How to Dress Yourself
811 Words • Personal Style • 06/22/2024
What is personal style?
Personal style, to me, is simply what you choose to wear due to aesthetic preference and intention. For aesthetic preference, this can look like either catering to your own preferences or to others (i.e. the local beauty standard since there is no such thing as an universal beauty standard). As for intention, there may be outfits where you don’t have an aesthetic preference but instead want to convey a certain vibe, maybe you want to look formal, strong, scary, comfy, soft, etc.
With this definition of personal style, “dressing for yourself” means wearing clothes that are made up of the things you like/are interested in. This may also involve leaning into aesthetics or trends for items because they are things that you like. I think that blindly adopting trends or aesthetics usually becomes less about personal preference and more about conformity, but I think that these things can be done intentionally from a place of personal style.
I think we have capitalism has induced a lens of marketing within us, which means a lot of definitions of personal style out there lean on the idea that personal style is our personal brand or that it is somehow aspirational. While this notion isn’t wholly incorrect, I prefer not to apply business marketing terms to people.
- What is personal style? - Who Wears Who?
- How to Define Your Personal Style in 8 Steps - Gabrielle Arruda
How can you find your personal style?
I think that most fashion advice up until recent times was simply “do this and not that” which made people dress to standards other than their own. Traditional style advice doesn’t always apply, but usually there are reasons for it. I don’t think that just because you are X or have Y that it means that you automatically can never wear Z. I prefer to think of it as you can wear anything, but some things will work better on your than others, and that’s totally okay. You wouldn’t say that gold or silver jewelry is somehow superior to the other, its just that usually one suits you better than the other.
Every person’s body proportions, face, skin, hair, eyes and posture are different and are all things that will interact with whatever clothes you decide to wear. Examples of interactions:
However, at the end of the day there is no way to pick how or what you want to accentuate without aesthetic preferences. There are some innate human preferences due to evolution, but sometimes going against those preferences can be intentional because of a certain reaction you want to produce. For example:
- Humans generally prefer symmetry
- Individual color preferences vary greatly, but humans may prefer certain color combinations.
- People have strong preferences such as “liking certain colors and color combinations much more than others.”
- If you are looking at yourself then it makes sense to dress in colors/combinations that you like and not to other people because there is no way to please everyone.
- There are some color combination preferences across culture.
- A lot color combinations are probably just pattern recognition with certain color combinations being so popular already. but why did they become popular in the first place?
- People have strong preferences such as “liking certain colors and color combinations much more than others.”
- “A combination of two complementary colors may be perceived as soothing or balanced, since it simultaneously stimulates different parts of the eye”
To take this notion further, lets look at South Korea where there is something called Personal Color Analysis (also sometimes referred to as Seasonal Color Analysis) that “that determines your most complementary color palette based on your skin tone, hair color, and eye color” (Source). The potentially pseudo-scientific notion of skin undertones aside, this whole service is based on the idea that complementary colors are aesthetically superior.
When deciding what to wear I think that dressing for your body proportion helps decide what kind of clothing cut you want to get. Depending on what you want to accentuate or cover up your options for clothes will become more limited and it will be easier to start looking for clothes.
- While it is your body and you can cover up or show whatever you want to, it is important for you to think through why you may want to cover/show certain parts and how they relate to beauty standards.
Fit is everything, so a well-designed garment will fit your body correctly. However fast fashion clothes are not designed this way usually so sometimes you will not be able to wear the same items as other people.