A comment from my best friend on an old OOTD photo that came up in my Instagram archive recently got me thinking about the ways my approach to fashion has changed since I started this blog back in 2010. Not the way my personal style has changed – though, whew, what a journey that has been, eh! – but, rather, the way I think about fashion itself. Let me explain.

When I started this blog, fashion was something very much Apart. It wasn’t even aspirational — it felt unattainable and, frankly, mostly irrelevant to my daily life. Oh, I was interested in clothes and dressing nicely. But after more than a decade of reading fashion magazines (from my teens through my 20s), I felt alienated by capital F fashion. I couldn’t afford it and, besides, why does a woman from a “backwater” city need to concern herself with what’s happening on the runways in Paris or New York? Reading about fashion was like reading about, I dunno, the Kardashians.

As I began to pay more attention to clothes, and began to be more invested (literally) in my appearance just as my professional career started to take off, things shifted a bit. I dipped a toe in the designer world – also literally. Designer shoes and bags began to be of interest to me. I never questioned this much at the time. It made thrifty sense; bags and shoes made out of leather can last forever (assuming proper care), they’re not vulnerable to size fluctuations or trend fluctuations, and so on. Looking back, I think this was a reflection of my general approach to fashion: it was still, to a large extent, a utilitarian thing, a tool. I used clothing to look nice and professional. I wanted clothes that flattered my body shape (relatively easy most of the time, since I wore straight sizes) and made me look polished. Conventional advice for the latter goal is: invest in good accessories. [Think about it: even men get told to spend more money their shoes, watches, etc.]

Sidebar here, but I think there was also a class element involved in this. I haven’t thought about it much, and maybe I’m way off-base. For what it’s worth, I think that “investing” in shoes and bags in particular was appealing to me, in part, because they were the most conspicuous status symbols available to me. I grew up poor, and didn’t start having much disposable income until my late twenties. Even then, I wasn’t making “big law” money, so I had to be strategic about my spending. Having a “good” bag seemed like the easiest way to elevate my mall brand outfits and achieve that “polished” professional look. There is a lot to unpack in that, including the very concept of what “polished” means and looks like, but that is another topic.

In the last few years, my approach to fashion has undergone something of a paradigm shift. I started to think about style critically; it became a form of creative self-expression. The next part did not follow immediately; in fact, I only became conscious of it in the last couple of years. What eventually happened was that I started to develop an appreciation for the “raw materials”, so to speak, of that creative expression. The clothes themselves.

The design. The workmanship. The overall vision of the designer, their aesthetic language.

Clothes became less of a utilitarian tool, and more of an art object. Some of my current favourites are, honestly, almost entirely the latter.

I stopped buying designer bags a few years ago (well, bags altogether for the most part), without really even noticing. They receded into the background of my outfits; became purely utilitarian. I have enough to last me a lifetime, and their design qualities don’t spark nearly the same level of joy and desire as clothes so … buying additional ones doesn’t seem like the best use of my discretionary budget. I’d rather spend it on a really beautiful Dries Van Noten dress.

I have also divorced myself from the concept of looking “polished” — which, I recognize, is a form of privilege in itself — and status symbols are less important to me. I am much more interested in making my own style statements, rather than adopting ones dictated by others.

Anyway, all of this is not to say that my current way of “doing fashion” is better or worse than my old way. It’s just different, reflecting my changing perspectives. Fundamentally, my philosophy hasn’t changed, really: invest in what maximizes your joy. As a sidenote, my fashion spending over the last 5-6 years (since I’ve been tracking it) has fluctuated very little; I know it might seem like I am a Buy All The Things kind of person, but I’m only that way about things that I’m obsessed with (whatever that might be at any given time) and otherwise quite frugal about everything else. I still love a balanced budget above all else 😉

I am interested in hearing how others approach this topic, so please let me know in the comments: how do you do fashion?