Personal Style An Ongoing Cycle

Change is inevitable. We all grow and change, and as we change, so does our style.

I was at the shops the other day and heard someone call out my name. I turned to face the spiky haired girl who'd just swanned into the store and cautiously said hi, all the while wondering if this was someone that I should know from one of my classes at uni. Then it hit me. She was actually a girl that I had been at school with and had only seen once since. At school, Emily* had sat next to me in one of my classes and had been just a genuinely nice girl. She sat with "the nerd group" (as the rest of the year level wittily referred to them) and dressed as casually as I did, i.e. jeans and t-shirts. It was the classic girl-next-door/ shy bookworm look.

But now, Emily has undergone what I'm going to term the "next stage of life image makeover". In it, people redefine their image to suit the stage of life they're in. In the transition between high school and university, Emily went from an average duckling, to a trendy swan. Her brown ponytail has been replaced by a funky pixie style haircut, and where she once sported a senior jersey and jeans she now wears an eccentric scarf teamed with a classic black coat. In short, she has stepped away from casual shy-girl fashion into the realm of edgy chic, a world where ordinary clothes are teamed in ways that make them look cool.

How does that happen? How do some people just manage to suddenly reinvent their style? Of course, Madonna's done it dozens of times but then it's easy to reinvent yourself when you have Madonna's budget. For the rest of us, I guess it works a little differently.

How many times have you looked back at old photos and thought, "I can't believe I wore that"? I, for instance, feel a sickly swoop of shame when I see photos of my 13-year-old self wearing badly applied shiny pink lipstick, a magenta t-shirt and a denim skirt with dark green trim. The very description reminds me of one of the bizarre outfits described in the Baby Sitters Club novels that I once read. Yes, my tastes in fashion (and literature) have definitely changed.

Sociology says that humans are pack animals, that more often than not, we follow the crowd. How much of the change in our personal styles is because of the fashion world moving on? Is the reason that we no longer wear stripy toe socks simply that they are no longer marketed as cool? "Hang on a second," I hear you cry, "I don't follow mainstream fashion anyway." But how many people do follow mainstream fashion these days? It doesn't mean that we're not following some sort of fashion trend. Many girls that I've known never scouted out vintage clothes until the alternative magazines that they were reading encouraged them to, and they had never read these particular magazines until society told them it was cool to be alternative. Hello Napoleon Dynamite and Juno.

Don't go thinking that I'm mocking the fact that mainstream fashion has latched onto its alternative counterpart. (Okay, maybe I am a little bit) It's okay for alternative fashion to be temporarily made mainstream, because fashion swings about in cycles and during each cycle we each learn a little bit more about what we like... and of course, what we hate.

In essence, our style is something that will constantly change throughout our life. What we like now, it's quite possible we'll scoff at in five years time, and that's okay. If clothing is a form of expression, it's ridiculous to expect that we'll express ourselves in the same way at twenty as what we do at thirty. We'll keep some of our own idiosyncratic fashion preferences the whole way through, and that's what counts. Now, I'm off to the shops to see if I can't find a funky new version of that old magenta top.

Victoria Nugent