16: The Only "Personal Style" Advice I'll Give

LEAVE YOUR HOUSE PURSUE OTHER THINGS STOP LOOKING SO HARD

At High Valley Books in Greenpoint. @HighValleyBooks on IG. I took home Design and Planning of Retail Systems by David Gosling & Barry Maitland.

On Saturday, at noon, Amélie made us an appointment at High Valley Books in Greenpoint. We showed up 7 minutes late, rang the doorbell and Bill opened the door and welcomed us into his beautiful home, an appointment-only bookstore filled from floor to ceiling with fashion, art, and design books and magazines. Bill took us on a tour, he showed us the light-filled first floor where most of the new books are, and led us down the cool narrow steps into a basement filled with possibilities – books and magazines stacked from floor to ceiling along every wall and in rows and rows with articulating lamps clipped to bookcases and balanced on stools.

Amélie perched on her knees and sorted through books piled on the ground and I sat in a chair and pulled them off the shelf. I scanned the Japanese magazines, held Vogues from the 1930s, flipped through pages of a book about Madeline Vionnet, one about design by David Hicks, and pages AnOther and a mid-century Swiss design periodical. I left his apartment drenched in sweat, with one book under my arm and the warm reminder of what makes leaving your house to learn such a special experience.

A selection of my favorite bookstores, from left to right: Magus in Seattle, Max, and Amélie at The Paper Hound in Vancouver, CA, Westsider Rare & Used Books on the UWS, Libreria in London, and Elliot Bay Book Co. in Seattle

Shopping in person is extraordinary, even if you leave empty-handed. Admiring items in person is unbelievably different from pinning images and browsing online. It's tactile, immersive, and exciting. Being away from a screen, perched on your knees picking books out of a shelf while someone sits on a little stool next to you doing the same, is wonderful. It is not about what you take home but about the unpredictability of what you might come across or who you might encounter.

For the last three years, I’ve watched the conversation about personal style grow and morph online, and sometimes I’ve even been a part of it. It’s a conversation filled with step-by-step guides, challenges, formulas, Excel spreadsheets (god forbid), authorities, advice, and echo chambers. And frankly, it’s a stale approach to one of life’s greatest joys — the ongoing process of expression, the negotiation of identity, and the art of curation. We tout personal style as the answer to a slew of problems but one of the problems is the approach itself. When we talk about style as something found in Excel spreadsheets and step-by-step guides, we lose what makes personal style personal — intuition, sentimentality, memory, learning, and most importantly, leaving your house, building connections, and experiencing public life.

Photos from the Vivian Maier exhibit at Fotografiska — I highly recommend visiting the exhibit. It is a gorgeous exhibition of public life in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago and New York.

Maybe shopping is a funny excuse for an experience but the reason I love browsing aisles and reading tags and labels in a vintage store is the same reason I like to go to the library and pick books out of the shelves to sift through. It’s the reason I go to museums and take notes of pieces that stand out to me and the reason I go to the park and watch people go about their lives. It’s the reason you go to Broadway shows and concerts and lectures and say yes to accompanying your friend to something they’re interested in. There is always something to learn and enjoy.

I owe a lot of my style to the internet, and I don’t want to discount that. There is something deeply intimate about scrolling through Wikipedia pages and photos on Tumblr unencumbered until the early morning hours and taking it all in. As much as I owe to the internet, I owe just as much to the flea markets, garage sales, museum exhibitions, and camping trips I was dragged to as a kid. I owe a lot of it to watching my parents. I owe a lot of it to my first job at Lucky Vintage in Seattle.

Last week, at Dover Street Market, I took note of three pieces from three brands I’d never heard of that I thought were absolutely to die for. The first was a ruffly cotton blouse from Judy Turner, the second was a tulle-covered beret from Scha, and the third was a pair of flats from Aarahee.

Sometimes I get a DM or message asking for tips on finding personal style. It’s always about ‘finding’ as if it’s something lost that will magically appear if you search hard enough. I hate to say my answer can’t be summed up into any guide but this: Personal style on an Excel spreadsheet without a list of references, experiences, and inspiration to cite is an empty and boring pursuit.

The personal style guides will tell you not to be impulsive, to be calculated, and to think long and hard to avoid mistakes but I couldn’t agree less. Every once in a while, if you are out, and you try something on that makes you feel extraordinary, take it home. I can’t imagine anything more representative of taste and personality than trusting your instincts and following your gut. And why shouldn’t you make the occasional mistake?

I think we should all put less pressure on ourselves, we should shop less and think less. We should trust our intuition. We should embrace sentimentality. We should accept that nothing happens overnight and everything, including style, is an ongoing labor of love. What’s that saying? You’ll find it when you stop looking for it?