"Style is a way of saying who you are without having to speak." – Susan Sontag

In an era where everything is available at our fingertips, it might be rattling to realize that you can’t accomplish the simple task of getting dressed without looking to a reference point first. Where once personal style was something that slowly developed over time, it is now something many feel can fully form overnight. After all, isn’t knowing which influencers and Pinterest boards you feel compelled to copy and paste onto yourself not the same thing as knowing what your personal style is? Can’t your “aesthetic'' be “eclectic grandpa” without the actual patina that comes with years of being an eclectic grandpa?

**Left:**
Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
**Right:**
Chloe Sevigny

The truth is, figuring out your personal style can take years, decades even, and is in large part out of your control. This might sound like a counterintuitive thought given that personal style is… personal, and so of course you should be fully in control and aware of something that is yours, but it’s a catch-22. Personal style is shaped by all your lived experiences. Yes, it can be the shirt you put on, but it’s also the books you read, the way you hold a newspaper, the way you get out of a car, the music that makes you want to dance, the way you look at someone. If you look at all the people whose personal style is regularly imitated, you’ll notice that the reason it works for them is because it comes naturally. Once copied head to toe, it loses that same effect it first had. Other times, the people you’re imitating have developed a very precise persona that they themselves might not even consider their personal style; what you’re actually copying is the way they dress.

**Left:**
Lil Kim
**Right:**
Mary Kate Olsen

We can apply Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” to this, in that your taste and personal style is often reflected and reinforced by social hierarchies. Therefore, your personal style can inform people of your social and cultural standing. It is also the reason people of different classes do not react the same way to different social signifiers. So yes, even years after you’ve moved out of your middle-class home in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where you regularly visited an antique store owned by your grandmother who loved to bake sugar cookies, it is still impacting your personal style and taste.

**Left:**
Princess Diana
**Right:**
Rihanna

Many of us have a need to fit in, but also a desire to stand out, and personal style should be more of an internal search than an external one. If you lived in a vacuum never being influenced by anyone or anything else, style in reference to the way you got dressed would not exist. There would be no reason to perform. If you do not begin with yourself and the ways in which you express yourself and communicate as a human being, there is no style, and there is no one to communicate with. It makes you think about how much of our choices are actually fully our own. You did not fall out of a coconut tree, etc.

**Left:**
Sienna Miller
**Right:**
Solange

Once you start to develop your sense of self, the rest starts to come more smoothly. You start to notice the things that speak to you, and instead of just knowing what you like, you know why you like it. Yes, perhaps you love The Row, and every time you look at one of their collections, you imagine every piece magically appearing in your wardrobe, but assuming you are not on a The Row budget, the next step becomes finding a dupe. A tragic dupe that does not scratch the same itch and was probably not made by someone in proper working conditions. Instead, once you realize something appeals to you, ask yourself why. Do you like the outfit because the fabric looks of high quality? Is it because the color blocking stands out to you? Perhaps it’s the way the pants have the most perfect break. With all this information, it becomes easy to realize that you don’t need to recreate the exact same outfit, because you know how to take those elements and translate them into things you already have at your fingertips. You can acknowledge something new in the trend cycle and know if it’s right for you to try out.

**Left:**
Taylor Russell
**Right:**
Tracee Ellis Ross

You can figure out what inspires you, what parts of your body you enjoy highlighting, what colors bring you joy, and that will help in developing your personal style, but it is a lot more complex than just that. It’s your individual identity and the ways in which it interacts with social dynamics and cultural capital. Developing your personal style requires discovery and being curious. It’s ever evolving while also being all that you are at any given moment. Although capitalism or the upper class might have you believing otherwise, there is no one correct way to have personal style or way to develop it, because the final ingredient will always be you.

Article by Caroline Nycek, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Bradley Duley, Graphic Design Intern, PhotoBook Magazine

Personal Style, It's Personal