Style Strategy 002: Know your style history
Plus, talking about what you're not meant to talk about: money (budget) and body
A note from me:
Last week, I introduced my new series, ‘Style Strategy’. I have been overwhelmed by how much it has resonated with existing subscribers and new. Thank you — it is incredibly gratifying to have turned an idea around in my own head for some time, create it, and then to immediately see a staggering response.
Each week I’ll be covering a topic in regards to personal style, such as:
How to edit and curate your style (and your wardrobe)
Life transitions: what happens to your style
How to shop better
How to get inspired — and not be a copycat
What are fashion trends, and how to make them work for you
What is a capsule wardrobe, and how it’s not one-size-fits all
Fashion rules to break
Wardrobe maintenance: how to take care of your clothes
Seasonal wardrobe updates: how to transition your clothes from season to season
I hope you enjoy, and please comment if you’d like me to investigate any other topics further.
While I love to shop, there is a lot of shopping out there, and I really want to give you the tools to navigate shopping and style through identity rather than instantly thinking you need to buy something to fix yourself, or your style.
Shopping links — which are the bread-and-butter to make so many Substacks financially feasible, including mine — will be limited for this series. Because of this, it will be a series for paid subscribers only.
You can upgrade your subscription here.
The first edition was about ‘how to’. I wrote about how to put together a moodboard and how to use it beyond looking at your screenshots/IG saves/Pinterest, and how to make sense of it using techniques from art theory visual analysis so that you can get something a bit more useful from it than surface level pattern recognition.
“Existence precedes essence” — Sartre
And how does this fit in with personal style?
We don’t just pop out into the world with a concrete sense of our identities; our identities instead are formed by our own experiences, what’s happening around us and our own agency. Agency is important here — it’s all up to you. That’s how your style and tastes are formed as a manifestation of your identity.
And now, arguably more than ever, we are bombarded by so much online through digital algorithms. Do we know what our actual identities, let alone personal style and tastes are anymore?
Getting to your style isn’t a finite end point, it’s meant to constantly be changing. Don’t put pressure on yourself to think that if you’re hitting a certain milestone (turning 20/30/40/50/60, getting a new job, becoming a mother, moving cities, etc) that you need to have it all figured out. Working out your sense of self, your identity, your personal style and taste takes time and effort. But, once you have, it takes out the friction when getting dressed each day, making it more of a joy than a chore.
This is the approach I have with this series and how I approach personal style and taste as an expression of identity. They are mouldable and changeable according to different variables – there’s no finite, concrete, never-changing – you.
Now that you’ve thought about your moodboard, this week, it’s about how to refine that, while keeping in mind practicalities and your style history.
THE STYLE AND TASTE FOR YOU
This can be fraught, and potentially controversial. Now that you have worked out what you like, there are some things to consider. THINGS THAT YOU’RE NOT MEANT TO TALK ABOUT: MONEY AND BODY.
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