Dupe Photos. Design: Sasha Purdy / StyleCaster
I remember the outfit I wore on the first day of 3rd grade. It was a pair of camo cargo pants and a red T-shirt with a print of a bright yellow smiley face wearing a newsboy cap tilted to the side. I wore it with a baby blue beaded choker necklace. It was the first outfit I ever wore that I put together on purpose. I was so excited to wear it and share with my friends. I remember losing sleep over how much I liked it.
I think a lot of people have a core memory like this, especially people in magazines and fashion spaces. It’s a love for clothes that came from the suburbs, from mall brands, music videos, and the stars of cable TV shows. When I moved to New York, I didn’t have a clear vision of who I wanted to be or how I wanted to dress, but when I got here, I found that everyone was speaking a really specific language, one I could barely make out. Moving here was the closest I had ever come to fitting in somewhere, and I still felt far away from any sense of belonging. If I wanted to fit in, I had to learn quickly, and I couldn’t let it show that I was sweating it. But then, in no time, I got the hang of it. A world that was once illegible to me had become something that I not only understood, but could talk about in a way that was illegible to others. Finally, I had graduated to the inside. For a brief second, it felt like I had figured out the game. The thing about the language of fashion is that it’s easy to learn. It’s easy to figure out what people are talking about, to mimic those ideas, and force them to be your own—but by then, whatever unique perspective you may have had about style is completely cast aside.
Fashion turned into something I did to chase a sense of belonging, and very quickly, that tamed that wild thing that made me want to do it in the first place. I got a magazine job and started polishing my point of view until it looked like everyone else’s because I thought that’s what I needed to do. It became so easy to bury my origin story (those clothes that made me want to levitate when I tried them on and took them home and laid them flat on my bed the night before school) in favor of something that I thought would win me an invite to a runway show. When your eye is tightly trained on that ambition, you forget that getting dressed is about going into the world—to shows, restaurants, and parties—and living in it.
I felt lucky to be asked to write this issue’s editor’s letter. But upon writing it, I really started to reflect on what it is that I had to say. I’ve had a lucky career as a journalist, but it’s also been a very puzzling one and one with lots of friction. One that often makes me feel small and ignored, one that often makes me question if my point of view on the world is still something that can get me paid. The last decade has asked us to create personal brands both professionally and as citizens of the internet, and nothing has done more damage to the idea of unique perspective. I think this is true about personal style too. We perform life for the algorithm, so of course, that means we dress for it too. The new shopping catalog is your explore page, the one you think was made just for you. But I have to think the pendulum will swing. I have to think that if I’m growing tired and unfulfilled by it, then others are too. I have to think a renaissance is on the horizon.
The best style wisdom I ever found came from reading Rilke and loitering outside cafes and watching people and giving myself time to become myself, and then time to become myself again. It’s in doing this that I realized that an invite to a certain party did not make me interesting. Getting hit on by people I perceive to be out of my league did not make me interesting. Being followed by someone cool on Instagram did not make me interesting, and guess what? My clothes did not make me interesting. It’s so obvious, and yet it’s easy to think this way. The validation we receive, the people who follow us on the internet, the clothes. It’s easy to treat them like proof of a well-lived life. It’s easy to think that if we just find that effortless white T-shirt, a perfect capsule wardrobe, a life-changing haircut, and a social life like the ones in the movies, we might actually have a chance at self-actualizing. But that’s not how this works.
People are quite hard to trick, and all that effort that goes into being effortless still looks like effort, I’m sorry to say. The clothes and love and attention—these are, at best, artifacts of the kinds of lives we live. The life itself, the sense of self, has to be made from scratch. I found my style while sitting at home and journaling and going out to parties and buying tickets to things I’d never heard of before. I implore all of you to return to the drawing board, to prioritize uniqueness, to bring back individuality. Try to remember what you like, what you think is cool. Ask yourself why you decided to buy those wide-leg jeans or buzzy sneakers. After all, it’s called personal style for a reason.
