Earlier today, there was a comment about the must-have bangs, as seen on Kate Moss:
“I’ve had these for years before they were trendy,” wrote the mysterious Number Five. “What can I do when they’re over?”
The remark leads to something we’ve been meaning to explore:
What happens when trends encroach on your personal style?
Case in point: The fauxhemians.
When I was in high school, I had a sheepskin coat, a pile of Indian tunics, wide leg jeans, and Eskimo boots that would later be called Uggs. This was years before Almost Famous, when Sienna was still at boarding school and I just wanted to look like my mom’s vintage album covers.
In college, girls started wearing peasant blouses - and not just the cool girls, but the popular girls, too. Earlier in the year, they’d shunned me for mocking Lilly Pulitzer. Now they tried to steal my dry cleaning. And months later, magazines proclaimed my look as “over.” But how could it be finished when it never really started?
I clung to the Boho thing until last year, when Rachel Zoe turned my style into a factory production, Tory Burch brought it to soccer moms (left), and I went as Penny Lane for Halloween - in all my own, normal clothes. “Okay,” I thought, “If I can do this as a costume, maybe something needs to change.”
I bought some straight leg jeans. I found a pea coat. Last week I actually decided I could wear a blazer - albeit a long one, with white piping and too much attitude.
I think part of it was just growing up - new job, new friends, a shift in the way I was thinking and living… and therefore, a much-needed shopping trip. But sometimes I wonder - should I have surrendered my signature style to Nicole and Keira, or clung to its tenants until the trendoids moved on?
—FARAN
posted by Susan
Oct 17, 2007 1:40PM
I think you know what the answer is....If you have always felt most comfortable wearing a certain color, or range of analogous colors, then I don't think that trends or particular designers can touch you. You will always look like you. You will always look confident and will know with what to accessorize in order to look fresh. If it's not a color, it's likely a combination of separates that drape the best on your frame - and you know it. Trends tend to look cheap for a reason. That's why they should never be an investment. But bohemian is classic, isn't it? It's not really a trend so much a younger generation discovering the look of the 1970s. If one isn't in full knowledge of the cultural understanding of the origin of a trend, then it will look....silly. Something tells me you knew what was what when you wore your many bracelets and tunics.