AUTHOR: Ekaterina Gurevich
GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Duaa Shahzad
COPY EDITOR: Saadiya Patel
As humans, we make assumptions based on appearance. No matter how much we like to lie to ourselves, we judge based off what we see and first impressions matter, which is why clothing matters. If you see someone in a tailored suit, you assume they are wealthy or somebody on the higher end of the corporate pyramid. If you see someone in street style you assume they are younger, perhaps a student. If you don’t care about how you look – it is visible by how you dress, how you present yourself. Personal style is always at the back of a fashionista’s mind. Do your clothes reflect you as a person? Is what you put on your body a good representation of your character? What will people see when they look at you?
Everyone has gone through a period in their life when they were experimenting with their style, whether it was dyed hair or shorts on top of tights, crazy side parts or messy makeup. It’s a natural process while growing up. Unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced fashion zeitgeist, it is getting more and more difficult to find yourself. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade – you have heard many statistics about how terrible fast fashion is for the environment. From leaching dyes and microplastics into the soil, to poisoning workers, to inhumane working conditions, to terrible quality, the fashion cycle is full of horrific practices that will take reworking the whole system to change. Supporting that cycle is the recent upwards trend in overconsumerism; clothing hauls, skincare hauls, the endless promotion of a hot new product by a sea of influencers. People are online more than ever before – it makes them more gullible to marketing, more prone to buy into the word of an influencer that had been sponsored by a brand. People buy into the promotion because there is a fear of missing out, because they trusted another human’s review online and were made aware of something they don’t have and were convinced they need it. It is a slow black hole swallowing everyone.
In my opinion, this is detrimental to the fashion self-discovery process. Of course, the trends you see online can make you feel like you fit in, like you’re part of the zeitgeist, but at the end of the day, if the clothes you’re wearing don’t make you feel like you, instead of just someone wearing a style or a trend, then those clothes or styles are the ones wearing you, not the other way around. And it is obvious. Subscribing to other people’s beliefs of beauty and fashion ultimately only does harm to you.
Every day there is a new fashion piece being pushed on social media, a new look or fad or a revamp of an old style. Fluffy bucket hats, bright patterned pants, ‘old money’ aesthetic, ‘mob wife’ aesthetic, cottagecore, facial microblading, Y2K, tomato girl summer, cherry cola nails. The second you buy into one trend, another one floats onto your For You page. How is anyone meant to discover what they like if they keep on jumping trends? Of course, there is an argument to be made that because there are so many popular aesthetics online, people have easier access to the styles they like, an easier way to discover what suits them. My rebuttal is as follows; why does that have to come at the cost of others? In the process thereof those following the trends tend to buy something once and wear it a few times before either chucking it at the back of their closet or throwing it away. Even if they donate it, thrift stores still throw away thousands of pounds of clothing, with only 16% of donated clothes being reused. Donating something that was part of a quick fad is just adding another step to the item’s inevitable end at the landfill. Those clothes were made by people who were barely paid, transported across thousands of kilometres of ocean, just to end their short lives leaching chemicals and plastic into the soil. Following quick changing trends only lends you to support the brands that are producing them – it’s a cycle that must be broken. Again, I repeat, why does a person’s support of current trends and their self discovery process have to come at the price of others? Is there not a better way to grow as a person? To evolve your fashion game without feeding into the devastating cycle that is the fast fashion world?
There is not a concrete way of getting rid of one’s desire to fit in with others or to always be ‘up-to-date’ with current trends. Nor is there a concrete way to stop the entire process of the industry. However, once someone realises how harmful their behaviours are to both themselves and their environment, there are many habits one can implement to facilitate a change. A simple way to start your exploration into an actual style reflective of who you are is to try a capsule wardrobe! This may seem like an overused piece of advice, but think about it – select the clothing items you like or wear most from your closet and limit yourself to single digits. For example, three shirts, four pairs of pants etc., and see how many outfits you can concoct out of those pieces within a month. Once you’re done with that, think about what makes those pieces your favourite? What do you value most? Do any other pieces in your closet fit those guidelines? From there, it’s really all about exploring your style with what you have. New purchases should be thoughtful and useful. Why spend money on something you don’t need, especially if it was sold to you through an influencer? Save links to things you might want on your desktop and see if you return to them a month later.
Self-discovery, especially in terms of how we present ourselves to the outside world, is important to many. Nobody wants to live as someone else, but the current fashion industry poses a dangerous implication for many of the people within it. It is absolutely normal to want to follow trends, to seem up to date in the fashion world, to want to fit in with those around you or to simply look cool. Those things, however, cannot come at the cost of our planet or your identity.
