On personal style, algorithms, aesthetics, and the strange business of becoming yourself.
There is a very particular moment when you realise you have been told how to be yourself by approximately 4,000 people you have never met, usually somewhere between TikTok, Instagram and a badly lit bathroom mirror. Find your aesthetic. Build a capsule wardrobe. Discover your personal style. Dress for your body. Find your colours. Know your style archetype. Stop buying trends. Invest in timeless pieces. Be authentic. AUTHENTIC. The word has started to make me nervous, because what exactly are we being authentic to? Ourselves? Our childhood? Our Pinterest boards? The algorithm? That one woman in Copenhagen who apparently owns fourteen perfect coats and has never made a bad decision in her life? I don’t know, I just know that somewhere along the way, personal style stopped being particularly personal, and we have turned getting dressed into a personality test.
You are either old money, quiet luxury, coastal grandmother, mob wife, blokette, indie sleaze, clean girl, office siren, boho chic, dark academia, or whatever the internet has decided to call being a woman this Tuesday, and honestly, I am exhausted, not because I don’t like fashion, quite the opposite, but because I love fashion precisely because it can be completely irrational. I love the woman who wears a beautiful tailored coat with a ridiculous children’s necklace, I love someone who spends €1,500 on shoes and then carries the same disgusting canvas tote they have owned since university, I love a perfect suit with a completely inexplicable pair of socks, those contradictions are interesting, actually, I think those contradictions are the whole point.
Because real personal style is rarely a perfectly coherent visual language, it is a collection of accidents, things you bought when you were 19, things your mother gave you, things you found in a market, things you stole from an ex, things you cannot afford but bought anyway, things that technically don’t work but somehow work because you work them into your life, and there is no mood board for that, thank God. I worry that we have become so obsessed with aesthetics that we have forgotten the person underneath them, because the algorithm is very good at recognising what looks like you, it sees the brown suede jacket, the cigarette, the messy hair, the old apartment, the loafers, the coffee, the book positioned casually on the table, and suddenly you are a type
The problem is that the algorithm doesn’t actually know you, it knows what you paused on for three seconds, what you saved, what you bought, that you watched twelve videos about French wardrobes at 1:17 in the morning, and then it starts feeding you more of yourself, which sounds wonderful until you realise you are essentially trapped inside a very sophisticated Pinterest board of your own making, and at some point you stop discovering things and start confirming yourself, which is when personal style becomes boring, not ugly, not bad, just boring, because taste without curiosity becomes a prison.
I think about this whenever someone says they are “trying to find their aesthetic”, find it? Where did it go? Was it behind the sofa? Did someone steal it at the airport? Maybe you don’t need to find an aesthetic, maybe you need to have a life, go somewhere you don’t normally go, buy something that makes absolutely no sense, wear the wrong colour, change your mind, fall in love with something embarrassing, wear it until it becomes yours, because that is how style actually develops, not through a checklist but through repetition, mistakes, embarrassment, through seeing yourself in a photograph six months later and thinking, What the hell was I wearing? and then, occasionally, looking at another photograph and thinking, Oh… that was me
That feeling is different, it isn’t “aesthetic”, it is recognition, and I think that’s what we are actually looking for when we talk about personal style, not a look but ourselves, which is much harder because becoming yourself is inconvenient, you can’t buy it in a shopping link, there is no affiliate commission attached to it, there is no ten-piece wardrobe that will magically make you interesting, and there certainly isn’t a quiz.
The strange thing is that the more desperately we try to communicate who we are visually, the more similar everyone starts to look, we all want to look effortless so we study effortlessness, we want to look individual so we buy the same individual-looking things, we want to look like we don’t care, which requires an alarming amount of care, and I have absolutely no moral superiority here, by the way, I have spent far too much time deciding whether something is “me”, as though “me” were a fixed category with terms and conditions
But maybe the most personal thing you can wear is something that doesn’t make sense, a colour combination that should be wrong, a piece of jewellery that is objectively ridiculous, a jacket that has nothing to do with the rest of your wardrobe but happens to be your favourite thing, a pair of shoes you bought because they reminded you of someone, something that makes you look in the mirror and think, I don’t know why, but yes, and that little yes matters more than the rules, because personal style isn’t about being recognisable to other people, it’s about being recognisable to yourself.
And that takes time, and it changes, because you change, thank God, I don’t want to dress exactly the same way I did five years ago, I don’t even want to dress exactly the same way I did six months ago, some days I want to be elegant, some days I want to look like I have just escaped from a 1970s supermarket, some days I want tailoring, some days I want something completely stupid, and maybe all of it is me, maybe the most authentic thing we can do is stop trying so hard to prove that we are authentic
So please, stop telling me how to be myself, I have enough people doing that already, let me make some mistakes, let me wear the wrong thing, let me change my mind, let me keep the ugly necklace, let me put the expensive shoes with the ridiculous socks, let me dress like three completely different people in the same week, because somewhere inside all that inconsistency, all those bad decisions and inexplicable combinations, there is probably a version of me that feels very, very right, and I would rather spend my life finding that than finding my aesthetic.