The Death of Style?: A Conversation Between Friends
A group of girls, wearing jeans and “going out” tops, walk into a bar, and they are greeted by 20 other girls wearing the same thing, just in slightly different variations. Maybe a different jacket, a different bag, a different pair of heels. It’s expected, put-together, especially if you’ve paired it with a statement or name-brand piece of jewelry. The repetition is striking. Walking into a bar feels less like arriving and more like stepping onto a conveyor belt of sameness. Style, in its fullest sense, feels absent; what we call “dressing” has become assembling.
My friend Ella’s style makes you see how deeply we’ve mistaken taste for style. I don’t mean she dresses well; plenty of people do that. I mean that she has style in the rare, nearly extinct sense of the word. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a “basic” outfit, whatever that even means anymore. I’ve seen her in jeans a couple of times, but even then she’s wearing something architectural on top, a draped silk corset, a belt so ornate it borders on conceptual art.
I’ve seen her create her outfits. It is almost a science, or she’s trying to solve a problem. Her clothes have narrative arcs. There’s texture, risk, surprise. If she looks effortless, it’s only because effort, to her, is part of the fun.
Being around her makes me realize how few people actually style anymore. Most of us simply assemble.
When I told Ella what I was writing, she had a lot to say.
“I love reading about trend cycles, when certain styles were popular originally, who popularized them, what kinds of people wore them, and how long they took to come back around, and how that even happened. Anything that gives Gen Z a ‘gotcha.’ We like to pretend that we invented everything, every style, every different way to wear a piece of clothing, every trend. But we never did. Fashion is so cyclical. It's all been done before, whether it was in a different culture or a different decade.”
Still, something feels different. The cycles spin faster, not deeper. Instead of trends morphing into new subcultures or philosophies of dress, they collapse into content. The internet took what used to be a slow-burning evolution, like that of punk, mod, and grunge, and turned it into a game of dress-up. It’s instantly visible, instantly replicable, instantly consumed. Participation has increased, sure, but the depth and nuance that made style meaningful is harder to achieve.
In the 1970s, there was Roy Halston Frowick, more commonly known as Halston, whose sleek disco clothes defined a new kind of style. Halston’s muses, the Halstonettes, wore silk dresses and perfectly cut jumpsuits to Studio 54. The glamour felt purposeful. It had cohesion and a sense of identity. Even at the height of celebrity and spectacle, the clothes communicated individuality, not just a label or a template.
When Vivienne Westwood sent safety pins and bondage pants down a runway, it wasn’t just a look. It was a revolt against respectability, against consumption itself. Punk style wasn’t about looking good; it was about refusing to. The ripped shirts and DIY patches were about politics, not polish.
Now, when people reference “punk,” it’s shorthand for fishnets and glitter. When people reference “disco,” it’s flared pants and Stevie Nicks (which, to be fair, is a wonderful choice for a ’70s style icon). The symbolism is stripped out. What we have now isn’t style. It’s an aesthetic.
Aesthetics can be expressive, even beautiful, but they are also structured by algorithms and expectation. Every few weeks, a new aesthetic blooms on TikTok, and just as quickly, it withers. Each comes with a starter pack: a shoe, a hairstyle, a filter. You can participate; however, there’s little room for improvisation. To achieve the look, you assemble the parts.
Style used to be a conversation between you and your clothes. Aesthetic is a one-way mirror. You pick a niche, and the niche tells you what to wear.
There’s a uniform for every kind of uniqueness now. Making every niche distinct makes everyone’s supposed uniqueness instantly recognizable, predictable. Aesthetics are inherently terrible; some people thrive within them, but the risk and evolution that defined style have become harder to access.
The irony is that all of this “personal branding” began with the promise of self-expression. Social media told us we could define ourselves by what we wore and when we posted it. But the more visible we became, the less experimental we got. Visibility is terrifying when you feel like everyone is watching.
Aesthetics are safe that way. They have rules, palettes, and pre-approved pieces. They tell you what to buy, where to shop, and which references to cite. You can’t really get it wrong. Style, on the other hand, is messy. It takes bad outfits to get to good ones. It takes intuition, risk, and the occasional fashion mistake that makes you cringe in five to 10 years. Aesthetics protect us from that.
I often think about the difference between a style and style, a distinction Ella made once when we were talking about this very topic:
“Having style,” she said, “is knowing what you like, what you feel good in, and how to combine pieces to make it look good. But specific styles still exist; they just live alongside that. Like Malloryheartsyou — she’s huge into ’80s goth fashion. She always dresses ’80s goth, but it’s still her. She can dress it up for fancy events, and down for casual days. It’s cohesive because it’s hers.”
Real style is interpretation, the starting point instead of the endpoint. Once you’ve defined yourself by an aesthetic, you stop evolving. A style is static. Style is alive.
The compression of time is contributing to style’s death. The trend cycle used to move in decades. Now it moves in weeks. Trends don’t fade; they implode. There’s no room for ownership, only participation. And participation requires performance, endless consumption, endless content, and endless proof of relevance.
When I scroll on Pinterest, I see collages of perfection: the beige “clean girl,” the denim “indie sleaze” revival, the lavender “coquette.” I rarely see the weird pairings, the odd thrifted finds, the lived-in outfits that break the expected formula.
The idea of a “personal uniform” has become aspirational. It’s about curating an image rather than confidence. Even minimalism feels like another performance. The goal isn’t to have taste; it’s to have consistency. Consistency photographs better.
Here’s the truth: I’m part of the pattern I’m critiquing. I’m in the jeans, the black top, the “going out” shirt that I’ve seen on 20 other people before me. Sometimes, I spend more time planning outfits than wearing them.
Before a night out, my floor turns into a museum of maybes: dozens of shirts, three pairs of jeans, one heel on, one off. I’ll take pictures from every angle, send them to my friends asking “which one?” until the group chat collectively decides what I already knew. By the time I leave, I’m somehow more nervous about the outfit or even sick of it. The outfits feel predictable and sometimes entirely unremarkable. I’m not an exception; I’m part of the rule.
I miss the outfits that just happen without overthinking. I believe we have become fluent in aesthetics but illiterate in taste. It’s hard to develop an eye when everyone’s watching you practice. Though there might be a possibility that real style now lives in the private moments that never make it online, like the unphotographed outfit, the one that doesn’t fit a trend but somehow feels right.
We talk about the “death of style” like it’s a tragedy, and perhaps it is; however, it’s also a natural outcome of extreme visibility and instantaneous consumption. Aesthetics seem to be an inevitable consequence of a culture where every outfit can be photographed and circulated in seconds.
I don’t think style is truly gone. It’s harder to cultivate and riskier to perform. It lives in those who are willing to stand out before they are considered to look good, in those who trust their eye, in people like Ella, who never cares whether her outfit fits a category, only whether it fits her.
