For me, the main thing I do is log off- instagram just makes me feel bad if I spend any time at all looking at influencers, no matter how like or unlike me (I retrained my algorithm to be mostly embroidery and art which I find more positive sources of inspiration), and it helps enormously that tikt*k is banned outright where I am, so there aren't a million minute-long videos of some person in my face telling me to dress all in beige or be a "[fill-in-the-blank] Girl" or XYZcore etc. I think it helps a lot to not view fashion solely in the context of acquisition or desired acquisition - there's no way to buy Anne of Green Gables' brown dress with the puffed sleeves because it's imaginary, you know?
This doesn't mean get off the internet entirely - I still watch Netflix or Korean dramas, and bought the Hellfire Club tshirt like several thousand other people who watched Stranger Things in 2022. But even there, I'm not immune to influence - I watched about five hours of youtube videos of six month old panda cubs over New Year's Eve. It wasn't until I was looking over pictures of my back-to-work outfits for that week that I realised all four outfits were black and white.
I love all your suggestions on how to get to the root of what you really like! I go back to the childhood one a lot, and the stream of consciousness is helpful for me, too.
“Follow people whose taste you don’t like. Just because it pushes you in new directions and exposes you to things you don’t usually see.” 💯 not just in fashion, but life in general. How people live, what people value, what they believe, always, always.
I love the return to childhood advice! I was just talking with my BFF about this after doing the “three words” exercise - what I realized is my true style has been the same my whole life! I just lost it during highschool/college chasing trends. Now, solidly in my 30s, I like the same things I did as a kid - comfortable, tomboyish, classic pieces. Nice to realize it’s been there all along.
I didn't like the podcast... but that's neither here nor there... or maybe that's exactly the point: to engage things that cause friction! Anyway, reading your excellent post, I'm reminded that aesthetics (taste) is a branch of philosophy, quite serious business. I strolled aimlessly through a museum this weekend, not a museum of paintings (my usual preference) but of objects from ancient cultures of West Asia and North Africa. As far back as 3000 BCE, objects were made for aesthetic, not just functional, purposes: decorative trim on bowls, jewelry, tiles. The impulse to engage the world through design, texture, and color is deeply, timelessly, human. And, what I love most about the Substack writers I follow, including you, Rachel (and Tiia, and Lin, and Irene) is the community of followers and the richness of the comments -- that's the real magic and curation, even though you don't choose your followers, maybe you collect them? I come for these exchanges as much as the outfit posts. I don't think we have the same taste, and that give me the space to learn.
Jan 15·edited Jan 15Liked by Hey Mrs. Solomon on Style
I've yet to listen to the podcast (on my list!) but I enjoyed your thoughts and suggestions.
re: Going inside closets – Many of the OG StyleLikeU videos are on their YouTube channel. They're super nostalgic for me and I like to revisit them every once in a while. I learned so much about fashion and personal style watching those videos. Definitely a pre-algorithm gem.
re: Follow people whose taste you don’t like – I don't follow anyone whose taste I actively dislike, but there are plenty of people I follow with taste I enjoy, even if it's something I'm not personally attracted to. I think it's an antidote to the, "I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops, so I bought army pants and flip flops" trap on Instagram.
re: Returning to childhood – My husband and I are doing a general no-buy in January to reset from all the holiday shopping. It's been great to redirect my energy away from constantly thinking about shopping to other areas of interest. Thanks to not spending all my money on clothes, I was able to buy tickets for us to see Ailey II when they come to town in March (we decided this was an appropriate exception). I grew up doing ballet and Alvin Ailey is my favorite dance company. This past month has felt like tapping into all the component parts of my own "taste" – with the added bonus of actually having places to wear all those clothes I spent $$$ on in the first place (high school/college me would've always prioritized going to the theatre/concerts over clothes). I'm also planning to use the money I wanted to spend on a new cocktail dress for tickets to a gala that benefits our local library since I already have a dress I can wear.
I'm an Ezra Klein fan and I listened to that episode and it has been fascinating how much people related to it. I think Nikki Ogunnaike said it best in the Man Repeller article you linked to: “When has personal style ever really been personal? Apps are here and we’re spending more time on them, but before that it was music videos, TV shows, and movies that served as inspiration for me. Joan on Girlfriends wore cargo pants one episode and I’ve been obsessed ever since. That is to say, I’ve certainly been inspired to buy things because I’ve seen it on another person —most recently it’s everything Princess Diana ever wore on vacation because I deep-dived Fly Lady Di— but the way I style it is all Nikki. The styling part of ‘personal style’ can still exist, but dwelling on just how personal it is could lead you into an existential crisis.”
As you've pointed out, it all comes down to how we respond or react to the times, and not judging others too much. Personally I feel like social media is great if you know how to find what speaks to you, I don't feel like we're all just passively consuming everything that's being fed to us, and when listening to Kyle Chayka and Ezra Klein discuss this, I felt they were just a smidge judgmental at times--being able to go to museums and the cinema cost money, not to mention we don't all live in a cities with amazing free museums and cultural offerings just around the corner. I think the discussion was best when they talked about how platforms are starting to fail us because they're too focused on maximising profit, and I liked it at the end when Chayka talked about challenging the notion that we should be consuming "the best stuff" all the time, ie it's not a competition.
I love all your suggestions and don't have anything terribly original to add, except that I think we can embrace what the algorithm can do for us while pushing back on what harms us. I think this explains why so many people have come onto Substack and are fighting to keep it safe of the issues plaguing other platforms, and I love that! I'm an optimist and I think we will keep finding ways to stay true to what is meaningful to us.
It seems I am on the same wavelength as you Rachel. When I listened to the podcast yesterday, it struck a deep cord in me. I have somewhat felt like I have kind of lost my individual style. I know that one’s style changes and that that is positive. I was getting ‘tibified’ and loosing my need for elegance in my looks. My goal this year is to not judge, and get back to my true DNA style, and not the algorithms. Great article and as always THOUGHT PROVOKING!!!!
Go back to childhood, yes! 10 years ago I realised my clothes were boring. It had changed slowly. But once I realised I asked myself, where is the girl that wore crazy clothes, second hand from the market, colorful. Zouave pants. Self-made. The girl that experimented. I am 40 years older, of course I will not wear the same. But I started to experiment again, with shapes, color. Returning to my true self.
As your sub-head suggests, the conversation with Ezra and Kyle blew my mind as well! I think all of your advice went to the second half of the episode which is about getting the most out of our algorithms; I especially loved the Return to Childhood piece.
One thing that was said, that has been bouncing around the most for me, is about how developing taste is about attunement. I struggled with an ED for years and I had to learn how to attune to hunger in my body. Similarly, personal style is about attuning to the things that make us FEEL something.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Klein/Chayka podcast, and this thoughtful piece of yours, Rachel! I love the idea of keeping a running "like" list (and consciously keeping it varied). I do this in a visual/tactile way on a small scale by making "vignettes" of texture, color, and book/movie references around my space. For example, a Vivienne Westwood book next to a thrifted fluted vase under a vintage map of Paris. Or an old Kundera paperback with a terrific naif black and white cover, sitting on a vivid dichroic metallic clutch, with a Calvin Klein 80s grommetted army green belt that I found for $8 on Etsy, under a vintage poster for Godard's Breathless. I keep changing these. It's fun and reminds me of what I like, some of which is lifelong and some of which evolves. I also want to say thank you!! For advocating for suspending judgement and for seeking out others with different views. My style (and my way of thinking about many things) has evolved joyfully since I started seeking inspiration more broadly. And since I suspended judgement about others...but also about myself!
I haven't listened to the podcast yet but I don't think I've ever seen so many people recommend one single podcast episode!
I love all of your suggestions, especially the one about following people whose taste doesn't align with your own. Exposing yourself to radically different aesthetics / tastes really helps to expand your creative thinking, to cultivate kindness and to move away from the judgment you talked about.
I don't really remember my childhood clothes, but I like to think about the clothes I wore when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and how the clothes made me feel in that weird tumultuous time when you're trying to figure out who you are for the first time, how to perform in a society, who you are outside of your family dynamics, all that stuff. Another thing I love to do is look at style/fashion media from ten years ago. What do I still love and what makes me cringe in hindsight?
oo i love collaging! when i was younger i used to go through magazines (both current ones and ones that my mom had kept from previous decades) and assemble actual collages of things that i loved. pinterest is great but there's something about the tactile act of assembling that really brings things together for me and helps me identify what i'm really drawn to and why.
It's funny, I was on the treadmill listening to this podcast when your post notification came through! It's all so interesting to think about. What is taste, what is a "good eye" and how does it all impact our day to day style? Like Lily below, I find myself avoiding IG and I will also take a break from the various forms of style content for a bit when I find myself thinking "I need this" but can't really figure out why. Do I really like it? Is this me, now? Or is this me wanting to stay in the conversation, the zeitgeist, the relevant? And the relevancy component can be amplified for women of a certain age, which is maybe an entirely different post! Fortunately, for many of us we know ourselves well at this point and are driven much less by the external factors that once meant much more (at least to me). Now, it's more about feeling like myself and good in my skin versus worrying about whether something is "cool".
When I think about returning to childhood as you pose, what stands out, besides certain outfits/pieces I loved, is the resourcefulness, and the fun I had just playing with ideas and creating using whatever I could get my hands on. No worries about what anyone would think (at least b/4 the teenish years), no tastemakers/style influencers involved, just pure, unadulterated fun with fashion and feeling good and proud of what I put together or made. A very happy, independent-thinking place to be!
Feb 8·edited Feb 8Liked by Hey Mrs. Solomon on Style
Was working at a bookstore when the Selby book came out and still remember how inspiring that book was as a broke college student ! The opposite of what an AD tour video usually does to me...
For me, the main thing I do is log off- instagram just makes me feel bad if I spend any time at all looking at influencers, no matter how like or unlike me (I retrained my algorithm to be mostly embroidery and art which I find more positive sources of inspiration), and it helps enormously that tikt*k is banned outright where I am, so there aren't a million minute-long videos of some person in my face telling me to dress all in beige or be a "[fill-in-the-blank] Girl" or XYZcore etc. I think it helps a lot to not view fashion solely in the context of acquisition or desired acquisition - there's no way to buy Anne of Green Gables' brown dress with the puffed sleeves because it's imaginary, you know?
This doesn't mean get off the internet entirely - I still watch Netflix or Korean dramas, and bought the Hellfire Club tshirt like several thousand other people who watched Stranger Things in 2022. But even there, I'm not immune to influence - I watched about five hours of youtube videos of six month old panda cubs over New Year's Eve. It wasn't until I was looking over pictures of my back-to-work outfits for that week that I realised all four outfits were black and white.
I love all your suggestions on how to get to the root of what you really like! I go back to the childhood one a lot, and the stream of consciousness is helpful for me, too.
“Follow people whose taste you don’t like. Just because it pushes you in new directions and exposes you to things you don’t usually see.” 💯 not just in fashion, but life in general. How people live, what people value, what they believe, always, always.
I love the return to childhood advice! I was just talking with my BFF about this after doing the “three words” exercise - what I realized is my true style has been the same my whole life! I just lost it during highschool/college chasing trends. Now, solidly in my 30s, I like the same things I did as a kid - comfortable, tomboyish, classic pieces. Nice to realize it’s been there all along.
I didn't like the podcast... but that's neither here nor there... or maybe that's exactly the point: to engage things that cause friction! Anyway, reading your excellent post, I'm reminded that aesthetics (taste) is a branch of philosophy, quite serious business. I strolled aimlessly through a museum this weekend, not a museum of paintings (my usual preference) but of objects from ancient cultures of West Asia and North Africa. As far back as 3000 BCE, objects were made for aesthetic, not just functional, purposes: decorative trim on bowls, jewelry, tiles. The impulse to engage the world through design, texture, and color is deeply, timelessly, human. And, what I love most about the Substack writers I follow, including you, Rachel (and Tiia, and Lin, and Irene) is the community of followers and the richness of the comments -- that's the real magic and curation, even though you don't choose your followers, maybe you collect them? I come for these exchanges as much as the outfit posts. I don't think we have the same taste, and that give me the space to learn.
I've yet to listen to the podcast (on my list!) but I enjoyed your thoughts and suggestions.
re: Going inside closets – Many of the OG StyleLikeU videos are on their YouTube channel. They're super nostalgic for me and I like to revisit them every once in a while. I learned so much about fashion and personal style watching those videos. Definitely a pre-algorithm gem.
re: Follow people whose taste you don’t like – I don't follow anyone whose taste I actively dislike, but there are plenty of people I follow with taste I enjoy, even if it's something I'm not personally attracted to. I think it's an antidote to the, "I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops, so I bought army pants and flip flops" trap on Instagram.
re: Returning to childhood – My husband and I are doing a general no-buy in January to reset from all the holiday shopping. It's been great to redirect my energy away from constantly thinking about shopping to other areas of interest. Thanks to not spending all my money on clothes, I was able to buy tickets for us to see Ailey II when they come to town in March (we decided this was an appropriate exception). I grew up doing ballet and Alvin Ailey is my favorite dance company. This past month has felt like tapping into all the component parts of my own "taste" – with the added bonus of actually having places to wear all those clothes I spent $$$ on in the first place (high school/college me would've always prioritized going to the theatre/concerts over clothes). I'm also planning to use the money I wanted to spend on a new cocktail dress for tickets to a gala that benefits our local library since I already have a dress I can wear.
I'm an Ezra Klein fan and I listened to that episode and it has been fascinating how much people related to it. I think Nikki Ogunnaike said it best in the Man Repeller article you linked to: “When has personal style ever really been personal? Apps are here and we’re spending more time on them, but before that it was music videos, TV shows, and movies that served as inspiration for me. Joan on Girlfriends wore cargo pants one episode and I’ve been obsessed ever since. That is to say, I’ve certainly been inspired to buy things because I’ve seen it on another person —most recently it’s everything Princess Diana ever wore on vacation because I deep-dived Fly Lady Di— but the way I style it is all Nikki. The styling part of ‘personal style’ can still exist, but dwelling on just how personal it is could lead you into an existential crisis.”
As you've pointed out, it all comes down to how we respond or react to the times, and not judging others too much. Personally I feel like social media is great if you know how to find what speaks to you, I don't feel like we're all just passively consuming everything that's being fed to us, and when listening to Kyle Chayka and Ezra Klein discuss this, I felt they were just a smidge judgmental at times--being able to go to museums and the cinema cost money, not to mention we don't all live in a cities with amazing free museums and cultural offerings just around the corner. I think the discussion was best when they talked about how platforms are starting to fail us because they're too focused on maximising profit, and I liked it at the end when Chayka talked about challenging the notion that we should be consuming "the best stuff" all the time, ie it's not a competition.
I love all your suggestions and don't have anything terribly original to add, except that I think we can embrace what the algorithm can do for us while pushing back on what harms us. I think this explains why so many people have come onto Substack and are fighting to keep it safe of the issues plaguing other platforms, and I love that! I'm an optimist and I think we will keep finding ways to stay true to what is meaningful to us.
It seems I am on the same wavelength as you Rachel. When I listened to the podcast yesterday, it struck a deep cord in me. I have somewhat felt like I have kind of lost my individual style. I know that one’s style changes and that that is positive. I was getting ‘tibified’ and loosing my need for elegance in my looks. My goal this year is to not judge, and get back to my true DNA style, and not the algorithms. Great article and as always THOUGHT PROVOKING!!!!
Go back to childhood, yes! 10 years ago I realised my clothes were boring. It had changed slowly. But once I realised I asked myself, where is the girl that wore crazy clothes, second hand from the market, colorful. Zouave pants. Self-made. The girl that experimented. I am 40 years older, of course I will not wear the same. But I started to experiment again, with shapes, color. Returning to my true self.
Great post! As always. Thanks.
As your sub-head suggests, the conversation with Ezra and Kyle blew my mind as well! I think all of your advice went to the second half of the episode which is about getting the most out of our algorithms; I especially loved the Return to Childhood piece.
One thing that was said, that has been bouncing around the most for me, is about how developing taste is about attunement. I struggled with an ED for years and I had to learn how to attune to hunger in my body. Similarly, personal style is about attuning to the things that make us FEEL something.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Klein/Chayka podcast, and this thoughtful piece of yours, Rachel! I love the idea of keeping a running "like" list (and consciously keeping it varied). I do this in a visual/tactile way on a small scale by making "vignettes" of texture, color, and book/movie references around my space. For example, a Vivienne Westwood book next to a thrifted fluted vase under a vintage map of Paris. Or an old Kundera paperback with a terrific naif black and white cover, sitting on a vivid dichroic metallic clutch, with a Calvin Klein 80s grommetted army green belt that I found for $8 on Etsy, under a vintage poster for Godard's Breathless. I keep changing these. It's fun and reminds me of what I like, some of which is lifelong and some of which evolves. I also want to say thank you!! For advocating for suspending judgement and for seeking out others with different views. My style (and my way of thinking about many things) has evolved joyfully since I started seeking inspiration more broadly. And since I suspended judgement about others...but also about myself!
I haven't listened to the podcast yet but I don't think I've ever seen so many people recommend one single podcast episode!
I love all of your suggestions, especially the one about following people whose taste doesn't align with your own. Exposing yourself to radically different aesthetics / tastes really helps to expand your creative thinking, to cultivate kindness and to move away from the judgment you talked about.
I don't really remember my childhood clothes, but I like to think about the clothes I wore when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and how the clothes made me feel in that weird tumultuous time when you're trying to figure out who you are for the first time, how to perform in a society, who you are outside of your family dynamics, all that stuff. Another thing I love to do is look at style/fashion media from ten years ago. What do I still love and what makes me cringe in hindsight?
oo i love collaging! when i was younger i used to go through magazines (both current ones and ones that my mom had kept from previous decades) and assemble actual collages of things that i loved. pinterest is great but there's something about the tactile act of assembling that really brings things together for me and helps me identify what i'm really drawn to and why.
It's funny, I was on the treadmill listening to this podcast when your post notification came through! It's all so interesting to think about. What is taste, what is a "good eye" and how does it all impact our day to day style? Like Lily below, I find myself avoiding IG and I will also take a break from the various forms of style content for a bit when I find myself thinking "I need this" but can't really figure out why. Do I really like it? Is this me, now? Or is this me wanting to stay in the conversation, the zeitgeist, the relevant? And the relevancy component can be amplified for women of a certain age, which is maybe an entirely different post! Fortunately, for many of us we know ourselves well at this point and are driven much less by the external factors that once meant much more (at least to me). Now, it's more about feeling like myself and good in my skin versus worrying about whether something is "cool".
When I think about returning to childhood as you pose, what stands out, besides certain outfits/pieces I loved, is the resourcefulness, and the fun I had just playing with ideas and creating using whatever I could get my hands on. No worries about what anyone would think (at least b/4 the teenish years), no tastemakers/style influencers involved, just pure, unadulterated fun with fashion and feeling good and proud of what I put together or made. A very happy, independent-thinking place to be!
As someone with those High Sport pants currently in their basket, I thank you so much for this.
*removes from basket*
2024 really feels like the year of reclaiming my own style.
FIREBALL. Yes! Such a rock solid term that I will now use forever and ever amen. Loved this post.
Was working at a bookstore when the Selby book came out and still remember how inspiring that book was as a broke college student ! The opposite of what an AD tour video usually does to me...