the arsenic of personal style

we continue the crusade to extrapolate uniqueness from tiktok!

Throughout this year, I have been followed by a ghost. It is there when I wake up in the morning and when I close my eyes to sleep at night. It’s there when I brush my teeth or wash the dishes. It doesn’t look like much, just a sliver of long hair and a silhouette from the chest up, but I can hear it clearly in my head. The ghost is the voice of a heterosexual girl on TikTok screaming at me:

“Here’s what you need to find your personal style—”

Personal style is to social media what arsenic was to the Victorian era beauty industry: an ingredient claiming to make you more beautiful, purchased and swallowed by the mass market, only later to realize that it was dangerously toxic to the blood and brain. There are so many rules to finding your style, according to the self-proclaimed TikTok fashion girlies: seasonal color palette, Kibbe body types, high visual weight versus low visual weight. Hair theory, wrong shoe theory, red nail theory, sundress theory. Or the more recent symptomatic slew of memes that aim to make self-deprecating jokes about style before the era of TikTok fashion rules: eyebrow blindness, blush blindness, outfits you wore on your way to finding your personal style set to sad clown music. Content creators like Mina Le and Emma Chamberlain, known for breaking through the swarm of content partially due to their unique sartorial choices, have recently posted about abandoning the character they built on their feed in favor of a new stripped-back “uniform” in order to get more in touch with their personal style.

It’s become an increasing part of our lexicon, with searches for the term tripling after the rise of TikTok, peaking in April 2022. Women tell each other over plates of omelettes and almond croissants, I’m on my personal style journey. I’m trying to level up this year. I want to become that girl. I’m going to revamp my wardrobe. I’m getting a whole new productive girl routine. I need to buy basics. I need to buy quiet luxury pieces. I want the coquette look but I’m not sure if it’s timeless.

I hate this crusade of lifestyle TikTok’s search for personal style. I wish I could reach through the screen and vacuum all these creators straight to the warehouse where they keep all the offensive Target Pride collections. I hate the way the keyword phrase engagement farming of the app inspires a new so-called “timeless hack” every few months, with capsule closets and outfit formulas and promises of unlocking some trend-resistant way of life. I hate that they all wear slick back buns that they probably have to crack off their heads at the end of the night like a Kinder egg. And most of all, I hate the way they treat the idea of taste, as if it’s one singular journey solely concerning clothes that fall into the binary buckets of “good” or “bad” dressing.

Of course, “style” usually invokes thoughts of clothes, the way we all express ourselves every single day. Getting dressed in America has been difficult for a very long time. American individualistic ethos and Western consumerism have constructed a unique web that has led us to walk into our overflowing closets and wonder why we have nothing to wear: meaning, nothing that fits us right, feels like a reflection of our emotional state, reflects the cultural trends and contexts around us. The problem of “what to wear, what to wear” has fed decades of television, runway, magazine, blog, and Instagram Reels fodder, and will continue to as long as it makes money (read: forever—we will always need something to wear). Even Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie-and-jeans combo has become a status outfit in Silicon Valley, the kind of outfit that men wear in order to project the message that they’re just so smart and so busy that they have been forced to dress like teenagers at band camp (and let’s be real, even Zuckerberg doesn’t want those ugly clothes anymore).

But the formulaic step-by-step manual to find style is so antithetical to what it is. Every fashion figurehead that has become iconized as an architect of modern style philosophy—Lynn Yaeger, Iris Apfel, Robin Givhan, Oscar de la Renta, John Galliano, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexa Chung—have all beat the well-worn drum that style cannot be taught or learned. “You can’t try to be somebody you’re not; that’s not style,” Apfel later said. “If someone says, ‘Buy this—you'll be stylish,’ you won’t be stylish because you won’t be you. You have to learn who you are first, and that’s painful.”

Identity is a bitch to find, especially when it’s in the digital rabbit hole. There are so many people trying to create so many boxes for who you can be so they can get over 100,000 views on their short-form vertical video content. The circus of SEO has been well-covered in the world of fashion and satirized into oblivion, so new terms like “mob wife aesthetic” and “cherry mocha girl” rise and quickly become laughed into the dark corner where the microtrend final boss lives. The algorithm rewards something new, something fresh, and many of us are not immune to the desire to feed the content beast. There’s a new identity to chase every time you open your phone, so a sense of strong one in the midst of it all feels more covetable than ever. It’s why Joan Didion has evolved from a 1960s journalist to a 2024 Pinterest girl, or why photos of artists in the 1980s wearing plain knit sweaters continue to go viral.

We are all expected to broadcast some unique sense of self in order to be seen online, so many have become far more interested in the performance of identity before they are concerned with the actual discovery of it. To the fully awake mind, the cream is easy to sort from the milk. But to the mind that is scrolling late at night, fuzzily attempting to stave off sleep, it’s easy to get caught in its abyss. People post flat-lays of books they haven’t read, travel to places or achieve specific milestones partially to flex on the timeline, scramble for hobbies that haven’t been gobbled up by the mainstream in order to affirm or protect the uniqueness we all swear we have. It’s like finding toddlers who have broken into their mothers’ closets—lipstick smeared across the cheeks, tampons strung around the earlobes, stropping around in too-big high heels, playacting some trickled-down idea of personality because they’re too naive to realize that they already have one.

When Yaeger was asked about the best advice she’s ever been given, she said: “If you’re interested in fashion, learn about everything except fashion […] Politics, art, painting. Anything except fashion.”

Style, like anything else, does not exist in a vacuum. It’s directly informed by your lived experience and the world around you. That’s what makes fashion art, what makes self-expression important, and what makes some people’s individuality seem aspirational in the face of none. All of this boils down to the truth that a sense of personal style will never be realized with attempting, but rather with being. Take a walk, read a newspaper, see the world, kiss a stranger. You cannot, and frankly should not, feel limited by color or the many guidelines that say who you can and can’t be. The hard part that will save you money is figuring out who the fuck you already are and what it is you’re trying to find out about yourself.

Frankly, I think the reflection of major influencers turning away from maximalism is a reflection of another trend. Between the recession and impending tariffs that will hike up prices even further—especially for fashion, which is highly reliant on imports—affordable utilitarian dressing always finds a way back to the cultural forefront. Maximalism has thrived in an economy when people have optimism and cash to spend, and neither of those things are around right now, so it only makes sense that content creators are switching up to advocating for paring down. I don’t even think it’s a bad thing. I just think that believing there’s a correct route to find your personal style is the kind of task akin to a dog chasing its own tail, thinking it will open its third eye.

No amount of basic t-shirts will give you a moral compass, and no amount of seasonal color palettes will give you a sense of peace with your own body. And the fact is, all of it might change, because you will change. “Connecting with your taste means accepting its fluidity,” culture writer and it’s steffi friend Tess Garcia wrote for Mixed Feelings. “Your desires for your own appearance can, and should, change over time … It won’t always be picture-perfect, but you’ll be surprised how quickly you view your own world through a lens of beauty, one you might usually reserve for people online.”

There’s nothing wrong with caring about how you want to carry yourself in this world. The great thing about this is that our care is not some scarce, finite resource that must be rationed to specific things—we can care about whatever we want, simultaneously, perpetually. But as our self-perception becomes more entangled with the reflections in our screens, it’s important to remember which ghosts live solely in your phone, and which bleed out into the somatic world.

More from Steffi:

• In my advice column in Fast Company, I made a holiday social media etiquette guide, and answered a question about how to use Instagram to date when your coworkers follow you.

  Delia Cai
  and I also talked about what to do when you hate your favorite influencer’s politics.

• I spoke with women in South Korea about the 4B movement for Rolling Stone.

• In my Australian debut, I reported on the vibe among young women pre-election for investigative publication Crikey.

• Chat, is this real? My first for Slate covered the rise of the slang term among Gen Alpha.

• For The Daily Beast, I called AI Santa Claus and he hung up on me.