Personal Style and Social Media

A few weeks ago, I started following a popular trend-focused personal stylist’s IG account. I found her through social media “mutuals” — i.e. people I follow reposted her content — and was intrigued, mostly by her general approach. You know, the “hot, not hot” and “this, not that” style of fashion blogging that seems to be popular on Tik Tok (don’t know her!) and slowly seeping into older corners of the internet (hello, it’s me!). I say “intrigued” because this is not something I’m interested in doing, but I enjoy rubbernecking when others do it. Anyway, I think I might need to unfollow.

It’s not for the reasons you probably think. It’s not because of my lukewarm interest in this account’s raison d’etre (trends). Nor because I’ve seen myself reflected in the “not hot” carousels. No, it’s because I am finding myself being pulled, ever so slowly but surely, towards an aesthetic that I do not want to pursue. If I keep watching these stories, I’m going to wake up one day in February looking like Hailey Bieber, and that is something I do not want to countenance.

The reason I am writing this post is not to sh*t on Hailey Bieber or popular IG stylists; what I actually want to talk about, in maybe a roundabout way, is how I navigate style inspo in the realm of social media, and how I curate my social media feed to serve me in the ways I need, and not the ones I don’t.

I don’t know how common this is, but I am a ruthless social media curator. Even after 10 years on IG, I still don’t follow a ton of accounts — around 300 at last count. Some of those are friends and family, some are what I would broadly categorize as entertainment accounts (everything from pop culture memes to my favourite museum), some are “trusted sources” (social activists, news media, etc.), and some are of course, fashion related. This is a mix of mostly “small” personal style bloggers like myself, a few “bigger” influencers, some brands, and some industry accounts like Diet Prada. Except for folks I know, I feel no obligation to keep following accounts if they start to annoy me, or if their content is no longer of interest. It’s a 3 strikes rules: three annoying posts and I unfollow.

When it comes to fashion though, it can get a little bit more complicated. Here, I mainly have 2 red flags. One, I do not follow accounts that give me FOMO. As a person who loves beautiful things but tries to be mindful about consumption, FOMO is my Achilles heel. It is better for me not to know about all the beautiful things out there — I will find plenty of them on my own and struggle to contain my impulses, without help from anyone else. Now, you might think this is why I don’t follow a lot of big influencers. Wrong. Most rich people buy stuff that doesn’t interest me. I wouldn’t follow, say, a Housewife of Insert-Metropolis-Of-Your-Choice-Here because I am not interested in the content, not because of FOMO. But FOMO is why I can’t follow, say, Carla Rockmore. She is a maximalist whose taste and interests align almost entirely with mine, but with a budget (and closet) I couldn’t dream of replicating. I enjoy watching her content in small doses — people keep sending me her posts, bless them, because they think I would enjoy it and that is true but the problem is I enjoy it TOO MUCH — yet I know that if I watched it every day, it would make me want to Buy. All. The. Things.

The other red flag is when I start to feel myself wanting to copy what someone else is wearing. Time to immediately unfollow! Ok, you might be thinking: Adina, what ARE you talking about? Isn’t that what “style inspo” is all about? NO. Not to me, anyway. My favourite fashion accounts are those whose perspective on style I admire but don’t feel a desire to imitate. They make me think about how outfits are put together, about colours and proportions, about style as a language. They give me ideas for creating my own looks … but the key is that they are informing my own expression, not dictating it.

I generally don’t follow people who have the same exact aesthetic that I am pursuing at any given moment; I prefer to follow people with a broad range of aesthetics (some of which may align with some facets of my own, some which are wholly outside my box) and get bits of inspiration from all of them. For me, personal style is the alchemy that happens when you digest a lot of inspiration from many disparate sources (fashion history, magazines, social media, people on the street, books, art, etc.) and create your own story out of it. It’s why, as I have gotten older, I have moved away from the concept of “fashion icons” — the idea that there is any individual worth imitating in something as personal as style is anathema to me.

But it can get tricky. If someone has a very strong and unique point of view and is very eloquent in expressing it — in other words, has great personal style — I can become susceptible to the allure of imitation. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take that much; sometimes, all it takes is an easily-digestible aesthetic consistently messaged and positioned as hyper desirable — which brings me back to the IG account I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Show me enough photos of Hailey Bieber captioned as the embodiment of cool, and after a few weeks I might start to believe that an oversized blazer will change my life. EVEN THOUGH I HAVE WIDE SHOULDERS AND THIS WILL MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A LINEBACKER! Ahem.

If the person who’s making me want to turn copycat is someone whose content I otherwise enjoy (or whose relationship I value), then I would not immediately unfollow; rather, I might take a step back from their content for a little while, until the feeling passes. Trinny Woodall often falls into this category for me. I enjoy her “Closet Confessions” and the way she analyzes and talks about style, and find it both interesting and helpful. Our styles do not align very closely, although there is some overlap (we both love colour, for example). But every so often, I start to feel like one or both of my red flags are waving with Trinny. She does frequent Zara “shop-ups” and if I watch too many of them, I can start to get retail FOMO — the worst kind of FOMO there is. (But not always; sometimes, it’s nice to be shown what’s out there in stores, and get ideas for what to pull from the back of my closet and wear again, in new ways). It’s the same with the outfits she wears. Most of the time, I appreciate her POV and find it inspiring. But sometimes, I notice that I am suddenly putting together “Trinny” outfits, and I know I’ve crossed the line and it’s time to put her account on “ignore” for a bit until my head clears.

So much of it comes down to a gut feeling. I choose not to engage with content that makes me feel frantic, or makes me feel as though fulfillment is something positioned outside of my own self. I know that feeling even before I’ve had time to process what is happening. And I am convinced that learning to recognize it and be guided by it has been a hugely positive influence on my personal style (and mental health, too). So I guess what I am telling you is to not let social media dictate your personal style, but to dictate what social media is allowed into the conversation around your personal style.

But, you know, I am not dictating that or anything 😉