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The Fashion Issue 2014

Style and Shopping as a Means of Expression and Self-Realization

Girls and women (it feels so corny to consider girls and women as these separate classes of experience, right?) have, more so than guys and to our great benefit, style and shopping as a means of expression and self-realization.

Illustration by Penelope Gazin

Girls and women (it feels so corny to consider girls and women as these separate classes of experience, right?) have, more so than guys and to our great benefit, style and shopping as a means of expression and self-realization. As problematic as it is to get super-excited about spending money toward, like, selfhood, it’s a socially and emotionally safe way to have some stripe of identity-adventure, to tell ourselves stories through our choices and things, and, more and more, to share those adventures and tell those same stories online. (This is why I don’t hate it when a tween buys a pee-quality body splash for $14 and posts about it; I know what she’s doing when she’s choosing, when she’s having, when she’s showing.)

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The online show-off experience could have been about sex—some of it is, obvi—but girls tend to do the show-off parts of the internet the way they do clothes, which is mostly for themselves and for each other. This way of doing the internet, our way, converges as an inward “me gaze.” The aspects of performance and intimacy are all there, but are for us, and for an audience of us-es. Street-style photographers still theoretically reward an individual’s own thing, as opposed to the approved seasonal version. Fashion editors still create the fantasies that girls play off of, and are essential liaisons between history, context, business, and buyer. Neither, however, is as powerful as girls and women are on their own, especially online.

Regular girls on the internet have become the kind of YouTube starlets who confuse nearly everyone, and they’re doing online what my kid best friends and I did for each other with our kid purchases in our bedrooms. Even when it was just two of us, the exposure of it was a little embarrassing. Today, it’s for millions of unseen proxies. Girls post their shopping bags and wish lists and tag #ootd on Tumblr and Instagram. There are “haul videos,” post-shop post-morts where new sweaters and on-sale boots are explained and caressed and wondered over in front of a MacBook camera.

Non-regular girls, like certain semi- and downtown-famous women, demonstrate their own style on sites run by women in the same social strata; their sites coolly maintain editorial authority and offer a different kind of lifestyle verisimilitude. The Coveteur shoots expensive stuff—clothes, shoes, bags, jewelry—around their subjects’ furniture, art, personal ephemera. To whatever degree their stuff is expected—the single pink Chanel jacket hung just so, the gold-shining spike bracelet wrapped around a cactus—there are also book collections and boyfriend baubles and limited kitchens and so much revealed about what these women wanted, what they’re trying, what they’re after, all of it nestled in a field of vulnerabilities.

The website Into the Gloss is my favorite. It documents the beauty and makeup routines of those same women, but often in such close detail that it feels like bathroom academics. Refinery29, Opening Ceremony’s site, posts “closet tours,” which are less self-consciously curatorial and more about the accumulation (both lit and fig) of influence, choice, and habit.

On Instagram, these same women post often and randomly, and the details (fixtures, flooring, furniture, books, lipsticks, shadowy background players, dogs) are often revealed by accident, in a way that’s perfectly unmediated. Insider access makes for voyeurism that’s more fun and positive than any other demonstration of who we are via our personal style, and a pile of shopping bags in a corner reveals more than the new shoes in the foreground every time.

Nothing is more wantable, for either subject or spectator, than an opportunity for some realness. Whether or not the demonstration of clothes and random other stuff is billboard-friendly mall-wear or the most exotic couture, the effect is the same: familiarity, and an ever-increasingly shared way of considering who we are, individually and together. The internet isn’t only about “Hi! I’m here!” With unlimited avenues of information, the very idea of personal style has become weightier. (Which isn’t to say there’s too much variance across its workings; the average style blogger is still in an easily traceable, collectively-agreed-upon rig.) When the emphasis is repositioned toward all of these tiny details and careful, me-gazing concerns, there’s less and less room or reason to minister to some other vision of what (and who) style, and self, are for.

More of Kate’s Li’l Thinks can be found at @KateCarraway.