Copy your friends!
Hot girls are talking about personal style! Or, rather, loudly lamenting the loss of style in the content storm that is the 2020s. How we dress has become increasingly dependent on the advice of people online, yet those people themselves derive their tastes from the content in their own feeds. Like rodents we furiously spin the wheel, unable to conceive that we are in fact going nowhere. Writer Alexandra Hildreth noted almost a year ago to the day that “you can tell someone’s screen time from their outfit.” The internet is still mad about it; sadly not a truism then.
It does certainly feel like, as the trend cycle operates at ever faster RPMs, more and more of us are becoming caught up in this distasteful revolution. We aren’t only rats, we’re ants too, unable to distinguish our individual taste from that of the hive mind. I’m in no way the first or only person to notice how the coveting of specific items, and the creation of uniforms designed to identify the wearer as an old-money-LA-Sophia-Ritchie-Chateau-Marmont-June-bride, or archive-Margiela-Brick-Lane-tabi-sample-sale-fashion-girly has created collections of identikit avatars that mill around London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Copenhagen etcetera. No longer people, merely archetypes.
Ok, I do need to tell a story now, because I had an inkling of this a couple of years ago. Diesel, at the height of their Glen Martens-driven resurgence, sponsored an event at E1, a club in London’s East End. It was interestingly formatted; they’d invited popular parties from various music scenes to take over the programming, I suppose to suggest that the brand had a particular knack for pulse-reading.
Anyhow, it was rammed, which was annoying, but the most bizarre thing of all were the people. Rarely does one get regular attendees to Adonis, Pxssy Palace, and Gutterring in the same room. Muscle gays, queer Black femmes, and Gabber-loving teenagers are three fairly divergent sectors of the population, yet across the diverse crowd I noticed an odd commonality: everyone was dressed UP, but lots of people weren’t really dancing.
Now I know not everyone is a good dancer. As much as I’d love a sense of rhythm to become a ubiquitous human trait I’m aware that is not happening anytime soon, and so I’m not criticising anyone’s ability here. This crowd was full of people who looked totally disengaged from the music. In my opinion, it isn’t outlandish to assume that if someone dresses in the style of a specific party scene, then they actually enjoy that scene and its music. You wouldn’t catch me dead draped in LEDs with UV-reactive face paint, nor in a cut-off band tee and skinny jeans1, because I enjoy dancing to neither electro-house nor metal. If you ever see me holding a rave totem… bludgeon me with it. Anyway, it seemed evident to me that many people might have looked the part, but either didn’t really take part in rave culture, or at the very least didn’t enjoy it.
‘Chaotic customisation’ has been the fashion buzz phrase to close out this year. For the most part this is described as a glorious alignment of personalisation and identity. We are being told Gen-Z have begun, and will spend most of 2025 “revolutionizing fashion” and “finding joy” through customising their clothing. How lovely. NSS seems to have said the quiet part out loud, which is that this is really customisation for customisation’s sake. I cannot bear to open up the whole bag charm conversation again, but this does seem to bring us back to these discussions about the role of experience in style. By this I mean how style has shifted away from necessarily being a reflection of someone’s identity and experience.
There has been many an exasperated think-piece on the ‘death of the subculture’ in recent years. (Incidentally I disagree with most of them, but we can talk about that on a different occasion.) What is certainly true is that we cannot assume that what a person wears is an accurate communicator of their identity, tastes, lifestyle, or worldview2. I do think one should be able to dabble in different styles, but if you’re wearing a leather harness to the office you’d better be wearing one in the bedroom too, piggy.
Getting back to the point, I agree with Hildreth’s more recent contention that this sartorial fragmentation comes from the removal of investigation as a part of developing personal style. To add to her point about research, it feels significant to me that in the past, you would find a community, learn its visual codes, and then incorporate them into the way you dressed. Nowadays, there are myriad creators online who will teach you how to dress your way into a community. Think of the recent spawning of videos purporting to offer foolproof outfits that will get you into Berghain despite the fact that every glance, nay, each twitch you make screams “I’d rather be in the pub.” You can purchase aesthetic alignment with a group of people, regardless of how much you actually identify with them, and without the need to invest any time or effort.
Yet dressing should take some time and effort. It is these things which beget meaning. How can we develop individual style when all of our outfits are chosen for us? Nowadays, looks can be recreated down to the thong, and any withholding of information about where to purchase an item is branded as gatekeeping. I’m not saying we shouldn’t find inspiration online; social media is a great resource. I just think there’s something sad about the way our desire to discover things for ourselves, to craft an identity from our unique experiences, is fading away. The internet, and TikTok in particular, has created channels between creators and consumers which are so wholly lubricated that we’re all practically sliding unawares into the outfits people tell us to wear. What happened to seeing a pair of boots on an actual real-life friend and then spending the next week trawling eBay for a similar pair?
Journalist Kyle Chaya has outlined the phenomenon of ‘algorithmic tyranny’ as the creeping ubiquity that comes from global overexposure to the same, limited set of references. Great for business, bad for individuality. I think the concept applies here. Influencer voice, the Scandinavian wedding guest aesthetic; so much of what we consume online is internal to the internet itself, and has little meaningful origin in the real world. In this cultural vacuum there is little to inspire our curiosity. We should want to find things out for ourselves, to have our restaurant, our pub, our music taste, our style. I, like most of you, will of course continue to use social media for tips. I want to know when the vintage pop-up is, and where to buy cheap silver earrings, but for the love of God, can we try to put the phone down from time to time. Love and light to you all, but if I see you in a five hour queue for a sample sale wearing Gentle Monster sunglasses, a Cos overcoat, and Miista boots? You’re getting a slap.
At the time of writing, the Indie Sleaze resurgence has not overtaken me.
This may have been less futile in the past, although the red hot accusatory brand of “poser” has been in use for a long while.
one thing i admire about no phones policies in club settings is that it encourages people to be present and interact with others and their own surroundings, sparking that ‘ investigation ‘ or ‘research’ that u mention. i went to berlin recently, and i’m very young so i don’t have much to compare to as i couldn’t go out before lockdown, but the nightlife i experienced in the short week i was in berlin felt quite thought out and considered, and i felt myself learn about my body and my style through that experience. personal style can really be shaped by where you need to go, what music you’re gonna be dancing to, wether u get too drunk and forget things… when i was in berlin, by the end of the week my outfits were all a lot more casual and less flashy, because i couldn’t stand dancing with so many layers or accessories . sometimes i feel like in the uk ppl step out just to show their fit, but it’s funny, that style means nothing without any context or personal story behind it. idk?