Last year I consciously cut back on my fashion purchases. This was something that I had intended to do for some time, but it took a pandemic for me to really confront my overconsumption. With no where to go and real fear as to the future, clothing ranked as a very low priority.
Lethargy meant that loungewear prevailed and all energy was funnelled into buoying morale as opposed to bolstering ones sartorial credibility. As a consequence, I became untethered from the touchstones that typically kept me grounded, namely my personal style.
As lockdowns came into force, were relaxed and then re-enforced and life stopped and stalled and re-started, my fashion groove has not been able to adapt, as I struggled to adapt. The elasticity of self seemingly outstretched and unable to ‘ping’ back. What to wear each day had become perfunctory, with thoughtfulness needed elsewhere, and my clothes coming to reflect this fractious self. I looked down, detached from the clothes about my body. But I reasoned, ‘if you can’t have an existential crisis during a pandemic, then when can you?’ However, this did little to alleviate the discomfort about myself.
In a desperate bid to resurrect my floundering personal style, I became somewhat dependent on social media: the escapability, the availability, the reliability, the distraction. Turning to these familiar strangers to advise me on what I like, because they know what I like, want, need. The manicured reality tempting in all its shininess, ensnaring me in the fickleness of it all and so I found myself literally buying into the very falsity that I claimed to be so aware of.
Despite the futility of attempting to ‘keep up', evident by the very existence of TikTok ‘cheugy’ (translation: basic/over) videos, trendy became my aspiration. Hauls of new clothes, unboxed en masse, an advert for waste, and an attempt at mass appeal through mass consumption. The proliferation of waste a terrifying sight to behold, especially as a means of entertainment. The blatant over indulgence making it easier to remain detached from this particular medium of social media entrapment. Resistance to Instagram, however, proved much more difficult. One scroll turning into an afternoon lost and a hundred likes of things and stuff, that morph into wants and needs, its subtlety pervasive.
Why think about what to wear, when one scroll offers thousands of images of inspiration that all promise perfection? New releases flood my feed as brands strive to stay relevant in retaliation to the algorithm that threatens to swallow them hourly. The same item repeated on different influencers, styled slightly differently; same, same but different. A trend borne as instantaneously as an Instagram upload and just as quickly over with a scroll. The newness addictive, the consequence an inability to distinguish between what I actually like and what I’m supposed to like.
This conundrum reached its apex when I became enthralled by a dress that is the definition of tRenDY: the Hockney dress by House of Sunny. The more I saw it, the more I liked it. Wanted it. Needed it. Yet my presumption of its fast fashion origins deterred me from actual committal to basket. That is until a curious click on their website enlightened me to the ethical and sustainable principles central to the House of Sunny brand and business. But whilst this discovery didn’t erase the trendiness of the Hockney dress, it did inspire a reconsideration of my preconceived ideas that this was a ‘wear it and bin it’ trend, that by buying into, I would be condoning in some way. Rather its trendiness was a reaction to it being a really nice dress, because it was a really nice dress and, as in such instances, these things are wont to gain in popularity.
Yet despite my attempt to shop more responsibly and this dress being produced by ethical and sustainable means, buying based on this alone was still wasteful. The need for there to be a genuine like imperative to ensuring that the piece is worn and used and loved and worn some more. But the pervasive tRenDiNESs was tricky to disentangle myself from. Was my like authentic, or conditioned? - see it, want it, get it. The dress was everywhere, so perhaps bombardment was the cause of my supposed like? Maybe advertising had won, replacing personal style with the promise of something that had previously seemed unattainable. After all Kendall Jenner has worn this dress, so by buying into it, would I, by proximity, be buying into her appeal and attaining some of her credibility? Is that something I even wanted?
Perhaps not, or perhaps not totally. It would be a lie not to admit that buying something worn by a person whose style you admire, is not tempting. For one, how often can you even afford to buy an item worn by a celebrity (and yes, you can interpret my use of 'celebrity' as loosely as you'd like here)? Yet positioning oneself in amongst celebrities, underscores the bubble that life has forced us into in recent months. These are not people that we 'rub shoulders with', rather they are people whose feeds we scroll through. The lack of interaction with the outside world, has skewed perspectives, allowing reality and the digital space to become conflated. This dress may be everywhere, with the exception of real life.
With the trendiness of the dress limited to the digital sphere, my peers remain ignorant to its very existence. I therefore wasn't buying it to 'fit in'. And so it got me to thinking; ignoring a trend due to it being 'trendy', is just as disingenuous to ones personal style, as buying into a trend due to it being 'trendy'. I liked the dress and it was trendy, not because it was trendy. The confidence of style that I had been lacking would not be rediscovered by trend chasing or trend aversion, rather it would be reestablished by following my own likes and dislikes. And maybe some will accrue more 'likes' than others, but what will always remain central to my personal style, are my own likes.
(Pictures via: @houseofsunny, @_emwebs, vogue.co.uk & ellakarberg)
