My closet inventory, in no particular order:
Jeans—a mix of low–rise, extra–baggy, and one trusty boot–cut pair; tops—shirts, blouses, baby tees (not too cropped), several cardigans, sweaters, and zip–ups; skirts—two maxi and a couple mini; bags—two shoulder bags, backpack, and various little purses; shoes—platform loafers, Nike Dunks, old mini UGGs.
Push back the filmy curtain separating my tiny closet in my freshman dorm and this is what you see: a mismatched array of clothes, grafted from my life back in Seoul and Johannesburg into my life at Penn.
Moving into college alone last summer, I was pretty much forced by circumstance to pick and choose what to bring to campus from my high school closet. I folded away impulse purchases from ninth grade—the faded jeans, the tackier graphic tees. I carefully chose clothes that I felt represented who I was and imagined I’d wear daily—pieces that I believed reflected my current “personal style.” Feeling a bit self–satisfied, I thought I had nailed a unique blend of Western street fashion and Korean influences—whatever that even meant.
Granted, I’m no fashion major. I consider myself interested, sure. I grew up on @bestdressed videos on YouTube, like to meticulously pick through Pinterest in my spare time, and scroll through the occasional fashion archive account when they come up on my feed. I know that my dabbling in fashion inspo–boarding and Twitter–threading doesn’t hold a candle to people who actually devote themselves to the industry. Even so, I thought I had a pretty confident understanding of how I liked to dress as being personal and unique.
Recently, however, I’ve begun questioning myself. Just yesterday, I noticed a girl near the fruit corner in my dorm dining hall wearing a leather jacket. It looked familiar; I remembered my friend had one just like it. I paused. Come to think of it, I remembered I had one just like it, too. What about my style—my love for baby tees and dark tights, “acubi” layering and bracelet stacks—was truly “personal” and not just a generic rehashing of trends I liked on the internet? The low–rise denim, the bags laden with trinkets, the sneakers and boots—at best—was an amorphous blend of whatever was popular in the cultures I happened to be immersed in at the time.
In her article for The Cut in September, Brooke LaMantia grappled with the same question. “Suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw myself, and it felt mortifying. Who was I to think my outfits were better, or less basic, than anyone else’s?” She writes. “Now I can’t stop seeing it—my style, versions of all the items in my closet I had so carefully collected, thrifted, and cherished—everywhere.” It’s a feeling I’ve shared: when does emulating evolve into personal style? Does it ever? Or am I doomed to forever wear outfits that are nothing more than diluted versions of my saved images on Pinterest?
LaMantia, like many others in the contemporary discourse surrounding personal style, pointed out the influence of algorithms in hindering us from achieving a truly personal sense of fashion. She decides to make peace with it, almost resignedly: “What I realized was that in the age of social media, a sense of uniqueness is damn near impossible to find. And maybe it’s overrated.” GQ writer Chris Black points out that Instagram ruined personal style by having us focused on trending pieces fed to us through the algorithm—say, a specific kind of top or a pair of shoes—instead of cultivating an actual sense of style.
Or, conversely, we try to emulate the lived–in, fleshed–out styles and personalities of others through microtrend aesthetics like “coastal grandma” or “eclectic grandpa” without any of the actual lived experiences that build such a character. In many ways, it’s over–consuming and ridiculous: say, buying pre–decorated bags online to emulate Jane Birkin without any of her personal philosophy. It’s easy to dismiss as yet another shortcoming of our internet–pilled generation.
However, I do also see merit in considering ‘why’ with a little more empathy.
In her seminal video essay on personal style, Mina Le argues that our general mortification at “dressing basic” or having a lack of personal style stems from our overall hatred towards our own generation: We are all lonely and addicted to our phones, she says, and we are embarrassed at the thought of being exactly like everyone else. I disagree; our pull towards poor imitations of actual lived personalities through odd microtrend aesthetics stems from a universal desire to feel assured in who we are. Our embarrassment is caused not by a unique hatred of our own generation, but in the much more timeless want to feel secure in our own identities. We try to emulate the ways of our eclectically–dressed grandfathers or the loved, lived–in feel of “Jane Birkin” bags because they represent the kind of stability and richness of self–identity that we painfully lack, simply because we are still so young. And ultimately, isn’t this too a part of the larger process of finding one’s personal style? That awkward posturing to adopt visual personas we are not, in ways that we’ll no doubt laugh embarrassedly about a few years later; overdone as they may be, ultimately, I don’t find any harm in considering it a natural part of figuring out how we want to be perceived.
And maybe it’s the same for my own closet at Penn. A lot of it’s pulled from the internet, some of it’s overdone, and still others only look nice in theory. Regardless, each of the items in my closet tell a story: the top I snagged second–hand for five dollars in SoHo with my friends before running to catch our ride back to Philadelphia, jewelry I bought with my friends last summer in the basement of a crowded Hongdae thrift. And maybe, in this way, my style can become less a story about trends and more a story about myself—the places I’ve been and the people I met, folded into my closet layer by layer.
