Why "Personal Style" is truly personal

Inspired by Maybe Baby's post to partake in the conversation around personal style. Chronicling my fashion arc + thoughts as someone with a small following on Tik Tok for "fashion".

***Preface***

Inspired to write today by "What is personal style" - Maybe Baby. Check out her post it’s very thoughtful. I can tell it’s written from a very different perspective than mine so I felt inspired to chime in. First, philosophizing what personal style means and why it’s convoluted yet actually very simple.

On Personal Style…

2024 I decided to purge my closet & buy nothing. That lasted 3-4 months. I did end up buying things this year but my mindset has become much less consumeristic & more thoughtful in the things I buy. I’m feeling more inspired than ever about fashion, design, “personal style”. There is a lot of talk about what personal style is & part of me thinks it’s kind of convoluted. When talking about these things it’s so hard to speak generally because there are such different levels of thought people give to what they wear. I think

Haley Nahman

’s article was so thoughtful and helpful. Especially for the person who gets up every morning and struggles to pick something to wear.

I thought this point was so important.

When I’m feeling confident, my taste is more reliable, grounded, and steady, and I’m able to shop slowly and with more patience. In the end, what I buy may contribute to my confidence, but only because it was already there, developed over time and, importantly, through other means.

Everyone i’ve observed that seems to have personal style figured out has one thing in common: a comfort in who they are. A confidence. I don’t think personal style is about figuring the one style that you’ll have for the rest of your life. I don’t think it has anything to do with longevity or consistency. Maybe I’m misunderstanding people’s thoughts on the subject but it seems to me that people think, “if I could just find my personal style, i will never have to question what I wear again”. People talk about the celebrity examples like Jacob Elordi, David Beckham, Addison Rae, Shia LaBeouf.

These titles seems to convey that if you just wear what they wear you can “dominate fashion”, have “impeccable style”, look like a “pop diva”, be a “normcore fashion god” (lol). I’m not even going to get into how most celebrities have personal styleISTS and that these personal stylists usually have a much more specific, honed in idea of personal style if you’re looking for that. Whether or not the celebrities actually feel good in what they wear may not even play into the equation. I’m sure sometimes it’s more about consumers loving their look since, after all, their likeness & people’s fondness of their likeness is a big part of their success. But that’s besides the point. The point is despite the countless Tik Tok’s claiming these celebrities have personal style down, even within their own outfit canon these celebrities looks change a lot. Jacob Elordi can be seen wearing a wide variety of things. They generally look the same because he is the one wearing them. Shia Labeouf’s style couldn’t be more different to David Beckham’s but people hail them both as personal style icons. What i’m trying to explain with these disparate examples is that personal style is just that- personal style. Practically speaking, it’s experimenting and finding a handful of things YOU really like. These things don’t have to be related to one another (or they can be!). You don’t have to have everything in your closet and wardrobe match each other but if you’re someone who doesn’t want to make decisions about clothing then maybe you should. There are a lot of different aspects that will play into what your idea of personal style should be. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen someone do what you want to do or wear something in a way you want to wear it. Even better if that’s the case. Here’s the recipe: Grow in self confidence (like Haley said, this might not come from buying new clothes), find some clothes you love, wear with pride. Style “tips” only exist if you want to be liked by a certain group of people. This is not a bad thing either. It’s not a bad thing to want people to like what you’re wearing. I just truly think if you love something and wear it with pride, the right people will think you look good. For me, I like having a small selection of simple pants & shirts that I absolutely LOVE. I’d rather have variety with outerwear and shoes that can make a statement if I feel like making one but overall I am pretty simplistic with my personal style.

It’s extremely difficult to write about personal style without knowing the audience. If someone who doesn’t really care that much about fashion is asking the question about personal style, the answer is entirely different than getting asked by someone who loves fashion and is trying to hone in their personal style. But to both i’d recommend figuring out what they’ve worn that they really felt good in. If they haven’t felt good in anything they’ve worn… It’s time to hit the thrift or a good vintage store and start experimenting.

**The Chronicles of Roger’s Personal Style…

((Beware… jump scares)

All I remember about little middle school me’s attire was that I was obsessed with basketball shoes. This was also the era of nike ID. I remember customizing a pair of free runs in as many colors as I could because I wanted to stand out. I wore very weird things. I remember in eighth grade I had some cargo shorts that went down to my knees that had black cheetah print on them. In 7th grade I dressed up like the guy from LMFAO for halloween.

When I was in high school I would wear white converse & new balance 990’s everyday. Yes, I also partook in the sperry nike elite trend. No I will not be buying “boat shoes” anytime soon (although I do think an all black pair of boat shoes look nice). I didnt have a sense of personal style. I looked to people who I thought were cool & copied what they were wearing. This was pre-social media for me. Both the white high top converse and the Grey new balance 990’s were directly influenced by friends of mine who wore those shoes everyday. They didn’t really wear them in a particularly fashionable way, but they had confidence and looked good in them.

Fast forward to college. This is when I really started developing some sort of fashion sense. Chronicling by year:

-Freshman year (2018): I actually did have a very particular personal style. I wouldn’t say it was my proudest era, but the style was distinctly mine. One thing that was funny about me freshman year is that I wore fake glasses. I thought that reading glasses were the coolest. I wore navy blue circle frame reading glasses with no prescription in them (I got 20/10 vision baby) ((side note, not sure if this is common knowledge but when I got my eyes check last, I found out that 20/20 was not perfect vision but the standard for good vision for humans)). It was an interesting time for me. I was still not really on any sort of fashion oriented internet or social media. I dont even know where I would get inspiration from. I started thrifting and would just buy random stuff that caught my eye.

***Fake glasses in question. Yes… I am wearing a red plaid shirt with a hood attached to it UNDER a black denim shirt. For warmth or for style? The world may never know.***

Sophomore year (2019):

This is the year that I felt my individuality contributed most to my sense of confidence. I wore a lot of interesting unbuttoned over-shirts or light jackets. Ones that would mix fabrics or designs. Still rocking a slimmer silhouette for pants. I was heavily inspired by Joe Greer (a photographer on instagram) stylistically & creatively. Tiny beanies & slim pants were part of his MO back then. His was a much more mature, put together look but I took those two aspects of his style and ran with them.

I fell in love with three pairs of shoes this year. Checkered vans, these multi-colored vans and AF1’s. Now that i’m thinking about it, I almost feel like my sense of style revolved (and maybe still revolves) around shoes. Everything sort of built off of the shoes I loved at the time.

Junior year (2020):

The shoes I fell in love with this year were the Jordan 1 and the dunk. And when I mean fell in love I mean I bought like 7 pairs of Jordan 1’s probably between late 2019 to early 2020. I was RELENTLESS on the SNKRS app, goat, stockx. That year I also became obsessed with what, at the time, was known as “archive fashion”? I think? im not really sure. This period of the internet for me was so interesting. I was really discovering a lot of brands. JJJJOUND, Stussy, Hidden, Supreme, Aime Leon Dore, Off white, Yeezy, Groundcover etc. I also became obsessed with finding niche collaborations. A lot of small designers collab-ing with reebok or new balance or puma. I was following & inspired by creators/ designers like Old man Alan, Undercover osh, Samutaro, Salehe Bembury, Virgil, Avery Ginsberg, etc. This was a good year for me. I felt like I was learning so much about what kind of style I liked. Not even just with shoes, with everything. I created an archive page late 2019 & was posting and reposting NONSTOP. I think I posted like 3k posts in the span of less than a year. It wasn’t for any purpose other than just expressing myself creatively. I would spend hours on the “explore” page before I was ever on Tik Tok. The explore page at that time was everything I wanted to see. Pictures from people hiking, fashion crap, editorial articles about different creative projects and collaborations. It was sweet. This is also when I discovered the dickies 574 pants. I think that’s the correct number. They were straight cut pants but slightly wide at the leg opening. I felt like i’d discovered a cheat code with them. They were super cheap but looked sort of elevated because they had a crease. I bought two black pairs, a khaki pair and a white pair and would wear them almost everyday. This year I also buzzed my hair and dyed it blonde (re: trying to be different).

Senior year (2021):

Senior year consisted of most of the same influences as junior year just getting deeper into the archive world and finding where I wanted to exist in the fashion world. I also started loving western style. I bought a cowboy hat and would interchange my style frequently. One day i’d be in Levis 507’s, boots & a cowboy hat the next i’d be in dickies, Jordan 1’s & a splatter painted hoodie (I still have that hoodie). Overall I felt really content with my clothes and was genuinely excited about fashion, design, etc. Senior year I found some beat up doc Martens for $20 and those became a quick staple. My first real pair of black leather shoes. This year I toned things down a bit as well. I adopted a subtle but distinct approach with what I wore for the most part. This is the year I feel that I “knew what I wanted to do” with my clothing & look. Maybe that means it was the first time I really felt a sense of personal style. I had my influences but also did things that I wanted to do for me.

2021-2023

2021 was the first year I was on tik tok. There was so much inspiration and I was having so much fun creating on it. I was meeting so many new people in the fashion world that I hadn’t been exposed to via the instagram world i’d uncovered. After the first year of Tik Tok I sort of got burnt out and didn’t do much on it. 2022-2023 I took a new role at work and it took up so much of my time & mental real estate. I still had all the same interests but just much less time to pursue them. I kind of got into a rut style wise end of 2023 and was feeling very uninspired to give much care to my clothes or what I wore.

An aside on having a small following on Tik Tok

It’s very strange and very cool. My favorite part about of it is talking to people I never would’ve met otherwise. I’ve been more inspired than ever before to create (In general!!!). Writing, photos, videos, outfits. My least favorite part about Tik Tok is that your followers often times don’t see your posts. I rarely go through my analytics but when I do I see that most people who view any video I post do not follow me. Substack is cool because every person I subscribe to I get their writing in my inbox. I’ve been posting most days on Tik Tok, which used to feel like a grind but now I just have more video ideas than I have time to post. I often times have 2-3 drafts that I am editing and a handful of other ideas I want to film when I get time.

If you made it this far, I appreciate you. This has been super fun. Any feedback encouraged below. Roast my fits or my writing idGAF!

My goal is to hit 1k subscribers by my birthday (February 15). I know it’s lofty but i’m doing my part publishing 2-3 posts a week O.o if I keep this up i’ll have published 130 posts by 2026! that’s a lot of writing!!!