I’m Quitting the Personal Style Industrial Complex™
It should never have been this serious!
It is 6:42 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I’m standing before my 66-year-old solid wood closet doors gazing vacantly at a cluster of clothes I don’t know how to wear.
I work from home, but before and after and during that I drive my toddler to preschool and my baby to daycare, and I get a cinnamon latte, and I eat a lactose-free yogurt bowl in my kitchen, and I lift weights and run like a gerbil on a treadmill, and I read about the summer Ina and Jeffrey Garten backpacked throughout Europe, and I RSVP to a bachelorette party. At some point, I take a selfie of the outfit I’m not convinced I like in my smudgy, full-length mirror I’m not convinced gets good light. I never post the selfie, and I delete it in a month when I decide to clean out my camera roll.
Why didn’t you post that? I will ask myself. I liked your blush that day.
I didn’t post it not because I didn’t like what I was wearing, but because I didn’t think it was “good.” More specifically, I didn’t think it was “good” “personal style,” by which I mean: It didn’t distill my 35 years of lived experience and aesthetic preferences into a pair of pants and a sweater, and for that I’ve been ashamed.
Though in the last literal five days, I’ve come to understand something:
It really isn’t that deep!
I used to be the type of person whose hyper-fixation on my outfits and what they communicated about me would quite literally keep me up at night. Once, in 2019, I wrote a frenzied essay at like, 3 a.m. about how bad I felt about “not knowing how to define my wardrobe DNA.” I got a lot of love on that essay, and I felt validated and smug. I want to go back in time and slap myself. Get off the Instagram accounts dedicated to chronicling Camille Rowe’s clothes and go touch a blade of grass!
Now, a confession. For today’s post, I had initially started writing a desperate little ditty about how my relationship with fashion has changed since having children. I then saw this clip from the brilliant Nikki Ogunnaike’s “Throwing Fits” appearance and deleted the whole thing immediately, never again to see the light of day.
Here’s what she said:
“I can't talk about personal style anymore… the obsession with finding your personal style rather than just living a life and letting your clothes come to you — figuring out how clothes fit into your life. I really think there’s a hunger that’s happening on the internet that’s like, WHAT IS MY PERSONAL STYLE? Go outside. Live your life and then figure out how clothes fit into your life. There seems to be a fervor around this conversation right now, and it's not that deep, guys.”
Living a life and letting your clothes come to you.
Figuring out how clothes fit into your life.
This is what personal style is.
Personal style, on the contrary, is not me frantically working to whittle down my “three style words,” and it is most certainly not vomiting 800 words onto the internet about how my friends have a pithy tagline for their style and I do not.
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In December, I was one of the approximately 1.5 million people who watched a viral TikTok from creator @yoszwnska about how personal style “is a byproduct of living.”
“We were never meant to care this much,” she says, adding that the real glamorous girls among us are “having great conversations with friends” and “developing perspective and taste.”
When I first watched this, I’ll admit that it went over my head. Instead, I noticed her terrycloth robe and wondered if the tidy stripes fit into the “preppy” bucket of my own style pyramid. I was out here doing a full personal DBQ over that robe, and then I was confused as to why staring into my closet made me so lifeless each morning.
So, I’m telling you first: I’m quitting the Personal Style Industrial Complex™. It is no longer serving me, and I’d imagine it’s no longer serving you, either. I’m living a busy, small life right now with two busy, small children in our busy, small house. But it’s still a life worth dressing for, one that clothes can help me live.
“A byproduct of living.”
One day, the life will feel calmer and grander and the kids will be easier and older. I will maybe even look forward to posting that outfit selfie, or maybe I won’t post anything at all because I took Nikki’s advice and logged the fuck off. And did school drop-off and got a coffee and ate a yogurt bowl and exercised and read a great book and planned a trip with my friends.
Clothes can come to me from now on.
Ooo this is good!! I feel a larger conversation here in general about living our lives online- fitting ourselves into boxes instead of just being who we are and allowing things to shift, evolve, and sometimes be “not cool”. I’ll be thinking about this a lot- thank you for sharing this Maura!
I think there's also an angle of personal style as brand identity in the era of everything is content. Your 3 words are hashtags for the algorithm, which is created to drive sales..... I want to love fashion and clothes but the capitalism of it all is bringing me down. I think that's why I prefer fashion and personal style in the wild IRL over the numerous fashion Susbtacks.