Where Does Inspiration End and Taste Begin?
Confessions of an outfit copycat and other thoughts on personal style inspiration
For as long as I can remember, I’ve mused. It’s always been as easy as breathing for me. I would muse at images in magazines, felt starstruck by the outfits in music videos and I even admired my mother’s wardrobe — which consisted of soft blues, creamy whites and tailored two piece sets.
The ability to admire and observe has alway felt like a necessary anchor for myself to figure out who I was as a child. It was a compass that pulled me to make definitions that I would still hold as an adult. We all go through this; piecing ourselves together using the beautiful images around us. We take in what we like, which leads to the fingerprint that is our style and identity.
But there was a distinct moment I can remember where I started to specifically pull inspiration for how I dressed.
I think there’s a special difference about the type of inspiration that influences your personal style. It’s something that you apply to your body, your every day routine, your aesthetic sense of self that is then projected back onto the world — asking to create a dialouge. It’s powerful. So powerful that we create T-shirts, hats and sweatshirts with every type of topic and interest out there. That way you can wear what you love right on your sleeve.
It makes sense why I remember gravitating towards graphic T-shirts as a child and teenager, and why almost every generation has a dusty box of T-shirts somewhere that reflect their earliest interests, their primal passions.
Before I knew what color schemes I liked or silhouttes I admired, putting on a T-shirt in 7th grade that said “All Time Low” or “Paramore” was the easiest way to connect and make friends. In fact, it did.
But, over time, our personal style expands into what we pair the metaphorical graphic T-shirts with. What we layer on top of them. A cardigan or a button down shirt? A pair of jeans or a flowey skirt? It starts to become a layered palette of garments to portray who you are. Our initial interests start to get filtered through other experiences and influences that start to show in our wardrobe — whether we’re trying or not.
The step between “I enjoy this” and “I want to embody this thing I enjoy” is a big part of growing up.
I remember one of the first times I felt the sentiment: “I like that. In fact, I like it so much that I want to try it on myself.” I was in fifth grade and it was 2004-2006. At the time, I was living and going to school in Eastern Europe and I had just moved from a uniform-only school.
No matter where you are in the world, moving to a school that allows you to wear the clothes you want is significant. It makes sense why many people pinpoint the trajectory of their personal style to be around this time.
This is when inspiration truly opened up for me. The early influences of my style came from a couple key sources. The first one was an Argentinian telenovela for teens called Floricienta. In the show, the main character Flora, had expressive, hyper colorful style that matched her bubbly, kind and quirky personality. I remember becoming fixated on her style; ribbons streaming from her curly hair, pastel layers, flowey hankerchief style skirts and of course, colorful Converse.
Another influence was Avril Lavigne (duh) — who’s boysih, slightly edgy style scratched an itch for me that I couldn’t quite describe but would later attempt to manifest fully during my emo phase after returning to the States. Even in fifth grade, I remember being obsessed with how a tie — something that even my own father hated wearing because of its fussiness — was paired so effortlessly on top of a graphic tee.
My theory is that most of our early style inspirations came from someone that had a certain degree of seperation from us: I.E. a celebrity, a character in a TV show, even an adult in your life who had a certain style that grabbed our attention. Those sources of inspirations, I think, are good to look back on in their purest form because they can tell us a lot about our own taste.
I also remember the moment I felt inspired to dress a certain way by a person in real life. Around the same time (2005), I saw her. In the flesh, in front of me, zipping from class to class in the hallways at my school. She was a couple grades above me but even so, she was hard to miss. I’ll never forget her outfits: baggy, sometimes ripped jeans that spilled over her Converse sneakers, brightly colored tank tops layered on top of each other and a cropped hoodie that was usually in bright orange, yellow or blue.
Aside from all the colors she wore, there was another thing that always caught my eye; she had extremely short black hair — a bob with bangs that fell over her eyes a bit. This was especially unique, as most Lithuanian girls at the time proudly kept their long, blonde hair styled in a single braid that cascaded down their backs. On top of that, she always wore a pair of over-the-head headphones around her neck.
If I would have to pinpoint it, this random girl in 2005 was my earliest, real-life personal style muse. My very first influencer, you could say. I also realize now, 20+ years later, she was essentially wearing an outfit that was a combination of Flora and Avril Lavigne.
But at the time, I wasn’t focused on making those connections. All I knew was, I loved her outfits and wanted to recreate them so badly. I felt like I had a real-life blueprint in front of me of who I wanted to look like. This girl wasn’t a famous person, or even someone that much older than me. She wasn’t a fictional character or a person in a music video. She was a girl, like me, going to my school, in the same small Lithuanain town.
And that was when, I felt moved to not only enjoy the things I like in a abstract way in my head, but to also wear them. Or atleast, attempt to.
Now, I’m 28 and I’ve witnessed much more reiterations of the short-haired girl with headphones. With each year, each school, each city, I added more people in my head as sources of outfit inspiration. Over time, I’ve layered more references, colors, characters (both real and fictional) onto my own style.
I think it’s fair to say that today you can’t go 5 minutes without being invited to be inspired. After starting Mandy Lee’s 75 Hard Style Challenge back in January, one of the hardest parts of the challenge wasn’t the no-buy (surprisingly), but the challenge to avoid outfit inspiration and rely on “your own brain”.
“Do I really have style if I’m relying constantly on outside inspiration?” This question started to haunt me.
And because it felt like such a challenge, I knew I had to dig into it more. Why is it so hard to look inward? Why is it so hard to drown out the noise? Why do I lean on this so much? Whenever outfit indecision hits me, I browse Pinterest and my Instagram saved folder obsessively. I feel myself reaching towards something I’m not even sure of. I feel myself needing the easy formulas, the step-by-step guides, the right answers.
I knew I was really in trouble when looking at outfits to recreate on my phone started to feel empty. The inspiration started to run dry, or maybe my brain went into overload. Even though the world was at my fingertips, that scarcity mindset of “I have nothing to wear” remained and I resented myself for it. Of course there’s things to wear! I have it all in the palm of my hand! I have the tools, the blueprints, the formulas, the style quizes — so what am I not getting?
I knew that a big part of the 75 hard style challenge was to begin the process of listening to the clothes I have instead of the constant roar of inspiration around me. I knew I wanted to put myself back in the fifth grade version of myself who just needed fleeting glimpses of a fellow classmate in the hallways to inspire my style.
I’ve definitely quoted this before, but my good internet friend and all-around creator I admire,
, shared for my Getting Ready Series that she rarely ever looks at inspiration when getting dressed. And — I mean this in the best possible way — it shows. Her style is not only distinctly her (and allows for the ebbs and flows of her style) but also show show at ease and comfortable she is.She also discussed more poignant thoughts on the monsoon of aesthetics we’re in right now in a post from January:
“We are so focused on belonging to a preset identity we forget we already have one. People look to aesthetics to feel like they understand themselves—to fit in. But the answer to who you are isn’t someone else’s Pinterest photo.” -
And it’s true. The digital landscape we’re in currently makes getting inspired feel like you’re in a chokehold rather than a place of exploration. Sure, outfit flatlays and style guides have existed long before social media, but the internet has made it a larger beast. It’s less the quantity of the content around us, but the specificity of it. The world around us knows us too well — whether it be in the aisles of Target or in our pop-up ads.
No longer do we have to do the fun, curiosity-driven process of investigating what it is about a character or person’s outfit that we want to recreate. Instead, rooms full of marketing teams tell us what to like and exactly what we need to buy to get what we like. Depending on the style, look or aesthetic you’re going for, there is a specific SEO keyword you can type in that will give you exactly what you’re trying to manifest.
And then we have real-life formulas — from people “like us” — online that show us an outfit that feels not too out of the realm of possibilty. Today, a young person doesn’t need to watch someone’s style from afar to decide how to emulate it, because that person likely has a TikTok style account.
And I’m all for influencers and creators showing outifts that are relatable and can be applied to our everday lives. That’s one of my favorite things about fashion TikTok! But! I sometimes wonder if inspiration presented to us has become too customized, too specific, too accessible? Because while it makes it (in theory) more applicable to our own style, it also adds to the pressure and the frustration when that outfit doesn’t come out the same way.
I think our questions about personal style are answered far too quickly. We don’t give ourselve enough time to answer: “Why do I like this?”, “Why do I want this?” In the same way that fast fashion is delivered to our doorstep in less than 48 hours, the answer to “What is my style?” can be answered in the time it takes to type a Google search.
The reality we live in has made it extremely easy to go from the first phase (initial inspiration) to the final phase (bringing that inspiration to life). And with that, where is the messy, trial-and-error in between those phases? Where is the fun of finding something new, weird and outside of our comfort zones when everything is perfectly spoon-fed to us?
To echo what fashion writer Rachel Tashjian wrote in her article, Whatever happend to having taste?:
“Ads on Instagram often look as polished as magazine spreads, and on TikTok, ads are often just as funny, shocking or downright engaging as non-sponsored content. The idea that you might like something because it’s unusual, or because your well-trained eye recognizes something no one else can, is almost foreign to many shoppers in their 20s and 30s.”
I’ve realized that my struggle with overdosing on inspiration was a struggle of not trusting my own taste enough. Because true taste is that you’ve been developing, evolving, remaking and playing with since the first time you said “I like that.” In a way, it’s always been there, even a tiny piece.
Even through writing this and looking back on my earliest inspirations, I’m realizing that there is no scarcity when it comes to what I like, what has influenced me, what has shaped my personal style.
When I find myself in a Pinterest outfit spiral, I now try to zoom out — to look at the process of outfit crafting in a more abstract way. I remove the traced lines and blur the shapes in front of me. The clear steps and specific outlines. In a way, I try to go back to basics. But really, I try to be less specific.
I think it’s good to remember that there was a time before online inspiration. Before hyper-specific algorithms. Before outfit formulas. Because there’s always been a starting point for what we like, even if it doesn’t feel like much. Right now with the closet I have, there is still so much left to be discovered. Because every piece in my collection ended up there for a reason — and it can tell me a lot about where my style is going to go.
Our taste shouldn’t be told to us. Instead, we should be learning how to decipher it — slowly and organically. And inspiration — no matter how specific or abstract — will always be a part that. Detangling that can be hard, dizzying even. The need for categorization, aesthetics and style guides will only grow as the sheer abundance of content on the internet does. But amidst it all, allow yourself to mess up.
When I was inspired by that girl’s baggy jeans and colorful hoodies back in 2005, I couldnt’ recreate it — I wasn’t even close. But I held onto it, followed that curiosity and continued to play.
Because here’s another thing I’ve learned: maybe finding your personal style shouldn’t feel like homework. Maybe the answer is simply allowing ourselves to fail the test sometimes. I fail at copying outfits miserably, all the time. But maybe that’s a good thing. I’m realizing I shouldn’t see this failure as a bad thing, or a hinderance of my own style evolution — but the very opposite. Because in those, failures, mishaps and mistakes, I surprise myself.
Maybe it’s in those mistakes where inspiration ends and taste begins.