Dress For Success (Part 1)
What is style?
After writing my first note of the year on “dressing for success,” I’d almost completed a newsletter about experimenting with my work wardrobe before writing today’s newsletter from scratch. I was applying edits from my editor, Meghan, and noticed I was cramming too many ideas in one newsletter to explain my approach to this experiment. We decided to backtrack and separate each idea to lay the groundwork for you to understand my work wardrobe experiment better.
What is style?
As a noun, style is a manner of doing things or a distinctive appearance, typically determined by the principles according to which something is designed. The word derives from the Latin phrase “stylus,” an instrument. In an interview with Sheila Heti, art historian Alexander Nagel defines style as “the instrument, and by extension the hand that moves it, and also the trace left by the hand and instrument. When we say someone has style, we are not simply discussing the clothes but the person wearing them. We notice the sensibilities that chose the clothes and the body that found the clothes to suit it, and that moves inside.”
Since the beginning of this newsletter, I have hesitated to commit to a definition of style. I was almost sure it couldn’t be defined. I’d described it as a feeling, and I felt that most of the time, we are unsure how to describe it, although we know when we see it. However, in reading this interview, a definitive description of what constitutes style emerged, and most of it looked familiar. Without realizing it, I’d written ideas similar to most of what Nagel defines as style.
Nagel’s definition has provided a starting point for me to argue against and develop further, and in doing so, to offer a definition or framework for what constitutes style. For a long time, I didn’t think a definition of style was necessary, but lacking a framework for understanding what style is in the context of clothing and fashion for myself, my editors, and my readers have resulted in confusion and limited my ability to share developed ideas on how to build a functional wardrobe, what to reference, how to evaluate a “good reference,” and how to experiment with one's wardrobe.
Dress vs. fashion
Before proceeding to a definition of style, I noticed that many of the resources I used for research made distinctions between dress and fashion. Although I had effortfully and woefully tried to explain the difference in previous newsletters, I hadn't considered the need for a clear differentiation. I want to briefly note the distinction in terms here so it’s clear what I’m talking about when I talk about style.
The Oxford Dictionary describes dress as a specified piece of clothing for men and women but I prefer Elizabeth Wilson’s definition in Adorned in Dreams. Wilson says, “If the body with its open orifices is itself dangerously ambiguous, then dress, which is an extension of the body yet not quite part of it, not only links that body to the social world but also more clearly separates the two. Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self.” In other words, before capitalism and the formation of individual identity through dress and the fashioning of the new competitive social order, dress in its basic form fulfilled an array of social, aesthetic, and psychological functions. Everyone has to get dressed; not everyone has style.
On the other hand, fashion is a product of capitalism in which the focus is always on the new, the next, the constant pursuit of an object that will fix your life. As Karl Marx puts it in The Manifesto, as society shifted from feudalism to capitalism, social life characterized by ‘fixed, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices’ (dress) was replaced with modernity where ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (fashion). In Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson wrote that fashion is “dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in a sense is change, and in modern western societies, no clothes are outside of fashion; fashion sets the terms for all sartorial behavior.” People with style, then, are not exempt from fashion, but having style is not the same as being fashionable. Style, unlike fashion, is not about the newest thing or the fantasy that a new wardrobe is the same as a new life.