The Problem With Personal Style Is That Everyone Is Shopping for It

Personal style has become remarkably easy to buy. Pick an identity, search the appropriate keywords, add the approved pieces to your cart and, assuming overnight delivery is available, you can wake up tomorrow as an entirely different woman.

Perhaps you're feeling quiet luxury. You'll need an oatmeal-colored knit, an aggressively understated handbag and something vaguely equestrian. Maybe you're having an office siren week, in which case apparently you require narrow glasses and the sort of pencil skirt that suggests you have been called into HR before. There was mob wife, clean girl, old money, coastal grandmother, balletcore, tomato girl and enough varieties of “core” that getting dressed has begun to sound suspiciously like selecting a character class in a video game.

I understand the appeal. Fashion has always offered us identities to try on, and that's part of its pleasure. Clothes let us experiment with who we are without requiring us to make any particularly permanent decisions about it. I have certainly looked at a runway collection and briefly decided that my entire personality should now involve sheer skirts and gloves. But something has changed. We aren't just borrowing from trends anymore. Increasingly, we're being sold complete personalities, and I think it's making personal style considerably less personal.

You cannot buy the starter kit for yourself

The internet has become extremely good at identifying aesthetics and extremely bad at understanding style. An aesthetic is easy to recognize. It has a palette, a silhouette, a handful of references and, crucially, products. Once something can be named, it can be searched. Once it can be searched, it can be monetized.

Personal style is much more inconvenient. It develops slowly. It contains contradictions. It changes with age, money, geography, work, relationships, confidence and whatever inexplicable obsession you happen to be having that year. It includes things you bought ten years ago and still love, things you thought you'd love and absolutely didn't, and occasionally something objectively questionable that you will defend with unreasonable passion.

Mine certainly does. I don't think anyone could build my wardrobe from a shopping list because I'm not particularly interested in looking like one coherent aesthetic. I like volume and femininity and things that are slightly wrong. I like putting colors together that perhaps weren't introduced formally. I like clothes with personality. I like an outfit to contain at least one decision that prevents it from becoming too polite. Some days I want something architectural. Some days I want lace. Sometimes I want both, plus an unnecessary sock situation. That inconsistency isn't a failure to establish personal style. It is personal style.

We have started dressing from the outside in

Traditionally, personal style developed from the inside out. You encountered clothes, music, films, subcultures, cities, designers and people. You tried things. You copied someone. You got it wrong. You discovered that a silhouette you adored on somebody else made you feel ridiculous. You became obsessed with something nobody around you understood. Eventually, certain preferences started repeating themselves, and the repetition became recognizable.

Now the process can work in reverse. An aesthetic appears on TikTok. Thousands of images establish its visual rules. Shopping guides tell you which pieces create it. Influencers demonstrate the uniform. Brands respond with product. Suddenly you aren't using clothes to express a taste you've developed. You're purchasing the components required to reproduce a taste that has already been developed for you. There is something wonderfully efficient about this, but there is also something slightly depressing about it.

The old-money phenomenon was perhaps the funniest example. Millions of people were effectively shopping for the visual language of people who supposedly don't need to demonstrate that they shop at all. Loafers were acquired. Cable knits proliferated. Neutral trousers marched across social media. Somewhere, an imaginary grandfather waited patiently at the family estate for everyone to arrive for lunch. The clothes weren't the problem. Many of them were lovely. The idea that assembling them automatically constituted personal style was.

The algorithm likes a uniform

There is also a practical reason these aesthetics have become so dominant: they photograph beautifully as categories. Algorithms need patterns. If you repeatedly post a recognizable type of outfit, viewers understand you quickly. The clean girl looks like the clean girl. The minimalist looks minimal. The maximalist looks maximal. The woman who wears beige appears to have entered into a legally binding agreement with beige. That recognizability is extremely useful online, but human taste is rarely that tidy.

One of the most stylish women I know could wear a vintage men's jacket with an evening skirt one day and something extraordinarily feminine the next. Another might own twenty nearly identical black dresses but suddenly appear in violent chartreuse. The interesting part isn't adherence to a visual identity. It's the instinct connecting apparently unrelated choices. That instinct is difficult to package because it cannot easily be reduced to five things you need from Zara.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of an influencer complaining that fashion has become too shoppable. I participate in this ecosystem. I show clothes. I tag brands. I tell people where things came from. I have absolutely been influenced into buying things myself, occasionally with embarrassing speed. The problem isn't shopping. The problem is confusing shopping with taste.

Good style requires some bad decisions

I would actually go further. I think developing personal style requires buying some things you probably shouldn't have bought. Not because waste is admirable. It isn't. But because taste develops through experimentation, and experimentation inevitably produces failures.

I have worn things that, in retrospect, deserved a quiet intervention from a trusted friend. Most people who genuinely love fashion have. That's how you learn proportion. That's how you discover which rules matter to you and which don't. That's how you find out that the item you thought would change your life has instead spent eighteen months glaring at you from the back of the wardrobe. You cannot optimize your way around all of that.

There is a strange pressure now to build the “perfect wardrobe”: fewer pieces, better pieces, everything versatile, everything timeless, everything working harmoniously together. I understand the sustainability argument behind that, and there is plenty of sense in buying more thoughtfully. Creatively, however, it sounds dreadful.

Some of my favorite clothes are not versatile. They do not go with everything. Several barely go with anything. They require effort. They create problems. That's often precisely why I like them. Fashion is one of the places where impracticality can still be pleasurable. A wardrobe composed entirely of sensible decisions might be extremely efficient, but I'm just not convinced I want to meet her.

Personal style should be slightly difficult to explain

When someone has genuinely compelling style, I rarely think, Oh, she's doing [insert aesthetic here]. Usually I can't quite explain why it works. There's tension somewhere. Something too masculine with something delicate. An ugly shoe with a beautiful dress. An expensive bag with something completely ordinary. A strange proportion. An unexpected color. An item worn in a way the designer probably didn't intend. Maybe everything is technically wrong and somehow the person wearing it makes the entire argument convincing.

That is what interests me about clothes. Not perfection, but specificity, and specificity takes time. It comes from accumulating references rather than accumulating products. Looking at old runway collections. Watching films. Traveling. Seeing how people dress in cities different from your own. Understanding why you keep returning to certain designers. Paying attention to the outfit you wore three years ago that you still think about and the expensive thing you bought six months ago that somehow never feels like you. Eventually you start recognizing yourself.

Trends are not the enemy

None of this means I believe we should heroically resist trends. I certainly don't. Fashion would be incredibly boring if everyone discovered their personal style at 28 and then wore it faithfully until death. I want some trends. I want new silhouettes. I want designers to convince me that something I considered hideous six months ago is suddenly essential to my continued happiness. I want to look back at photographs and immediately know what year they were taken.

Being influenced isn't a weakness. It's part of participating in fashion. The difference is what happens after the influence arrives. Do you absorb it into your existing visual language, or do you replace your visual language with it?

If leopard print suddenly returns, perhaps you discover that leopard belongs beautifully inside your wardrobe. Perhaps you wear it with something nobody on your Pinterest board suggested. Perhaps you realize you hate it and continue living a perfectly meaningful life without leopard. What matters is that eventually you make the decision.

Your wardrobe should contain evidence of you

Maybe that's ultimately how I think about personal style. Your wardrobe should contain evidence of your life. The city you lived in. The designer you became obsessed with. The ridiculous purchase from a trip. The jacket you've owned forever. The color everyone told you didn't suit you. The shoes that hurt but you refuse to surrender. The phase you're slightly embarrassed about. The phase you're considering bringing back. It should evolve because you evolve, and it probably shouldn't make complete sense to anybody else.

We're living through an extraordinary moment for fashion inspiration. We have access to almost every runway, archive, street-style photograph, designer, vintage dealer and stylish stranger on Earth from a phone in our hands. That should be making our wardrobes stranger, richer and more individual. Sometimes I worry it's doing the opposite.

So by all means, steal the styling idea. Buy the ridiculous shoe. Try the trend. Save 400 photographs to a folder and become temporarily convinced you're going to dress exclusively like a woman wandering around Milan in 1997. Just don't buy the entire personality. Personal style isn't something you discover in a shopping category. It's what remains after you've tried everything else and started making up your own rules.