Runway magazine, and on the whole, someone who’s drunk the high-fashion Kool-Aid and conformed to the rest of the Runway-verse.

Does that mean she doesn’t look good? 

Not in the slightest – she looks great (I’d be remiss not to mention that the styling was by Patricia Fields). In fact, she looks uniformly great pretty much all the time, just like every other girl at Runway. And as demented as that analogy sounds, that same sense of sameness has crept up lately within our internet-verse.

Bag charms, for instance, formerly a trend signifying brazenly individual style, have been adapted in a way that takes “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture,” notes Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker in his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

You see, it’s no longer about the statement Ms. Birkin made with her Aung San Suu Kyi sticker in support of the Burmese pro-democracy movement and more about who can zhuzh up their handbag in the craziest, most meme-worthy way possible.

And like Lionel Trilling so sincerely proclaims in Sincerity and Authenticity, “At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account” – it’s that sense of authenticity that’s now the Internet’s most significant commodity.

What Does It Mean to be a Person Today?

So, here we have a trend cycle spinning increasingly out of control, and we’ve also seemingly lost our authentic selves, which are oh-so-essential for personal style development, to the machinations of fashion. 

How do we choose to react? 

Instagram photo dumps are eclectic, out-of-focus, and kitschy collections of pictures that stand in stark contrast to the diktats of the FaceTuned and Juvederm-ed influencers of yore. Outfit-logging on – of all things—our iPhone Notes app allows us to seemingly escape having to constantly buy new things (we can’t) by buying vintage instead of new and by accepting that the current conglomerate luxury universe is ultimately only for that 1%.

Funnily enough, none of it requires any less of an investment in our collective time, effort, or even, for that matter, funds. While seemingly random, photo dumps are just as curated as a high-fashion editorial. Logging all our outfits on our phones only points more conspicuously to what we lack in our closets. And the thrills and travails of vintage shopping are not lost upon any of us at the end of the day.

But that’s really what it means to be a person – we contradict ourselves (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), we repeat outfits, we wastefully consume material things that only serve as vessels of our own insecurities, and we end up dressing alike, sometimes to our collective horror. And that’s okay – uniqueness is overrated.

As long as we find joy in how we’re dressing, as long as we’re living, breathing, sweating, smoking, moving, maneuvering, commuting, or communicating in the world with our clothes, that’s as personal as it’s going to get.