Fashion designer and style icon, Iris Apfel, once said you could teach fashion but you could never teach style. This wise New Jerseyan says that if you have to be taught, you’ll never learn either one. Fashion might be the art form that walks the runway, but style is something you make up on your own, composed of your own tastes. Style is something deeper than the clothes you wear and the material things you own. It can be mimicked either from fashion’s runways or the TikTok Made Me Buy It hashtag, but both are equally useless if merely copied. Good taste is simply not for sale, despite what you may have heard. In today’s age of fast fashions and Goodwill hunting-and-gathering, what can’t be taught can at least be bought, if only to be resold on Depop.
My generation is becoming defined by experimentation– new trends hit the scene every few weeks, and no one style ever takes up too much airtime. We’re the generation that grew up with the world on fire, so who cares if we mix patterns and wear cheap jewelry. Our tireless quest for individuality has left us with serious trend fatigue. Where the previous generation took each decade to cultivate a unique style, it seems our tastes are changing every few months, with some curiously-dressed teenagers on TikTok declaring this trend in and that one out like clockwork. Resin jewelry and cow-print pants may seem dated, but their time in the sun was within the last 3 years.
Following trends does little more than make you look trendy, and if you’re only ever following, then the taste you have will vanish as quickly as it entered your For You Page. As tasteless trends come and go, fad-fiends tend to look back at young photos of themselves in shame, wondering why they looked like that all those years ago. When I was a kid, the Snooki-style Bump-It was all the rage before it was laughed out of the mainstream zeitgeist, and relegated to the nostalgia junkyard. I guess the higher the hair, the harder the fall.
We’re cultural amnesiacs when it comes to style. We laugh at what we used to wear, move to the other extreme, and dress in direct reaction to our former selves. Every few years the pendulum swings the other way and certain fits are no longer en vogue. What was once laughable is chic again at last.
When choosing your own style, you may just think that anything will do and value practicality over style. Practical tastes may be reliable, but they’re rarely interesting. Wearing socks and slides in public may not seem out of the ordinary, but I promise you there’s at least one column writer looking on in judgment. Your style doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should say something about you. I’m not sure what Crocs say about you once your age is in the double digits, but I’d prefer you didn’t tell me.
Style beats predictability every time, but cutting-edge style is hardly timeless. Uniqueness is a novelty with a shelf life. Too much quirky individuality damns our self-expressions to a singular time and place. A movie like Dirty Dancing is so iconically 80’s you forget it’s supposed to take place in the 60’s.The movie might be dreamy, but the cars and the clothes write a 60’s-era check that its mullets and synthesizers can’t cash. This is the doomed fate of anything that dares not be sanitized by a “classic” sensibility. Drench your art or yourself in the current era and you might stand out, but someday pretty soon you’ll be carte blanche for ridicule.
Pushing the envelope too far makes your style look dated; not pushing it all makes your style boring. Thus the popularity of athleisure, the backbone of modern style, is truly enigmatic to me. They’ve become an inescapable, tragic style staple that’s more like an infectious disease than a popular trend. Some trends inspire generations, others just make better pandemics.
Personally, I’ve never wanted to give up pants that zipper in order to be comfortable in public. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t always think being uncomfortable is a bad thing. I’ll admit there’s a reason people don’t say “beauty is pleasure.” Critic, hater, and literary antihero, Fran Lebowitz, says being uncomfortable is how we know we’re awake. Being beautiful may not be comfortable, but then again neither is being awake.
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As a bonus, I’ve compiled in no specific order my predictions for 2023 style trends that will be ridiculed the most in the coming decades:
Uggs: Their name says it all. They weren’t stylish 15 years ago, and they’ve only gotten worse with age.
Cropped everything: this will go the way cuffed-everything did in recent years
Baggy pants: This is inevitable, public support switches from skinny to baggy once a decade.
Middle-part hair: I would bet money this haircut will be laughable in 5-7 years.
Mullets: Throughout history, the mullet has definitely looked worse, though the modern version does walk a fine line between mullet and mohawk.
Mustaches: Today’s sex symbol is tomorrow’s bright red flag. A dubious choice now, but even more so in the next few years.
Tattoos: I’m pro-tattoo, but I firmly believe that patchwork sleeves are the barbed wire tattoos of our generation. Do with this what you will.
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The Smoking Section is where I observe the world at large, and put a magnifying glass on a subject we all hold dear to our hearts. As a member of Gen Z, I think it’s important that we take a step back and remember that life is not that serious, and no topic is too good to ridicule. In the Smoking Section, we take a step outside of the party for a breath of less-fresh air. Here if you don’t have anything nice to say, pull up a chair next to me.
@schmidtconrad
