Personally, I became preoccupied with clothes at a young age. It started as far back as grade school, when I had strong fashion preferences whose influences elude me now.
Well, not all of them: My desire for Jams shorts and neon-colored Gotcha shirts is easily traced to the popularity of skate-and-surf culture in the late eighties. But where I got the idea that a white turtleneck with a gold herringbone chain and a cardigan was a sweet look, I’ll never know.
Still, school-picture-day records from the time (complete with a rattail hairstyle, if you catch the right year) attest that I certainly did think so.
What was I copying with that look? In any case, my fashion sense has gone through lots of changes, lots of ups and downs, since then—many for the better, some, however improbably, for the worse.
There was the nineties high-school era of freely mingling punk and preppy clothes, which reflected my musical tastes of mall-punk and alt-rock and gangster rap. And there was a mercifully brief, very confusing post-high-school moment when I dabbled in raver: steel-bead necklaces, absurdly oversize JNCO jeans, that whole thing.
There was the diehard indie-rocker phase of nothing but band T-shirts and thrift-store finds, grommeted leather belts and chain wallets. There were also short, intermittent dalliances with a sort of Gappy young-professional look, at moments when I thought I might try a normal life, though I often felt like I was wearing a costume, and it would never stick.
And then there’s whatever the hell my style is now (it’s hard to see except in retrospect). It mainly consists of the flossiest things I can find at Plato’s Closet and vintage finds or modern reproductions of the skate-and-surf gear of my youth.
Though my style has come full circle in that way, it retains traces of these phases and all the others I’ve been through, like the rings of a tree. It’s just that now, well into adulthood, I can blend them into something richly my own. I can tell the whole story of my life through clothes. As you read and reflect on this issue, I hope you’ll see that you can, too.
Social Media Helps Local Designers Blend Fashion and Art, Financial Necessity and Trendy Exclusivity
I Went to Ethiopia with The Flourish Market to Learn How to Give. But I Got So Much in Return.
I Used to Hate How I Looked in Clothes. Then I Learned to Make Them Speak My Truth.
Fantastic Hypebeasts and Where to Find Them
Grown in New York, Styled in Raleigh, Nafisah Carter’s Life in Hair Has Deep Roots in Durham
Chefs Tap Local Potters to Craft Serveware Blending Function and Style, Surprise and Delight
This page was in dire need of the quote “Style is a story we tell about ourselves.” And so I leave it here in a comment. I can’t remember if this was also part of the print issue, or just the teaser quote from the index, but it’s such a fantastic quote I want it on this page.
Don’t remind me of the neon and pastels we used to wear, although I’m glad the glasses of that era are making a comeback