Style vs Access

Style is for everyone. Or at least it should be.

And the beauty of social media has been that, to a certain degree, style has had the opportunity to democratize. (Has it entirely? No. Has social media harmed true style as much as it’s maybe helped it? Probably yes. A rant for another day!) Anyway, this democratization is wonderful. It is easier than ever to look on the World Wide Web and find someone who looks like you wearing cool, strange, inspired outfits and to feel connected to a style community that speaks to your values.

At the same time, it's also as easy as ever for people who the fashion industry has always served to cash in on that widened access and, with very little effort, be dubbed style experts.

The fashion influencer part of that has been happening since the dawn of social media. But lately I feel I've noticed an uptick in fashion influencers who are pivoting to calling themselves “stylists.” I even did an interview with Emily Stochl who has a great Substack called Pre-Loved about this very trend.

1) The influencer market is collapsing. The money to be made off of branded partnerships and affiliate links just isn't what it used to be. So style influencers are looking to pivot to an income stream they have more control over, like offering a service.

2) The post-lockdown wedding industry boom we've seen in the last couple years has made for the scale and expectation of weddings (and the wedding LOOKS and wedding PHOTOS for SOCIAL MEDIA!!) go way up. This has also created much more demand for wedding/bridal stylists. There are also a lot of recent brides (who tend to be white, thin, traditionally beautiful, and wealthy) who had a blast shopping for their own wedding gowns, documented the process, and emerged post-wedding with the sense that by shopping for their own wedding they are now experts in bridal and use their own weddings to launch bridal styling careers.

But here's the thing guys...

Not everyone is a style expert!

Not because everyone can't have style, but because there is a HUGE difference between having style and having access.

What do I mean? Well, let's unpack what it means to have style (according to me, a self-proclaimed style expert).

Style, to me, is quite simple. It is the expression of one's unique preferences and personality through how they dress.

Style is taking individual pieces of clothing and creating a compelling, expressive, and personal context for those pieces in how you combine and wear them.

Because style is communication. It sends a message to ourselves and to others about who we are, what we feel, what we want to be known or unknown about us.

I think of clothes like words we all know. And style is how you put those words together to form a sentence. The newer and less connected you are with yourself and your personal style, the more rudimentary your sentences will be. And that's okay! As long as the sentence is authentic and true to you and what you want to say in that moment, it doesn't have to be fancy.

But the better and more connected you get with your sense of personal style, the better writer you become, the better communicator you become. Your sentences aren't rudimentary anymore, they're nuanced. They’re effective. They're poetry.

Now, not everyone is interested in having their style become poetry, and I think that's great. It's okay not to want that for yourself. It's okay to just want to feel comfortable with the basic skills of getting dressed in a way that's affirming and then go on with your life.

But if you're going to call yourself a stylist, I think you need to be able to not just write goddamn poetry! But you need to be able to TEACH goddamn poetry! You need to be able to step outside of yourself — your preferences, your budget, your body, your gender, your own context. Your job is to teach people the words, not to tell them what to say.

So it makes me very....annoyed...when people who do not have a true command of teaching style (let alone of their own actual style) get celebrated as style experts.

Because we are celebrating people with ACCESS, not style.

Access has nothing to do with the subjective art and work of connecting with oneself and expressing preferences and personality through the medium of clothing. It means you are lucky enough -- because of your wealth and/or status and/or body -- to be able to access nice clothing. You can afford trendy shit, you can afford designer shit, and when you get it it fits your body with ease. Which almost immediately disconnects them from several of the core things most people struggle with when it comes to style.

You don't have to connect with any kind of personal style, your sentence may be fucking word salad, but because it's designer clothes on a thin (usually white, usually normatively beautiful) woman it is automatically considered style.

Like, this outfit may really sing to mega-influencer Chiara Ferragni’s soul. I don't know (and in fairness, I don’t thinks he’s launching personal styling services at this juncture but I didn’t want to single out anyone who is). What I see is one of the world's most influential style figures wearing at least three designers with their logos/signatures on display all at once. And that seems to really be it. Otherwise there's no there there. What's the story being told with this style? What're the layers of personality being communicated? Or is it simply signaling that she could afford these things (or is so influential that they were sent to her for free), that they fit her body, and that when she posts this outfit the majority of her 29 million followers will feel compelled to do something, buy something, buy a knockoff, buy the fast fashion dupe of the thing, to achieve this fleeting look?

In my snarky, petty little opinion -- this is access without style.

And normally something like this would peeve me and then dissipate. What does it matter to me as someone who has worked hard to connect with her personal style but also is fortunate enough to have relative access as well. There are a lot of people who, like me, sit in that lucky Venn diagram where we LOVE true style but also have bodies the fashion industry makes clothes for and can afford some nice things. Let the Chiara's do their thing, who cares?

Except it’s not harmless! I have heard from clients and fellow stylists repeatedly about negative experiences with someone who they entrusted with their time, their money, their body image to help them with their style in some capacity only to have them say something fatphobic, to mislead them about cost, to not know how to support them when things went awry. There are actual material risks at stake here when anyone with a following and a designer closet can market themselves as a style expert.

But here's the thing: there are SO many people out there who manage to have incredibly soulful style WITHOUT access. Fat people, disabled people, working class people, trans people. I could go on. People who often have to move mountains to find clothes that FIT their body, let alone are cool or expressive or well-made. That, in my opinion, requires a level of style expertise that runs laps and laps around the average style influencer. The insight, the ingenuity, the creativity, the compromise required to express oneself so authentically when the raw materials are so off limits to you. THAT is expertise.

So at the very least, let this remind you that the very fact that you are here, connecting with yourself and other people who want to work on your personal style gives you more authority as a style expert than the many f our most celebrated style influencers. Let it give you the confidence to take that style risk, to be bold and strange and get dressed with joyful abandon. Try that thing you thought you couldn't pull off, because what does that even mean? Honor the work it took for you to find that funky thing, to mend it, to upcycle it, to pair it with the right pants, to make it work with the orthopedic shoes, to make it comfortable for your body. And if you see someone else out in the world who, maybe like you, may not have had an easy time bringing their fabulous outfit together -- let them know you think it's fabulous. Give them a compliment, from style expert to style expert. <3

Thanks for reading! And as always, if you’d like to book a one-on-one styling session with me for anything from your everyday wardrobe to wedding or event styling, you can book directly through my website. And if you like these newsletters but want even more exclusive content like curated second-hand shopping lists, videos, giveaways, and more then check out my Patreon!