You're born naked, and the rest is drag.
fashion at its finest, finding your personal style, and the "baby yoda" debacle
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that I really, really fucking love clothes.
While this sentiment can easily be traced back to my formative years and penchant for stealing my grandmother’s slip-on kitten heels, I think my love for “fashion” happened sometime around Y2K.
It was the Christmas of 2000. My dad, a self proclaimed pop culture aficionado, gifted me subscriptions to Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. With the internet still in its tiny baby toddler stages, magazines were part of the core of keeping up with pop culture. The world, at this point, still predominately analog. From incredibly ornate editorial spreads by world famous photographers to artfully crafted theatrical runway shows, fashion felt in a peak of creative renaissance.
My sister and I have always been avid collagers, building seasonal moodboards that swallowed our bedroom walls and triggered the depths of our imaginations. We spent weekends carefully peeling off the looped scotch tape on the back of the old inspiration, tucking it safely away in our designated shoe boxes, while we soaked up a new issue of Elle or Vogue and schemed on what emotion, color, or theme we wanted our new seasonal wall to evoke.
While it’s safe to say I didn’t understand, read, or care about 80% of the articles in Vogue (thankfully ignoring pieces like, “The Power Diet: Surviving Raw Food Bootcamp”) I became an expert in naming designers, houses, photographers, stylists, and top models of every issue. It seeped into my school life, the yearly assignment to do a biography giving me an excuse to show off my knowledge of Carolina Herrera, Edith Head, and Audrey Hepburn. I wanted everyone to feel the magic I felt come out of those pages. Fashion was art and there was no one you couldn’t be in perfectly crafted couture.
This is, of course, just one very tiny perspective on a very small portion of a very large industry. The point I want to make today is the power fashion has to open up your imagination and make a playground where anything is possible. Building a wardrobe you love supports that whole concept of “when you feel good, you look good.” Clothing is one way of how we can express ourselves and show strangers who we are, what we stand for, and how we live our lives.
If you’ve been here for awhile you know that one of my biggest struggles in finding my own personal style has been how to embrace being more than “one thing.” It has become known in our house is the “the baby yoda debacle.”
As complicated tiny baby humans, it’s a very normal thing to have varied tastes and interests. Yet somehow, I find there is an unspoken expectation when it comes to fashion that you must fall into one specific style and stay there. What if sometimes I want to be a basic sweatsuit athleisure girly, but sometimes I want to be a latex goth queen in full drag?
When browsing for any kind of specific outfit inspiration on Pinterest, I am immediately led down “aesthetic” holes with names like “coastal cowgirl aesthetic” or “new balance girl aesthetic” and am alarmed at the assimilation these aesthetics have in making every person shown in photos look seemingly like a clone of a clone of a clone. And while there is nothing wrong with loving these styles, I think finding ways to express your personal style within them makes it easier to for those trends to stand the test of time.
If you want to wear chains, spikes, and Doc Martens one day and six inch stilettos and glitter the next, let this be your sign to do it! Life is too fucking short to be worrying about what people think— and I’m saying that out loud because I need it tattooed on my fucking forehead. Despite fearing this may be becoming a meme heavy newsletter, I think of this one often:
So often I’ve shy’ed away from wearing what I really want to in fear of the *guaranteed* stares and questions I will get from someone who “doesn’t get it.” And while I’m all for curiosity, we all have that friend or snarky aunt who has asked you about why you’re wearing something in a tone that has immediately made you want to crawl into the bathroom and remain there for the remainder of the evening.
Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring the power of developing personal style and finding our voice through our wardrobe. It will be secondhand heavy because the world is becoming a landfill and I have trash panic (regretting not naming my newsletter this…) but I will also be sharing some of my knowledge from my time as a stylist along with my favorite brands I feel have stood the test of time. This Thursday will be all about “The Closet Edit” — organizing what we love, don’t wear, or want to wear and don’t know how. Following that, the real fun begins. Queue’d up for the next few weeks is:
“How to Express Yourself Through Vintage Tees”
“Finding the Perfect Jeans (Old and New!)”
“How to Shop The Real Real”
“Classic Accessories That You’ll Want to Pass on to Future Generations.”
I also think it’s good to be transparent upfront and say I’m very aware I’m just another conventionally attractive and petite-ish white person soliciting fashion opinions, but I hope this can feel open and inviting no matter how you identify or what size you wear. I left the luxury fashion world because of the incredibly narrow minded and exclusionary culture — fashion is for everyone. It is literally something we all partake in as humans and we all deserve to look, feel and express our best. I welcome requests, comments, feedback, etc and hope you’ll join in on the conversation along the way and send it to a friend you think might like it, too.
On that note, I’ll see you Thursday for….
Until then,
xo,
G
As always, thank you for being here and supporting this silly little newsletter. I hope that despite my whining, complaining, and existential dreading, you find nuggets of comfort, reassurance and most importantly, inspiration to lean into living in a way that best reflects your personal style.
Oh. My. Goodness. Just catching up on this email and those Vogue spreads! That Alice in Wonderland is a core memory.
“What if sometimes I want to be a basic sweatsuit athleisure girly, but sometimes I want to be a latex goth queen in full drag?” I’ve never related to anything more