THE REFASHION JOURNAL

OBSERVATION 002

APPARENTLY GETTING DRESSED NOW REQUIRES A BRAND STRATEGY.

The internet has decided you need a personal style

There was a time when personal style was something that happened to you.

You wore what you could afford, what fit, what survived the laundry, what your older sister abandoned and what you once saw on a woman smoking outside a nightclub in 1997.

Eventually, through repetition, geography, accidents and several purchases that should never be discussed again, you began to look like yourself.

Nobody asked you to define it.

Nobody demanded three adjectives.

There was no quiz.

Now the internet would like a word.

Actually, it would like three words, a color season, a body type, an aesthetic archetype, a Pinterest board and a 45-minute closet audit explaining why you keep buying black trousers when your authentic essence is apparently Romantic Gamine Mermaid.

Personal style, once the natural residue of being a person who wore clothes, has become a project.

And projects require deliverables.

PLEASE SELECT YOURSELF FROM THE DROP-DOWN MENU

Open TikTok, Instagram or Pinterest looking for a coat and you may emerge three hours later knowing that you are supposed to be an Eclectic Grandpa.

Or a Coastal Grandmother.

Or a Tomato Girl.

Or a Mob Wife, Clean Girl, Weird Girl, Office Siren, Vanilla Girl, Old Money heiress, Dark Academic, Light Academic, Balletcore woodland creature or woman mysteriously dressed for après-ski despite living in Florida.

The internet did not invent dressing like a grandmother, a ballerina or a wealthy widow.

It invented the idea that each one needed a name, a starter pack and several convenient shopping links.

Vogue's catalog of recent TikTok aesthetics has included everything from Barbiecore and bimbocore to tomato-girl summer and Europecore. These trends are often less like traditional fashion movements and more like extremely specific temporary identities.

You do not simply wear a headscarf.

You become the sort of woman who summers on the Amalfi Coast, even if the scarf arrived yesterday and the closest you have come to Italy this month is ordering burrata.

This is fun. It is dress-up. It is fantasy. Fashion has always allowed us to try on another life for an afternoon.

The strange part is when the costume starts requesting a long-term commitment.

THREE WORDS. NO PRESSURE.

Stylist Allison Bornstein popularized a genuinely useful exercise: describe your style in three words.

The idea is simple. Look at what you actually wear, consider where you want your style to go and choose language that helps connect the two. Bornstein describes her work as helping women build wardrobes that reflect their authentic selves.

Reasonable. Thoughtful. Helpful.

The internet, naturally, took this gentle styling tool and turned it into a minor identity emergency.

Suddenly women were staring into wardrobes full of perfectly functional clothing trying to decide whether they were Relaxed, Refined and Unexpected or Classic, Sensual and Mildly Concerned.

Is leopard print unexpected if everyone expects you to wear it?

Can your third word be tired?

What if your style is Minimalist on Monday, Alessandro Michele's aunt on Friday and a person wearing the same sweater for the fourth consecutive day on Sunday?

The promise is clarity.

The risk is that describing yourself becomes another way of limiting yourself.

Once you announce that your style is Polished, Feminine and Timeless, a giant resin necklace begins to feel like a violation of company policy.

PERSONAL STYLE USED TO CONTAIN PERSONAL INFORMATION

Clothes once told people where you had been.

The jacket came from a market in Berlin. The earrings belonged to your mother. The boots were bought during a regrettable relationship and somehow outlasted it. The bag was the first expensive thing you purchased with your own money. The dress looked terrible on the hanger and perfect on you.

None of it necessarily matched.

That was the information.

Personal style was not a perfectly maintained visual identity. It was a record of taste colliding with life.

Today, the internet can supply the entire appearance of a life immediately.

Search for French girl style and the striped shirt, basket bag, red lipstick and loafers are waiting. Search for downtown girl and there is the leather jacket, wired headphones and carefully accidental hair. Search for old money and an alarming quantity of beige appears.

You can purchase the evidence before having the experience.

Which does not make the clothes bad. It makes the speed strange.

A style that once developed through years of exposure can now be downloaded in an afternoon.

THE ALGORITHM KNOWS WHAT YOU LIKE. SORT OF.

Recommendation systems learn from what we pause on, save, click and buy. Researchers have already examined how fashion algorithms construct simplified versions of our identities from this behavior.

The machine sees that you saved one photograph of a red shoe.

Congratulations. You are now Red Shoe Woman.

Here are 600 more.

The more you interact with an aesthetic, the more the platform returns it to you. Repetition starts to look like consensus. Consensus starts to look like taste.

Then comes the especially elegant trick: the algorithm recommends the thing, watches us adopt the thing and uses our adoption as proof that it understood us all along.

Perhaps it did.

Or perhaps we are trapped in a very attractive feedback loop wearing loafers.

Research into algorithmically shaped online culture describes how recommendation systems connect users not only with aesthetic communities, but with the products required to perform membership in them. The subculture and the shopping cart now arrive together.

Punk required alienation, music, politics, safety pins and possibly frightening your parents.

Punkcore requires a checkout button.

THE MOOD BOARD ATE THE PERSON

A mood board is supposed to be inspiration.

Online, it can begin to behave like surveillance footage from a life you are failing to lead.

There she is, the imaginary woman who inhabits your saved folder.

She wears silk trousers at breakfast. Her white shirts are never transparent. She owns one perfect vintage watch and apparently has nowhere to carry a phone charger.

She does not panic-purchase a dress two hours before dinner.

She has never kept an unflattering jacket because returning it required printing something.

Her wardrobe contains seventeen objects, all of which understand one another.

Meanwhile, your actual wardrobe contains a sequined top, four nearly identical black blazers, jeans from three different body weights and one spectacular pair of earrings that does not coordinate with anything but makes you feel fantastic.

The mood board says this is inconsistency.

We would argue that it is evidence of life.

MAYBE CONTRADICTION IS THE STYLE

The most stylish people are rarely the ones who follow an aesthetic most perfectly.

They are the ones who interrupt it.

The severe suit with ridiculous earrings. The old Chanel brooch on a worn denim jacket. The evening bag carried in daylight. The thing that should not work and somehow makes everything else look intentional.

The interruption is where the person appears.

This is also why secondhand fashion is so useful. It refuses to deliver a complete identity in one seasonal collection. You find one object from 1987, another from 2004 and something released last year. You have to decide what they have to do with one another.

Sometimes the answer is nothing.

You simply like them.

That may be the most personal style statement left.

SO, DO YOU NEED A PERSONAL STYLE?

Probably. You already have one.

It is in the things you repeatedly reach for, the things you refuse to throw away and the things you buy despite knowing perfectly well they are not practical.

A method can help you see it. A mood board can sharpen it. An algorithm can introduce you to something you would never have found alone.

But none of them gets final approval.

Your style does not need to be consistent enough to satisfy a branding consultant.

It does not need a name.

It does not need to photograph well from every angle or communicate the same message every day.

Sometimes personal style is simply the collection of contradictions you keep choosing.

The black blazer and the enormous gold earring.

The sensible shoes and the completely unreasonable bag.

The woman you are, the woman you were and the woman you might decide to be at approximately 7:30 tonight.

Three words?

WEAR WHAT YOU LIKE.

SOURCES

Allison Bornstein: Personal style methods and wardrobe philosophy - https://www.allisonbornstein.com/content

Vogue: The 12 TikTok Aesthetics That Defined 2023 - https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/tiktok-aesthetics-2023

Vogue: The Aesthetics, -Cores, and Microtrends That Defined 2023 - https://www.vogue.com/article/core-aesthetic-microtrends-2023

Sara Bimo and Aparajita Bhandari: Algorithms, Aesthetics and the Changing Nature of Cultural Consumption Online - https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/13397/11539/86087

Diana Onitiu: Algorithmic Abstractions of Fashion Identity - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-021-01235-8

Haitian Zheng et al.: Personalized Fashion Recommendation from Personal Social Media Data - https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12439