personal style; a trip down emotional memory lane

Part of growing up, and establishing a sense of identity means to hate your culture, and despise the way you were raised, just for you to suddenly enter an era where all you do is wear your grandmother’s clothes. It is a crucial state of transformation we as people go through when we step into the wardrobe that is the pathway to the Narnia of fashion; personal style

Personal style is a messily built block tower, each level representing the phases we go through as growing beings. It captures the essence of the way you feel and gives your unfiltered thoughts a voice to be heard. Personal style is the rough teen years of our lives. It’s never truly figured out, but holds a great impact on our current path in life. 

Style holds a different meaning to different people, and is mostly based on how you view your day-to-day life. The way you dress speaks volumes about the gap between who you are and what you wish you were. Something that has always struck me is how limitless fashion and style is. There truly are no rules when it comes to figuring out who you want to be, and how you want to express that with the clothes you wear. 

Alexander Mcqueen once stated that fashion was a world of theater for him, and his designs were so that people could be different characters when they wore his clothes. You are allowed to be a theater kid in the hall of fashion, as it gives you the creative freedom to be anything you want to be. 

As we grow older, our minds capture things we like and dislike and segregate them into boxes that get stored in our brains. These later turn into identities we perceive as adults. The possibility of these idea boxes changing over time and adapting to your newfound interests is highly likely, which is why personal style has no set definition. It not only looks different to each person but also to you during different parts of your life. Liking florals could be your entire identity until one day you decide that’s not who you want to be. That is perfectly acceptable. You have the right to make or break any fashion pathway in your brain. 

Something that has caught my eye about fashion is how emotions, color, and clothes are an intertwined web that is very precisely knitted. All of these things correlate and exist in a very common space, affecting a person’s sense of style in different ways. I’ve always found that my mood or outlook on life is always depicted through the different palettes of colour i wear on a day to day basis. The times I’ve gone through major life struggles and have felt my lowest, I’ve naturally gravitated towards dressing in much darker shades or sticking purely to black and white pieces. During times I’ve felt happy and joyous, I’ve dressed in very femminine clothes and have incorporated colour into my way of dressing. Everything from the way I’ve carried myself, to the jewelry i would choose had been interlinked to some form of positive or negative emotion. 

One would claim that this was a very common way of dressing, based on your emotions. But what surprised me more is how on days i felt especially low, were the days i dressed extra fancy, because i wanted to feel a spark in my life through the way i dressed. Diving deeper into the thought process of each outfit I put together this year, it is becoming very clear how we as humans make decisions based on our emotions. I don’t think there is a set method we can determine how exactly our emotions play a role as a group, but more so in an individual level. Paying close attention to the way you dress can possibly help you make a statement on how emotions affect your sense of style. 

But emotion is not the only thing that affects the way we view style. Culture and those around us influence our style in more ways than the typical manner. As a person who was hellbent on sticking to wearing athleisure for the rest of her days, I’ve become someone who expresses my thoughts and feelings through the way i dress. I realized that the way i was dressing, purely in athletic wear was dumbing down my voice as a designer. My way of expressing myself was not being shown through the way i dressed and rather made me feel quite the opposite of who i belived i was as a person. Recently with the way i dress, my sense of voice has returned and i fully feel like myself when i dress loud and bold in fancy outfits and statement jewellery. 

It has been clear to me that what we try to run away from evidently catches up to us in hilarious ways. I’ve always thought florals and certain types of clothing items were not my style. But the world of fashion is basically a rule book waiting to be broken. These days i find myself raiding my mother’s and grandmothers’ closets’ to find the next unconventional piece of clothing i can style according to my personal style. When you experiment with fashion you soon realize the way you wear a certain piece of clothing is actually different to the way someone else would wear that exact same item. 

It is truly fascinating how a group of people can be given the exact same clothes, shoes and jewellery to style and yet how each individual styles them will be completely different from the other. This is where the personality aspect of personal style dominates any other trait. It is a beautiful finding that the same item of clothing can be loved by multiple people in so many different ways 

Looking at all these factors, im on a journey of trying to figure out how to incorporate all of these and create a series of well balanced personal styles that i can utilize in multiple pathways of life. Slowly but surely i have mastered how to style black and white clothing to look more alive, rather than the initial sorrow it was associated with. What matters with personal style regardless of all the factors that impact it is, how much of your essence can you find in an outfit you put together? Would someone you know look at this outfit, regardless of the color, style, or trend it has followed, and see a part of you in it? Would they immediately think of you when they see an outfit? 

I think if we can build our style around this key question of “how personal is our personal style” we can have a much more satisfying journey with fashion. But it too is an evolving journey. There is no right path to stick to, to crack a code. The important thing is to not think too deeply and have some fun with it