AESTHETIC INSTINCT

True style resists commodification—rooted in memory, intuition, and the quiet defiance of personal mythology

By Amanda Harlech

Have Instagram and TikTok murdered personal style? Do algorithms stifle imaginative curiosity, reducing our field of stylistic vision to resemble ordering Deliveroo, the calculus of clicks gambling with our ineluctable but therefore original desires? My answer is no—not yet. A wise, discerning eye, a consciousness of self, and a peculiar erratic joy in knowing who you want to be—and how you want to dress—can deaden the little screen and allow space into thought which, as much as instinct and desire, is the vital spark that evolves the self through the myriad spaces we occupy.

After 40 years (Oh god, has it been that long?) of watching and feeling my way through styling collections for John Galliano, thousands of fittings and campaigns for Karl Lagerfeld, Silvia Fendi, and Kim Jones, as well as creating images for editorials, there has always been my own sartorial narrative running alongside—without it, the cyclical spin and return of fashion would become a blur of cloth. I believe we all have a personal style; we are all uniquely flawed and gorgeous, with our idiosyncratic voice tuned by memory and hope.

I remember my first decisive fashion choice: I was about six years old, and Jasper Conran and I made a plan to make tiaras out of the broken glass of headlights and tail lights we could find in the muddy gutter that ran along the Camden Town terrace, where we both lived. I knew what I wore to make these jeweled tiaras was important. Jasper was important. I had to look regal. So I chose to wear my favorite Chanel pink-and-white-checked suit—a pleated skirt and a trim jacket with pockets, designated for Sunday best. It got covered in mud, my mother was furious, but Jasper and I continued to be friends who loved making things forever. Making my own Halloween outfit was also very important, so I raided the dressing-up box and customized my mother’s cocktail dress—layers of mousseline wound into a bodice. I cut tatters and holes with nail scissors to achieve the right wraith-like effect and plaited my toy stuffed mouse into my hair.

When I was about 10, I started making my own magazines, drawing the covers, ads, and fashion spreads. By the time I was at Oxford, I discovered charity shops and I would wear vintage cheongsams or a slippery chartreuse bias-cut dress, like I was Louise Brooks or a character from Vile Bodies.

I believe that what we loved in the very beginning is also where we end, like ripples radiating outwards from a pebble cast into the eye of a pool, gravitating back to where they began. It could be a certain color or combination of colors, juxtaposition of textures—the rough with the refined is a particular dissonance which I love, or even a geometric monochromatic structure versus the shadowy, fragile, and ghost-like. The black angular collections by Junya Watanabe (Fall 2016 or Fall 2025) and Galliano’s fragile mist dresses (Fall 1995). Or Karl’s precise tailoring for Chanel Haute Couture (Fall 2002) and Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2007 collection come to mind. We all contain within us a keyboard of responses, which allows us to configure and play out original songs of the self with notes that have been played before, and will continue to be transposed forever.

But it is easier not to have to think about the signs and signifiers of what you wear when online retail therapy is instantly gratifying. That quick, digital “add to bag” click triggers the opiate of stardust dressing, where you align with the gods—who are, currently, celebrities who reign supreme across all visual content. Every pixel of their appearance is identified and then re-identified and valued against global clicks and “likes” of applause. In the chatter and twitter, it is easier to visualize yourself as a version of your algorithmic dream, buying into the latest fleeting trends rather than working out how you want to be perceived or, more importantly, how you want to feel in any given situation—be it work, a wedding, the beach, or bed.

Maybe it’s not necessary to worry if the little screen operates in the way that Grace Coddington’s editorials performed their magic of desire (“I want to be like her”) in the ’80s or Steven Meisel’s shoots for <<Italian Vogue>> in the ’90s. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the grist of working out how you could approximate the mood of a look that made you think there was no other way to dress has been removed, because in the 2000s, the Brand took center stage. The interlocking Cs of Chanel on a pair of sunglasses, and a matelassé bag with its iconic chain could suddenly become your total look. A Prada triangle, a Gucci snaffle, the LV logo, or a Fendi Zucca eclipsed design. You could hide behind a logo to align and belong.

I have always roved about in the attic in my head to create what to wear—the boudoir of stories of my beautiful great-aunts drifting about in black bombazine and Fortuny pleated gold; the painter Romaine Brooks’s top hat and white shirt or Gluck’s attenuated romantic tailoring, both known for wearing menswear but in their own way; a girl I saw crossing a street in a man’s emerald sweater and forest green eyeshadow. When I was working in Paris, I kept clothes, hats, and shoes in storage at the Ritz, and later in a tiny flat in the 7th arrondissement. Often, my way to get to sleep was to think about what I wanted to wear the next day, splicing a vintage dress with some new arresting proportion to respond to something I’d seen or remembered. The Charles James padded satin jacket is such a perfect volume to wear over a column dress, for instance, and I could try and create that juxtaposition from my thrifted finds by turning up a silky puffer jacket. Comme des Garçons’s or Yohji’s incredible reinterpretations of Victorian mourning dress might mean turning a frock coat inside out, wearing it upside down, and using black grosgrain ribbons to create shape.

Initially, I loved vintage because I couldn’t afford fashion, but very quickly it became a love for the unique workmanship: rare fabrics that are no longer woven or produced and that sense of story in a hem, say, frayed by a passion for dance, or a tiny white linen suit from the ’40s, bought in a market in Buenos Aires, that might have been worn by my grandmother who lived there and which fitted me precisely. The uniform of a Brand look has never really worked on me. I always want to inhabit what I wear rather than it wearing me. I think the only time I wore a total look was a red Chanel tailleur: a jacket with ornate brass buttons and a skirt. I wore it to a dossier de presse shoot in 2011, when lead looks for an upcoming show were photographed by Karl as a sort of dress rehearsal for attitude, hair, and make-up. He took one look at me and declared, “You look like a PR,” and promptly threw a 19th-century painter’s smock at me, which he’d bought from Sennelier around the corner from Studio 7L.

But dressing for yourself out of some invention in your head can also isolate you in a twist of red silk kimono tied across vintage Rick Owens, when everyone else in the studio is wearing jeans and an oversized cotton shirt. The thing is to enjoy figuring out how to transpose what Phoebe Philo or Jonathan Anderson has proposed in their collections and adapting what you might already have in your wardrobe to echo the proportions and tonality. It is about attitude, not so much the actual garment—the dissonance and resolution within personal style is what’s truly inspiring.

I still dress a bit like a suffragette at home, like my grandmother, whom I remember so vividly: whipcord breeches and two cashmere sweaters with overlapping holes. But I always reach for that first slip dress that I found when I was 18—I have a collection of ’30s slipper satin wedding dresses, which I layer in threes, sometimes with a massive sweater or a greatcoat. In a way, I don’t need anything else.

Before self-consciousness slays abandon, children dress instinctively, chaotically, with passion for a favorite talismanic thing. It is vital to rekindle this freedom, which is snuffed out by our urge to belong to the peer group at school, at work, at the edges of our vision, sitting in apparent judgment. Sometimes this insecurity persists throughout our entire life, and the idea of being eccentric (from the Greek ekkcentrus, meaning off-center, out of orbit) is as terrifying as free-diving through deep space. My icons have always stood outside the accepted orbit—Tina Chow, Dora Maar, Dora Carrington, Rei Kawakubo—and growing up in North West London in the ‘70s, it never occurred to me that you didn’t follow your heart to dress.

“That so few people now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.” — John Stuart Mill, 1859