Forming a Style

When considering the way that I dress, it is very difficult to narrow my style down to one specific genre of clothing. I’ve noticed that I go through cycles in how I dress. This cycle usually begins at the beginning of a semester of school. It starts with me caring about my appearance. I take the time to pick out shirts and pants that go together and make sure my shoes and purse match.

This begins to go downhill as soon as the first sign of stress concerning school appears. Gradually, I start to think about my outfits less and less, often opting to throw on t-shirts and jeans. Eventually, I find myself in a jeans and t-shirt rut, which is very difficult to get out of. I also find that my clothing often reflects my self esteem about my appearance. When I start to feel stressed about school, I usually comfort myself through food (I like to eat my feelings), and eventually this causes me to gain weight, which effects how I feel about my appearance. I then try to hide in my clothes.

I feel that the clothes I have been wearing recently probably tell people that I don’t care about my appearance. My clothing tells very little about my personality because I haven’t been dressing myself in a style that I particularly like. My current style probably communicates that I have been feeling stressed, making me lazy in my style choices.

Even when I am dressing myself in a way that I like, it is still almost always casual. I’m not really one for dressing up. There are so many styles that I always want to try out, but I still find myself drawn to casual clothing. I wish that I liked to wear skirts and dresses more. I even made that a goal for myself over the summer; but more skirts. I tend to feel less comfortable in dresses because I never feel like they look “right” on me, but I like them so much on other people that it makes me want to wear them.

I often find myself flipping through magazines and admiring the styles of others. I actually follow fashion quite thoroughly, but you wouldn’t really know it from the way that I dress. It seems that I never want to take the effort to dress the way that models are dressed, and I never seem to want to take the fashion risks it must take to dress the way they do.

I feel that although people want to be seen as individuals in fashion, people still care about what others think about their appearance and are too afraid to dress completely out of style. Style is a way of expressing one’s self, but not too much. People use fashion to communicate a message of how they want to be perceived, and usually, they want this style to be admired, not questioned.