Everyone Lost Their Personal Style
There was a time when we inspired Tik Tok. Now TikTok inspires us. Social media tells us what's cool, and somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to figure that out for ourselves.
Today, we have more named styles than ever. Whimsy. Cottagecore. Clean girl. Mob wife. Coastal grandmother. Old money. Every few weeks there's a new "core" with a new checklist of what to buy. On paper, that sounds like more options, but in reality it's the opposite. These aren't personalities, they're shopping lists. Instead of a style growing out of who you are, you pick a pre-packaged aesthetic, buy the starter kit, and move on whenever the algorithm does. The old subcultures had roots in music, community, and attitude. Today's micro trends have roots in a hashtag, and they fade just as fast.
And I get it. Certain brands are popular for a reason. Balenciaga, Givenchy, Giuseppe Zanotti, and Bape are all having a moment, and plenty of older labels are making a comeback. Nostalgia sells, and there's nothing wrong with loving a designer. The problem is how we shop them. When we see someone with a Fendi bag or a specific Balenciaga bag, we don't explore the brand and find another piece in the collection that actually fits us. We photocopy. We buy the exact same bag the girl or guy showed us on their social media channel, down to the color and the way they styled it. That isn't style, that's a reproduction. Carrie Bradshaw loved her Manolos, but she never wore them the way anyone else did. That out of the box thinking is what made her a style icon, and it's exactly what's missing right now.
Miranda Priestly once explained to Andy in The Devil Wears Prada that her cerulean sweater was chosen for her by a room full of people who were educated to make those decisions long before she ever picked it off a clearance rack. Back then, that room was a magazine office. Today, it's your Instagram feed. To be fair, not every platform is the problem. Pinterest is still a genuinely good place to find inspiration, where you search, wander, and save what actually speaks to you. Instagram works differently. You follow influencers, brands partner with those influencers, and the result is a steady stream of people telling you what you should think is cool. It isn't discovery, it's direction. We're constantly bombarded with user generated content about what to use, what to wear, and what to buy next, and much of it is paid for.
Because we're always consuming, we never have time to sit in silence long enough to be inspired by anything else. We wake up and scroll, we scroll on the train, we scroll before bed. But great style has always been inspired by everything else: books, movies, cars, old magazines, a grandmother's closet, a vintage record cover. Cher's yellow plaid in Clueless didn't come from a haul video. It came from a costume designer pulling from history, culture, and imagination. Those outside references expose you to new subsectors of fashion and give you more information to work with. Without them, we're stuck living on the surface, recycling the same ten looks the algorithm keeps serving back to us.
Everyone has lost what it means to be stylish within themselves. We've outsourced our taste to the feed, and the feed is more than happy to keep selling it back to us. Getting it back doesn't mean deleting the apps. It means putting the phone down long enough to notice what actually moves you. Watch an old movie. Flip through a magazine. Walk through a museum. Look at a car and ask yourself why you love the color. Then get dressed from that place. The goal was never to look like the person on your screen. The goal was to look like you. Style that comes from within can't be photocopied, and that's exactly what makes it worth having.
Written by Ketia Jeune
