Not everyone dresses the same. This is important to say from the outset. When the phrase “everyone dresses the same way now" is thrown around, the sentiment is mostly relegated to those who engage with style and fashion material on social media, with a disregard for how most of the population is actually clothing themselves. Walking the streets of New York, without any particular agenda towards this end, it’s easy to find that a fear of uniformity is borderline comical if not outright ridiculous. The notion that fashion is trending towards a singularity of depressing uniformity appears to be a complete non-issue when you’re not “on the internet,” really. But this anxiety over what we lose with a homogenized mode of dress is a question that’s garnered considerable attention for a few years around several corners of social media.
“Personal style” is usually identified as the object at stake. At its core, the anxiety over homogenization is a fear of losing your inarticulable you-ness, a fear of having something perceived as inherently good snatched away by morally corrupt (and corrupting) technologies and consumer behaviors. Personal style is, as Derek Guy put it, where your clothes are “an extension of you — a visual representation of your identity, personality, and place in culture.” This is what people perceive as attacked by the machinations of social media generally, and algorithm-powered “content” delivery more specifically. It is widely feared, and rightly I think, that the limited pool of data upon which social media algorithms are trained are doomed to trap us within a self-referential hell. It is not just the idea that your clothing is a visible reflection of your complex interior subjectivity that is threatened, however. There is also a fear that your identity itself will, in a way, also disappear. Visibility and identity are coarticulated in the age of social media, where the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” is only a half-joke. If your unique self can’t be perceived by other through your clothing choices then who are you, really?
The Bazinian collapse of how someone actually dresses in the world and images of their outfit is a major issue with this fear. Image and referent are taken to be indistinguishable from each other, if not the same thing full stop. But a photograph of an outfit — and nearly all images of outfits on the internet are photographs — is not the same thing as the outfit itself. That the identities we create through our clothing exist exclusively within the realm of visuality seems to indicate that a photo of an outfit is more or less the same as “the real thing.” This bit of slippage between reality and images on social media is important, and not only because it assumes a series of images can accurately and completely capture and communicate your subjective self. It more importantly reflects an assumption that the finite set of images you encounter on the internet is a comprehensive totality of what people are wearing off the internet, too. This is where the fear of algorithmically-driven singularity of dress comes in — if you think that what you see on the internet is what everyone is wearing, it might well look like everyone on the planet is chasing the same trends and buying the same things.
Contrary to the Guy’s notion of personal style, the act of wearing clothing is always meaningful, whether or not you feel good about doing it. By clothing yourself at all — just putting on anything, be it a garbage bag or a bespoke suit — you are always putting forward an identity, inscribing yourself within the semiotic confines of social and cultural apparatuses. Clothing is not a “visual representation of your identity, personality, and place in culture,” it is a part of what constructs your identity, personality, and place in culture. Simply put, it makes up who you are to other people, even if you don’t feel good doing it. While clothing inherently performs functions directed outwards towards others, it also inflects your own experience of the world and the identity you wanted to project. “Your style” is not really pure identity-manifestation, but an act of identity-making within a limited tool set, and cannot be extracted from your material conditions. Clothing both constitutes and is constitutive of our identities, personalities, and place in culture; it is in constant relation to us as subjects. It tells others who we are, and tells us who we are, within bounded possibilities of meaning.
“There’s been something happening to fashion recently, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on,” writes Hannah Schmidt-Rees in an article titled “The End of Personal Style” for Perspex, “but I think I’ve figured it out - personal style is dying.”1 Victoria Thompson similarly says “I have always strived to maintain my individuality… but what I found shocked me: my closet had become a museum of forgotten microtrends, fast fashion dupes and dated statement pieces…Where is my personal style?”2 In a rambling 40 minute video entitled “The Death of Personal Style” Youtuber Mina Le laments social media’s role in creating “microtrend” outfits that look “like an overconsumption spree rather than, like, an authentic attempt at dressing eclectically,” and that “the sentiment holds that originality and authenticity are hanging on by a thread.”3 J’Nae Phillips, under a similar Substack post titled “Algorithms Eroded Personal Style,” writes that algorithmically-driven social media platforms are “policing individuality, eroding personal style one predictive suggestion at a time as we dress in mundane monotony… aesthetics, cores, trending styles or whatever you want to call it, all end up looking a bit samey… it’s time for us to be wolves instead of sheep.”4 She goes on to quote a TikTok posted by user mustbemargiela, who says “when anyone dresses in a unique way on this app [TikTok] they’re hated and and the disposition towards their content is always rancid.”
Mina Le’s articulation that “originality and authenticity are hanging on by a thread” at the hands of social media apps and Phillips’ similar stance that algorithms “erode personal style” have implications beyond dress. She is speaking against the circulation of information and ideas about style available on social media, and explicitly calls for a return to the uniform, a rigidly defined way of dress which communicates your identity as inscribed within a strict set of social, cultural and economic boundaries. The menswear commentator Clayton Chambers, who goes by the Instagram handle spr.ezz, agrees. He poses that attempting to “find” a personal style is “the wrong approach,” followed by the obligatory “and here’s why” (ever the favorite phrase of all-knowing internet pundits.) How should people dress then, if not through experimentation? What is “authentic and original?” Chambers offers this position:
“personal taste came [to New York artists] as the byproduct of interesting stuff they were already doing. Today it feels like the opposite. People are searching for meaning in their personal style in a way that’s completely disconnected from their day-to-day life. My advice is to get outside instead of trying to chase a specific look… your personal style will develop as a byproduct of the things you’re interested in.”
Not a bad system, at first glance. Authenticity and originality, then, are simply “byproducts,” of your hobbies and interests — in other words, choosing what to wear in pursuit of a certain style, “look,” or "aesthetic” is “inauthentic.” Whatever you pick up in your dress from the people you associate with and interests you pursue — that is authentic. It doesn’t take a very hard look, however, to see what Le and Chambers are actually calling for. What happens when “authenticity” only comes from drawing on the clothing you see in real-life, as worn by those you associate with? What happens when you don’t have the leisure time to pursue hobbies for pleasure? What happens when you consider the fact that interests, hobbies, occupations, and social circles are economically and materially determined, delimited ultimately by income, race, and gender? In short, what happens when you realize that Chambers and Le — and, from the millions of likes their videos garner, lots of other people — are calling for a return to class-stratified dress and a demobilization of symbols, a re-mapping of signifiers along preexisting class faults?
The occasional burst of concern for how algorithms affect our styles seems to come from a genuine place, but reactions like these are a bit of a knee-jerk shift towards a direction that doesn’t really seem to help. Individuality is seen as something inherently good which must be upheld, and any notion of the collective or collaborative is often snubbed. How could our unique style, expressions and extensions of our very identities, come from anything other than deep within ourselves? A new way of thinking about how we develop our styles in and alongside social media would be beneficial. But We want to be Ourselves! the critics seem to say. The Individual Human Spirit will not be stifled by algorithms and external forces! We want to make our own decisions about what to wear like we always have! Such sentiments completely ignore, or willingly turn away from, the material realities that have always influenced, or even directed, the way people have clothed themselves. A non-dialectical self that somehow exists outside of historical, economic, and social conditions is both nonsensical and inexistent.
What are we to make of all those Vogue magazines, going back to 1892? Or what about Mercure Galant, a fashion gazette that began publication in 1672? Did the thousands, if not millions, of textile books that have been around since the 16th century simply never exist? Or every single style magazine ever, for that point? What do we do with the countless fashion plates that appeared in magazines across Europe and America in the 18th century? These images so informed popular taste that a stylish person used to be called a fashion plate, its double meaning being indicative of the long and entangled, perhaps even co-determinative, relationship between fashion as portrayed in visual culture and “personal style.” And forget about the infinite advertisements and catalogs that have been selling clothing of every conceivable type from the dawn of mass media to the present day.
Trends and fleeting fashions have been chased and discarded with fervor from the Renaissance onwards, often driven (at least in part) by operationally-situated and strategically marketed imagery. Statistical models for capital accumulation and value extraction have always loomed in the background since their inception in the 19th and 20th centuries. The “individual style” that was somehow free from material and economic pressures is a romantic fantasy, a manifestation of both pre-social-media nostalgia and perhaps a longing for some sense of uniqueness in an age of hyperconnectivity.
But let’s take the fear at face value. Let’s assume that an algorithmically-driven social media landscape will continue to push “everyone” towards “less individualized” fashion sensibilities and interests, and pretend as if clothing was never actively marketed towards particular demographics, communities or individual consumers, and pretend that your style was never limited by social, economic, or cultural factors. What might a more “homogenized” style of dress actually afford us through social media? This, I think, is a more productive question rather than fretting over what has always been happening, though perhaps less with less visibility and efficiency, before the invention of social media. What might we gain when “we all” dress the same?
No social media application delivers one style of dress to all of its users. One single very large audience, composed of every user on a particular platform, simply doesn’t exist. The “cores” and trends that are highly legible to one group are alien to another. I didn’t recognize a single example that Mina Le or J’nae Phillips presented as evidence of an apparently universal homogenization of dress (what the fuck is “coastal grandmother core?”) So in this question — “what do we gain when we all dress the same?” — “we all” really means a mappable, limited network of real people who engage with certain kinds of images, videos, and text on social media platforms.
The styles that emerge from the constant circulation of images, videos, audio, and text on the internet have a networked ontology, coming into being as a cohesive form out of a cloud of disparate sources of information and practitioners, heavily inflected by and replicating the networked structures of digital data movement. Pre-internet styles had distinctly different participants, temporalities, geographies, and methodologies of continuity. You were much more confined to dressing within the boundaries of your class, since you were very simply afforded less ways of imagining yourself dressing otherwise.
Books, magazines, and other ways to access fashion writing and imagery just were not distributed as widely or as quickly. With the hyper-saturation of images and text in the internet age there are more ways than ever to envision yourself as dressing some way that you want, infinitely more ways to be exposed to interesting ideas. In some ways “chasing a look,” as Chambers derogatorily put it, is evidence of a greater possibility of imagining yourself as something outside the confines of your milieu. Look at what we call ivy style now — it maintains a series of conventions and practices but is not limited to waspy, educated, upper-crust American northeasterners but is distributed among a decentralized line of information movement globally.
This acknowledges the democratizing impulse to the way in which social media is often utilized in fashion circles. Interesting ideas, articles of clothing, or outfits are distributed to audiences in a manner that cuts across socio-economic and geographic lines. It also acknowledges that “personal style” is never really completely personal or an act of pure expression from within. Admitting that a large part of “your” style is owed to algorithms is not a rejection of individuality but an acceptance of your situatedness within several intersecting areas of social influence.
What we gain when we all dress the same is the death of the personal style myth at the hands of the network. We know that how we dress is an activity that occurs as a result of internal and external pressures, and that algorithmically-driven social media platforms have expanded our abilities to imagine how we clothe ourselves, with the added footnote that predictive algorithmic suggestions are, obviously, nothing more than a tool designed to keep you hooked on social media and giving them advertiser money. In acknowledging that style it is not an act of identity-manifestation, we can get rid of the impossible contradiction that your “personal style” is somehow both an extension of yourself while inscribed within economic, social, and cultural limits of accessibility and permissibility.
Hannah Schmidt-Rees, “The End of Personal Style,” Perspex, October 24, 2024, https://www.per-spex.com/articles/2024/10/22/the-end-of-personal-style.
Victoria Thompson, “Personal Style is Dead — and Fast Fashion Killed It,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, February 5, 2025, https://dailycollegian.com/2025/02/personal-style-is-dead-and-fast-fashion-killed-it/.
Mina Le, “The death of personal style,” YouTube, November 27, 2024.
J’Nae Phillips, “Algorithms Eroded Personal Style,” Fashion Tingz, February 4, 2024,
https://fashiontingz.substack.com/p/hot-takes-16-algorithms-eroded-personal