We've Always Dressed The Same

Personal style isn’t dead, and social media didn’t kill it: most people never really had it in the first place. At least, not in the sense that we talk about it now.

Throughout history, personal style was mostly limited to what fabrics, colors, and trims you applied to the look of the time. You could choose to add your own twist to things, or keep wearing last year’s/season’s look (many people did and still do—not always by choice) but, by and large, not only have people dressed fairly homogenously, but there have always been trendy pieces that catch on seemingly out of nowhere and are everywhere within months. And this is true as recently as when I was a teenager: who didn’t want a pair of Jeffrey Campbell Litas (or a knock off of them)? Who didn’t own jeggings? In fact, late ‘00s/early ‘10s style is so distinct, my fellow millennials go viral regularly joking about our blazers and peplum tops in the club.

Remember this one?

Obviously, there have always been outliers when it comes to style, but, most people tend to go with what’s most accessible, easiest to figure out, and, above all, popular: that’s why it’s popular!

That said, as an observer of other people’s style since I was old enough to recognize colors, I can acknowledge there has been a shift in the way people dress—it just can’t be attributed to any sort of “death” of personal style. Rather, I’d blame it on the birth of a new era of consumption. We have an unprecedented level of variety in clothing, today. If you can conceive of it, you can probably find someone making it (or some fast fashion brand knocking it off). Any silhouette, any fabric, any color—it’s a kind of access that simply hasn’t existed for most of human history. This unfettered access has expanded the boundaries of what personal style can look like. With unlimited options, and unlimited ways to put it all together, no two people should ever have to look the same, right?

But, that’s just not how humans work. In What Is Personal Style, I said “we are all an aggregation of everything we’ve ever seen and experienced, including other people.” Most of us are not reinventing the wheel when we get dressed: even if it’s just subconsciously, we are drawing inspiration from somewhere, and reinterpreting the things we observe. Luckily, style is not defined by originality—or being completely new and free from influence—it’s about authenticity—what you do with that influence and how your life and experiences shape that. It’s not the lack of originality people are really taking issue with: it’s a perceived lack of authenticity.

I say perceived because there’s no real way to determine who authentically came to the decision to wear light wash jeans, a black top and white sneakers on a Friday night just by looking at them. But it sure does feel easy to judge the young women in the picture above in a way that we probably wouldn’t judge the young women in the picture below.

And it all comes down to these new, higher expectations of style: being on trend is taken as a lack of style; wearing similar outfit formulas (and even the same pieces) as lots of other people is read as mindless imitation. Why? Because you have the option to not wear what everyone else is wearing—so why would you choose to look the same? There must be something wrong with you. Too much TikTok, perhaps. Or you’re just not trying hard enough.

I just don’t think that’s fair.

I do think people are trying. I also think the sheer multitude of options makes it harder, not easier, to find what really resonates with you. And, thanks to social media, we see so many people via content that’s served to us by an algorithm who therefore all tend to look/dress/live quite similarly; and yet, we see so few people via, like, real life experiences, as fewer and fewer of us are leaving the house and socializing in the same way we would’ve just a few years ago (for some obvious and some not-so-obvious reasons).

To be clear: this isn’t me saying there isn’t a lack of authenticity in a lot of people’s style at the moment. And this isn’t me saying—despite my opening sentence—that social media hasn’t had any detrimental effect on the way we derive style. But, personal style has always been hard. The problems that exist now are only enhanced by social media, and we see them a lot more simply because we see so much, but, if you’ve ever read any old book about style—dating all the way back to the 50s with Claire McCardell’s “What Shall I Wear”—you’ll know, the struggle is pretty timeless. There’s a few reasons for that.

Expression and experimentation are not encouraged.

I recently read a LOT of style books and articles as I prepared to write my own I reached even further back than Claire McCardell’s 1956 book I just mentioned, all the way to Elizabeth Hawes’s writing from the 1930s, and it all boils down to the same things, essentially: do this if you’re this; do that if you’re that. It makes sense, of course: most people seeking this kind of guidance are usually looking for the easiest answer—but answers without any explanation of the “why” behind them tend to leave people right where they started, even if they work for a while. I’m referring to things like capsule wardrobe checklists (something I’ve criticized a few times now), rules around “dressing for your body type,” and guides to how to achieve some nebulous idea of “chic” or “stylish” or “cool.”

But, knowing the why does wonders for figuring out if certain advice works for you and, if it doesn’t, it can put you on the path toward understanding what does. Without it, though, you’re kinda stuck looking for someone to hand you what’s “correct,” and, in the meantime, lack any sort of framework that could help you reach your own solutions. Even if you do stumble into something that looks good, you can sometimes struggle to recreate it or make it a consistent part of your wardrobe because you don’t know why it looks so good. “Why” opens up possibilities to be explored. Without it, you don’t even know what options there are, and so, rather than try to find them, you’re more likely to just default to the things you’ve already seen work on others, or that you’ve been told should work for you.

Social media—especially the current methods of selling on social media—have made it a lot harder to come up with the why, especially since even the most “stylish” influencers tend to not be able to explain anything beyond themselves, leaving you to search endlessly for someone with your exact needs or just trust that that thing they’re pushing as “amazing” and “universally flattering” actually is (it isn’t). But, as I said, this isn’t really “new.” From the earliest fashion magazines to now, those considered the arbiters of style and/or fashion would really rather not have you out there figuring things out on your own and becoming ungoverned: you’d be harder to sell to.

But, even if you are the type to try new things, there’s a chance you’ll still never wear or even purchase them, since:

People lack confidence in their own taste.

You can be the most creative visionary in the world when it comes to outfits but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t actually put it on. Unfortunately, most people, even at their most creative, aren’t really confident enough to stand out “too” much.

I see it in statement pieces that sit languishing in wardrobes, in outfit ideas that never see outside, in fear of taking even the smallest risk like combining navy and black or wearing white after Labor Day. The rules we’ve been subjected to for so long work absolute wonders at discouraging us from doing things that feel right or even look right just because we’ve been told they aren’t right.

I’d say social media has absolutely exacerbated this, even among people who don’t have the wildest, most outrageous sense of style, simply because we can see the way others respond to those who do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on something as simple as a small woman wearing a big dress or someone who identifies as a men wearing something “meant for” women devolve into some of the most disgusting, vile, cesspool of hate. Whether we realize it or not, we can internalize that, and it—along with societal pressures, beauty standards, whatever’s “trendy” at the time—can absolutely make us terrified of doing anything that could be perceived as “against the norm.” Even if we really, really like it.

Our bodies are always the problem.

There’s no such thing as The Perfect Body, but, according to fashion, if there was, it’s definitely not yours. Or mine. Or anyone’s.

It’s not just because mass producing clothes requires taking average measurements and proportions that don’t apply to most of us and making clothes that will therefore always be a little bit “off,” but also, just, like…misogyny. Even if you’re not a woman!

Yes, women are discouraged from, say, wearing short sleeves if their arms aren’t slender (Claire McCardell herself, said that), or wearing bright colors if she’s not thin (Thank the “Dress Doctors” aka fashion rulemakers of the early 20th century for that one) but men are also discouraged from wearing certain things lest they be read as too “feminine.” If you have a body, you simply cannot win.

This is not an instance where people just default to whatever works—this is one where an entire population of people are simply excluded from fashion that works for them. There are few options to practically and accessibly explore, and a level of scrutiny so oppressive it leads to a tangible, quantifiable decrease in quality of living.

And so, you wear what’s available. And what’s available is the same thing that’s available to everyone else. And we all dress the same.

These are obviously things I’m constantly seeking to address as a stylist—experimentation, confidence, and inclusivity are the core ethics that make me the Ethical Stylist—but, I struggle to come up with any universal solution, besides knowing and naming the issue.

But, while it’s not a solution, I have another proposal—and I wanna thank my friend Kendall Lee on TikTok for putting some things I’d been feeling already so succinctly for me.

Instead of focusing on how everyone is “dressed the same,” what if we focused on the little nuances that differentiate even the trendiest trends? I’m not saying you should analyze why someone went with a peach Labubu instead of blue, but, let’s revisit the light wash jeans/black shirt crew above, shall we?

It’s not all identical, is it? One girl has a shoulder bag vs a crossbody; some jeans are distressed and some aren’t; some hems are grazing the floor while others graze the top of the shoe. These are all choices, these are all intentions: little choices we make to make things our own. What do they say? Or why do they work? Or why would you not make that choice? Or why would you? Even in times when the only real decision you could make about your “personal style” was whether you went with one trim over the other, there were still decisions—deliberate or otherwise—that you could make to communicate something.

We all dress the same—and that’s always been true, whether our options are few or many—but that doesn’t mean we’re all saying the same thing.