706: Personal Style

Though the phrase “style switching” is generally used to refer to how someone chooses and then alters their words, phrasing, and cadence of speech, there’s a number of other situations where that same type of shifting applies. It’s important to note, too, that fashion and style are two different things. Quoting from fashion blogger Sarah Scoop:

Personal style is something different entirely. It’s the style you cultivate for yourself and – most importantly – it doesn’t move with fashion. Sure, you can add and change things if you find something on trend that you particularly love, but your key looks at the same. […] and no fashion whim is going to deter you from them.

Style switching — changing or altering the fashion that you choose when it comes to your personal clothing style can have just as much of an impact on the view others have of you.

As seamstress Burke Brewer put in on her blog, quote:

[…] our clothing tells the world who, and where we are in life. Regardless of why you wear what you wear, I believe in wearing clothing that I love, that makes me feel fabulous & invincible, and that celebrates the uniqueness of my body with all its curves and flaws. I believe in wearing clothing that genuinely feels like me. My style will inevitably shift again — when I become a mother or age gracefully — and I’m excited to see what I’m creating 10, 20 and 30 years from now. I look forward to looking back to see where life, and my style, takes me.

In fact, that style and the choice of what clothes you put on can be more than just a choice. In fact, it can be a powerful and empowering moment to choose the clothing that you present yourself with.

As Tom Rasmussen wrote for CNN about trans and non-binary folks, quote:

For some of us, fashion allows us to pass, and to remove demarcations of a gender assigned to us. For others, it’s a way to opt out, to ask questions, to curate a whole new gender away from a binary. For all of us, it gives us autonomy over our bodies. The clothes we wear allow us to make a choice, they allow us to escape the expectation of normativity, and the boredom of homogeneity.