What Does it Mean to be Stylish?

What does it mean to be Stylish?

Not to get confused with how fast fashion brands shorthand the art of true styling and curation to sell us default looks that negatively impact our opinions of creativity, but the pure art of putting together an image of yourself in general.

Style is the piecing together of different elements that contribute to your outward presentation or appearance. Whether you have a style of dressing, talking, and expressing yourself, all of these factors contribute to your overall image and look through which society identifies you. Being stylish speaks to your unique style and how people or society likes your style. Whether you have confidence in your style and what you represent, we all have our unique styles and preferences. Talking about different styles, or collections of these different attributes that remind us of different archetypes can be a very nuanced and complicated topic. What we view as being stylish in different contexts heavily relies on the perspective we have. The historical subjectivity ( extreme examples of styling habits that point to different historical meanings and the context in which they were made popular) of style through different times, symbolisms, and intersectionalities is what I hope to capture in this column.

Through this blog, I hope to talk about everything from everyday styling trends that we all know and love, historical subjectivity found in our preferences to like certain aesthetics, and environmental and cultural contexts that are found in different aesthetics that tells us about cultural appropriation in trendy items. Aspects of stylistic history that highlight both unfair judgement of different ideas to the rich history of cultural expression and pride we can’t forget in this everchanging world. Talking about the industry and aspects as detailed as the choices in the garments material, construction, and silhouette and how the patterns in which they were commercialized and sold to us is also important to conversations like this.

Perceptions of style are also a component. What different styles say about the people that wear them has such a rich history as well to be represented. Putting all of these elements together gets you to create a stylistic view of the world that becomes an interesting context to think about society in general. The stylistic history we all share is what I hope to bring with this blog.

So if you are interested, join me on this journey as I explore these topics and their nuance in this society. Different perspectives we commonly never think about yet run the underworking of our society are things we should start to become aware of.