To Dress like You’re Still Becoming

the myth of ‘finding’ your personal style and viewing style as process, not product.

I have been sitting with myself lately. All of the past iterations of self that have come before; the preteen who cared more about books than anything else, the stroppy sixteen year old who was hellbent on being ‘different’, the coming of age young adult who wanted to embrace herself and her style but ended up masking the essence of her true self, flash forward me as I am now.

Twenty-four and on the brink of a change, a projectile into stasis and a cracking open of the universe as I currently know it.

With this retrospect comes the marvelling of the shells I inhabited in all of these phases. Rag tag mousy hair, rarely brushed, through to the bottle bleach blonde and synthetic hair extensions. Plaid shirts and ‘creepers’ through to slip skirts and ballet flats.

Even recently, I have been looking in the mirror and struggling to recognise the woman before me. Now brunette, my cheekbones are higher, my eyes a little wiser, and my clothes feel... different.

In returning home, I have been confronted by the skeletons in the closet. A floor to ceiling oak wardrobe stuffed full and bursting with garments that don’t quite feel like mine anymore. Modest pieces bought for a career I didn’t really want. Dresses that felt like someone else's idea of sexy. Clothes contorting themselves into an ideal that isn’t mine.

I remember saying to my mum, “I don’t know how to dress anymore.”
She replied, “You’re coming into a new sense of self, darling.”

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot. Especially in moments when I’m scrolling TikTok and I see yet another video telling me how to find my personal style, like it’s something I’ve misplaced. A map to a self I haven't reached yet. But the truth is, just like all the selves we evolve through and experience: personal style isn’t something you unlock. It’s a vehicle, it’s a mode of expression. It’s something you learn and something to live.

Style as a living language.

The disorientation of standing before your clothes, not knowing who you’re dressing for, isn’t a crisis. It’s a signal. It’s a conversation not only with culture and trend cycles, but with the self and the current emotional state you reside.

Take Barthes’ theory of clothing as a semiotic system, a language full of visual codes. As with any mode of communication, it changes over time, reacts to its context, and appears differently in any given culture or community. That is what makes it alive. What felt like you even a few months ago might not fit today, and that’s not failure. It is the one sure sign that you are growing and living and allowing yourself to be carried in the inevitable winds of change.

When we dress for performance, to project control, taste, coolness, success - the language might feel gramatically correct, but it lacks a certain rhythm. It lacks intimacy. It says what it suspects others might want to hear, but not the truth within the wearer.

Sometimes I wear things because I like how they move when I walk. Sometimes I want to feel comforted or protected, opting for an extra layer. Other times I want to feel seen, so I might wear something a little louder. These aren’t quite the rational decisions they appear to be, but acts of expression and intuition.

Style becomes less about signalling status or intelligence, and more about telling the truth of the moment.

Advice Culture and Aesthetic Superiority.

It can feel all too easy to succumb to the style content online that parades itself as empowerment.

‘Stop copying Pinterest’, ‘Stop following trends’, ‘Develop your signature look’.

This kind of aesthetic prescription often disguises itself as confidence, but in reality reduces the joy of the journey in developing and undoing and redoing your sense of style. I suspect people aren’t often sharing this advice out of a want to help; it has become an extension of style superiority. Posing in a particular way to prove that they’ve figured it out. That they’re no longer lost.

As Angela McRobbie puts it: ‘Through fashion, girls and women are invited to become ’aesthetic entrepeneurs’, managing their appearance as a moral project.

To reiterate, it is as if you don’t have a consistent, well-defined ‘style identity’, the implication is you must be behind. Unaware. Messy. Not serious about life.

This assumption is both flawed and classist: developing a highly curated, visually legible personal style requires time, resources, access. Not just in the garments, but the cultural capital that teaches you how to read and use them.

It also is ignorant to the fact that clothing is often not used in a fixed aesthetic, but a relational tool. A way to feel safe, or playful, or powerful. Or just neutral enough to get through the errands of the day. This can fluctuate, constantly.

So when people online give you a list of rules for ‘finding’ personal style (ahem), remember this: often, the advice says more about them than it does about you. It’s about maintaining a sense of superiority, a fantasy of having ‘arrived’ at something. But no one ever really arrives. The people giving that advice are also winging it. Just louder.

And ultimately, that’s okay. Style can be communal. We can learn from each other. But advice should be offered with humility - not as a yardstick for aesthetic virtue, but as an invitation to play, question, and evolve.

The Wardrobe as a proof of existence

Often, a certain sense of liberation can be found when you start dressing intuitively.

I wear a three-tiered skirt on a Monday if it feels right. I may put on lipstick just to go to the post office. Sometimes tracksuit bottoms with tabis is the order for the day. These decisions are made not because they photograph well, or to signal taste, but the simple fact that I wanted to. Because something in me said: this feels right today.

That is intuition. And in a culture obsessed with polish and legibility, intuition is quietly radical.

Joanne Entwistle, in The Fashioned Body, describes getting dressed as ‘a situated bodily practice’ - something we do to negotiate our presence in the world. It’s not a detached performance. It’s intimate. Responsive. Physical. Emotional. Less about proving who we are, more about feeling at home in our own skin.

This is where Rian Phin’s thinking becomes especially resonant. Phin describes dressing as ritual - not in a grand, ceremonial way, but as a quiet daily practice of self-determination. Something done repeatedly, not to construct a coherent aesthetic, but to stay in relationship with yourself. To notice what you need. To care, not because of the outside gaze, but because you’re worth attending to.

To treat dressing as ritual is to take it seriously without making it rigid. It means allowing for softness. Change. Mood. Weather. Nostalgia. Movement. You might not look like someone who ‘has it figured out’, but you’ll look like someone in touch with who they are that day. Which is far more powerful.

You don’t need a capsule wardrobe, or a moodboard, or an ‘essence archetype’ to do that.

You just need a little space. And permission.

When you move through your wardrobe intuitively - when you dress not for who you should be, but for who you actually are that day - your clothes stop performing. They start communicating.

And that’s ritual too.

Style isn’t what you wear, it’s how you got there

Vogue Business journalist Amy Francombe posted an image with text that succinctly encapsulates the fluidity and temporal nature of style:

It suggests that style is not a finished product, but a kind of biography. A personal archive. A lived and evolving method of self-discovery.

This is why advice culture, with its how-to formulas and aesthetic ultimatums, so often misses the point. You could wear the exact same outfit as someone else and still be worlds apart - because what makes it stylistic is not just the clothes themselves, but the journey that brought you to them. What you let go of. What you were trying to feel. Who you were becoming that day.

Style is textured by context. That’s why it can’t be flattened into three aesthetic words or shoppable moodboards. It’s not just about looking good - it’s about wearing something that feels true to your current state of becoming.

This is also what makes personal style immune to duplication. Even when trends cycle fast and everything starts to look the same, the how you got there is what gives an outfit soul. The process matters. The failed experiments, the small joys, the shifts in your body, your city, your mind. That’s what makes your style yours.

So maybe the real question isn’t “What’s your style?”

Maybe it’s: How did you get here?

Dressing as an Ongoing Process

Personal style isn’t something you unlock after ticking off the right boxes: reading enough, travelling enough, cultivating the ‘right’ interests. It isn’t a static aesthetic you land on one day and stick to forever.

Style is a reflection of how you’re living. Your body changes. Your needs change. What makes you feel powerful, safe, or seen will shift as you do. And that’s not something to be embarrassed by but something to pay attention to.

That’s where intuition comes in. Dressing intuitively isn’t about always getting it right, it’s about being honest with yourself. It means choosing clothes based on how you feel, not just how they look. It’s about tuning in, not performing out. And that’s where style becomes a ritual, a daily moment of self-connection.

As Rian Phin puts it, getting dressed is a kind of ritual practice. It’s not just about aesthetics or trends; it’s about showing up for yourself. Style becomes less about impressing others and more about maintaining a relationship with who you are, even as that shifts.

So instead of treating personal style like a final form to reach, maybe it’s better to approach it as a process. A tool for living. A way of communicating that doesn’t require perfect consistency or visual cohesion. Because real style isn’t built on strict rules - it’s built on awareness, intention, and care.

You don’t need to prove that you’ve ‘found yourself’ through your wardrobe.

You just need to stay open to the possibility that your style, like you, is still changing - and that this is exactly how it’s meant to be.