How to Find Your Personal Style

Napoleon Hill, grandfather of modern self-help, said this of transformation:

“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.”

The author of Think and Grow Rich¹, first published in 1937, probably wasn’t referring to personal style, but that’s exactly how any kind of self-transformation should be approached: from a place of possibility, a sartorial awakening as visions of Louboutins², power suits or golden Hollywood denim dance in your head.

Very few people care about fashion, even though everyone wears clothes. Fashion is so closely tied to body image and self esteem, to ideas and ideals about conformity, gender, status, wealth. These things are hard to untangle from, like any system so ingrained in our social and cultural fabric.

When the fashion blogging phenomena first started back in the aughts before building to a crescendo in the early 2010s, the quell of an entire fleet of an entirely new form of digital media—built one outfit and blogger at a time—eventually came to a steady halt. Fashion bloggers who carefully cultivated followings based on the clothes they put together, at fashion week, on cobblestones in Paris and in the back alleys in middle America, eventually morphed into a thirst for lifestyle influencers, branching out to home, wellness, fitness, travel, and food.

“Fashion” wasn’t enough.

Most people, as it turned out, weren’t tuning into what their favourite bloggers were wearing as much as they were tuning in to see for the very first time in history, a swath of real people living fantasy lives, sticking it to a fashion media system that left almost everyone out in the dust. Sure, there were a small population of people who hung onto couture and runway and who could tell a Yamamoto from a Yves, but for the rest of us, pre-mass influence-za was a portal into people’s lives through their personal style.

The dream of great style is sometimes of an abstract and intangible quality: the confidence of Elle Woods on her first day at Harvard, the desperate need to stop spending money on clothes that are rarely worn and hardly loved, or the desire to be for once someone who looks put together and does so effortlessly.

Sometimes, it’s not even the clothes at all but how they add or detract from the lives of their wearers, whether or not we intend for them to.

I grew up watching makeover shows.

It was a “simpler” time, before social media and mass body dysmorphia and the sometimes debilitating magic of endless choice met the dark fuel of the everyman and woman as a possible content machine.

We would always be taken through an emotional journey:

Maybe it’s someone who’s gone through some major change, or someone who’s been living life for others. Sometimes the theme is self-care, other times it’s self esteem or self-assertion. Sometimes it’s a new journey, sometimes it’s revisiting a past self since tucked away.

There’s always a wow moment, sometimes met with astounding silence or tears of joy. (I sometimes wonder if there’s ever a lacklustre makeover; but maybe those don’t make it to tv.)

As it turns out, these people needed someone else (helloooo, Stacy London!) to come in and show them possibility, a new perspective and lens from which to view themselves in.

You see, not everyone appreciates fashion but almost everyone can appreciate and see the power of transformation.

A makeover is a makeover, a glow-up is a glow-up, and looking and feeling great about how you look comes with all sorts of ripple effects. Side effects can include confidence, new relationships, new jobs, more money, more power. (Power, in my books, is just like money: it only emphasizes the qualities that already exist.)

The transformation that understanding and living your personal style can make on a life can be profound and is much more powerful than “new clothes”.

In the 19th century, a woman named Maria Mitchell was the first American—man or woman—to discover a comet; she was also the first woman ever to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Maria was a scientific celebrity, and she became known for her black silk dress uniform; her father had boycotted slave-harvested cotton years before and Maria, along with the rest of her family, had always worn simple silk dresses in protest of slavery when it wasn’t the common or popular thing to do. This was decades before Chanel popularized the little black dress in fashion. Through her style, Maria Mitchell did not become less than who she was. She exercised legacy, values, utility and therefore, self, through dress.

Defining your personal style takes some self-reflection, research and self-assertion as you start to reject the messages of who they tell you you should be and what you should look like. They used to be the people you knew and mass media. As if that wasn’t hard enough to navigate. Now, it includes a newer, more dangerous kind of media⁴: one that follows us everywhere and is tailored exactly to us.

It sometimes feels as hard to defining your career, building a financial plan or determining even what you want out of a relationship. Sometimes, you get messages or ideas that knowing these things should be intuitive, that knowing should be as easy as “finding your passion”.

Don’t rush the process: think of it as both a creative act and an act of self care because this is one of the most tangible and literal extensions of your self. And who cares if it’s a little superficial? You don’t have to choose between being superficial or serious. Be both. Be it all. Be whoever you want to be, and look good doing it.

In the wise words of American writer Gore Vidal: “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”