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Who are you? What do you value? How do you want the world to see you? These existential questions are difficult to reckon with internally, and even more difficult to explain to other people. But this is the weight of expectation the fashion industry has projected onto our personal style, and it is pushing us to overconsume.
“A lot of people think you have to keep consuming to achieve personal style, but the overconsumption trap just makes you more confused,” explains New York-based content creator Mandy Lee, better known online as Old Loser in Brooklyn. “When you stop introducing new things to your wardrobe, your scope of creativity gets smaller, and you have to work with what you have. I don’t have shopping regrets anymore, because I’ve figured out what I like and what I’m comfortable with; which colours and silhouettes I gravitate towards.”
As social media has pushed the already exhausting trend cycle into overdrive, and fast fashion has made overconsumption more accessible than ever, a countermovement is ensuing in the form of “underconsumption core” and “deinfluencing” — trends on TikTok and Instagram whereby people post faux “hauls” of things they didn’t buy, debunk the marketing messages that encourage overconsumption and celebrate using products to their full capacity.
Katia Dayan Vladimirova, senior lecturer at the University of Geneva and founder of the Sustainable Fashion Consumption research network, says developing a strong sense of personal style can go so far as to be a “radical act”. That’s in part because overconsumption, and all the factors that drive people to overconsume, often cloud a person’s sense of self, including which products they would intuitively like or reach for as a means to express themselves.
Online, what you wear doesn’t just say something about who you are, it betrays which corner of the internet you occupy. You can often tell from someone’s outfits which influencers they follow, which side of the generational divide they sit on (whether they tuck in their shirts or prefer invisible socks to long ones), even which musicians or celebrities they like (as evidenced by the booming business of Bella Hadid, Taylor Swift and Charli XCX). This is resulting in an ever-faster cycle of trends and micro-trends, from Barbiecore to tomato girl summer.
“People end up just mirroring influencers without considering whether an item will work for them, in their context. There’s no thought process behind shopping on social media, and there’s certainly no slowing down,” says Kerry Wilde, who has developed a niche as a “soul stylist”, combining personal styling with sustainability and wellness.
Finding personal style in the age of overconsumption
Developing a stronger sense of personal style might be an effective antidote to overconsumption, but it’s no easy feat. Many people struggle with finding and expressing their personal style in the first place, a challenge some stylists and content creators can then capitalise on.
“When you have a strong sense of personal style, you’re not swayed by trends or marketing, or the popularity of certain items within your social group,” says Brittany Sierra, founder and CEO of the Sustainable Fashion Forum and host of the Green Behaviour podcast. “This self-assured approach to fashion can lead to a more sustainable wardrobe, as you’re more likely to invest in pieces that genuinely resonate with you, rather than those that are ‘in’ fashion.”
There has been an uptick in personal stylists catering specifically to sustainability in recent years, but Wilde takes this one step further. She describes her work with clients as a journey of self-development, whereby she helps them get to grips with “who they are on the inside and how they want to present that to the outside world”. Wilde argues that the polycrises we are living through, and the demands of life under late-stage capitalism, have left people feeling “disembodied”, overconsuming to “fill the void”. For her, personal style, mental health and sustainability are inextricably linked. “Brands and influencers have latched onto the emptiness a lot of us feel, and promised to fill it,” she explains. “When we develop a personal style that reflects who we are and stop over-consuming, we have to find other things to fulfil us. We have to be okay with who we are, as we are.”
Personal stylists, however, are not accessible to everyone. For people who can’t access stylists one-on-one, there are social media challenges and prompts designed to pin down their personal style. For example, wardrobe consultant and stylist Allison Bornstein went viral on TikTok last year for her three-word method, where you choose one practical, one aspirational, and one emotional adjective, and use that to guide your outfits. And self-described “simplification coach” Downsize Upgrade puts potential purchases through her “deliberation station” worksheet to decide whether or not it’s really necessary. Questions include: Does it solve a problem that I have genuinely noticed? Is buying it worth giving up progress towards my next financial goal? Can I be productive and happy without it?
In the UK, content creator Andrea Cheong — author of Why Don’t I Have Anything to Wear? — developed the five-step “Mindful Monday Method” to guide followers in developing their personal style and shopping more sustainably as a result. The method includes a wardrobe audit, setting a budget that accounts for the emotional urge to overconsume, figuring out your fashion values, and setting guardrails around materials and quality. She says the sustainable fashion mantra of “buy less and buy better” is useless if you don’t understand your personal style and how “better” translates to fit and quality.
And Lee reached almost 60,000 people with her 75 Hard Style Challenge, which launched in January. Riffing off author Andy Frisella’s 75 Hard mental and physical endurance challenge, Lee invited her followers to get dressed and document their outfits for 75 consecutive days, as a way to identify patterns in what they actually wear and feel good in. The catch? They couldn’t buy anything new.
For Lee, one of the benefits of the challenge is that participants have to be actively engaged. The challenge shows that social media algorithms and moodboards are not a shortcut to personal style — if anything, they’re a hindrance. “You don’t just wake up one day having discovered your personal style, and you don’t find it on a Pinterest board,” says Lee. “It’s an ongoing process.”
Vladimirova is currently working on a year-long project called The Joyful Closet, which invites participants to reflect or act on a new prompt each month, with the ultimate goal of decluttering their wardrobes and therefore deriving more joy and wellbeing from the clothes they have. These prompts include assessing what triggers your overconsumption, learning about materials and repair techniques, and auditing what you actually wear and reach for. After all, how many wardrobes contain so-called “timeless” or “classic” items that were bought to be basics, but never get worn, because they are not timeless or classic to that individual person?
It’s time to challenge the role of personal style
For all the potential that defining a sense of personal style offers, sustainability experts caution against overemphasising its importance. The idea that the material items you wear reflect something as intrinsic and immaterial as your identity is not just overstretching, but a dangerous misalignment of self with consumerism. And it puts fashion “on a pedestal where it does not belong”, says Dr Lewis Akenji, managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute, whose 2022 report Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable proposed a “sufficiency” wardrobe of 74 items for a country with two seasons (or 85 items for a country with four seasons). For Akenji, overproduction and overconsumption aren’t just driving the industry’s environmental woes, they are contributing to the burnout culture among fashion workers and stopping consumers from addressing the root cause of their dissatisfaction. “Fashion, as it exists now, is actually the antithesis of identity and wellbeing.”
There are other ways of looking at the role of fashion, too. Dr Laura Beltran-Rubio, a lecturer in design cultures at De Montfort University, says she focuses on the social and environmental impact of her clothing rather than what it says about her. “Instead of valuing trends or novelty, I try to value the memories attached to clothes and the histories they carry from how they were produced,” explains Beltran-Rubio, who has a special interest in decolonisation. “I focus on the impact my purchase is making, for example if I buy from Latin American or Indigenous designers, whose clothes represent resistance and empowerment. I try to use my clothes to highlight the diverse fashion systems that exist in our world and question the Eurocentric idea of luxury.”
Rachel Arthur, the sustainable fashion advocacy lead for the United Nations Environment Programme, says she overhauled her wardrobe to bring it in line with her sustainability values, and then questioned her personal style again when the pandemic relocated her work week to her living room, and she moved from London to the countryside with two young children in tow.
In a bid to experiment without overconsuming, she turned to circular fashion. “I rent a lot now, which allows me to be more courageous when I dress for events, and I’ve started swapping with friends again, which I hadn’t done since university. Since doing the ‘rule of five’ [where you can only buy five items each year, including secondhand], I have a much stronger sense of my personal style and what my uniform is. Now, when I buy new, I ask whether it fulfils that criteria of what I will wear for a long time.”
What does this mean for brands?
Untangling trends and consumption from personal style recentres the debate around degrowth, or the softened version of “decoupling revenue from the production of new garments”. People’s relationships with trend cycles won’t matter so much to brands if they move on from their current model of success, which relies on increasing consumption.
Experts say this is also an opportunity for brands to rethink the way they engage with consumers.
“If we are only buying five new items each year, brands need to massively up their game in terms of quality, functionality and style to convince us to buy from them,” says Arthur, adding that in order for consumers to buy less but better, brands need to make less but better. “Rather than appealing to outdated ideas like retail therapy or creating a false sense of urgency around purchases, brands could give people time to stop and think before buying, and engage with fashion in more circular ways, offering different ways to consume. Just because I’m buying fewer items now, doesn’t mean I’m spending less.”
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