If you only rewear things you've been complimented on, you're mastering someone else's style
let me guess: you have a closet full of clothes, and absolutely nothing to wear.
You may think you’re dressing for yourself, but you’re not. If the reason you’re wearing that again is because someone liked it last time, that’s their style, not yours.
Compliments are a fascinating little time machine, don’t you think?
They can doom you to relive the past, hold you captive from the future, and most impressively, they can even stop your own evolution by locking you in a box you didn’t realize you built. If this sounds dramatic, a little over-the-top, compliments are harmless, Alexandra, who doesn’t like to look nice? Then you might already be aware of the secret charm that makes them work, even if only subconsciously.
Dopamine.
Dopamine is tricky because it doesn’t work like we think it does. It’s not the reward itself that keeps us salivating like Pavlov’s favorite puppy, its the anticipation of the reward.
When you wear something you know will be a hit, your brain floods with anticipation.
Dopamine crashes through your system and your confidence elevates. When you wear something different, strange, should-have-pulled-the-tags-off-months-ago new, your brain can’t predict the outcome. It short circuits into disaster mode, making you feel like an imposter in your own body. To remedy this feeling, and not incur the social wrath of uncertainty, you put back your original idea, and reach for the safer option.
Essentially:
you are terrified of being viewed as ugly
which prevents you from taking any risks in your appearance
and because you’ve played it safe for so long, your style has stagnated
which leaves you looking like the person you think you should be, and not the person you actually are.
Evolutionally, behaviorally, psychologically, this is your brain working exactly as it should, keeping you safe and cozy under the warm, heated lamp of social approval. The loop is closed, your prophecy is sealed, cramming you into the too-tight box you accidentally made for yourself.
The cost of never being ugly is that you’re never truly known.
When you hold back who you are, you live in the space between your taste and your style. You reinforce the idea that true, expressive style, is only reserved for a certain few, that this special bunch that has been given the privilege to look the way they want to, to break the dress codes, to abandon social norms.
You think it must be easier for them, they can pull it off, they can get away with more. But this is where you’re wrong. What you have is an entire world in your head that no one else can see, and the reason no one can see it is because you’re too afraid to bring it to life.
Your taste, held as vivid imagination, remains invisible. No one knows it exists because no one knows its there. Because no one sees it, you start to doubt it, too. Maybe you just don’t have good taste. Maybe this top is fine, maybe I’ll wear that next weekend. Every time you try to close this gap you feel like a fraud. But the reason you feel like a fraud is because you’re not dressing like yourself. You dont look like yourself, because you look like someone else. Around and around you go, the prophecy fulfilling itself. And you wonder why you have a closet full of clothes and absolutely nothing to wear.
When you stop dressing for validation, you’ll experience a kind of death. The death of the false self, the death of the person you constructed to fit in, the death of being understood. But this death is not to be feared, as it is exactly this that will give meaning to your style.
It is only through this process that one day you’ll be able to look in the mirror and see who you actually are reflected back to you, and not the amalgamation of all the things you thought you should be. Without this death, you’ll spend the rest of your life dressing a person who doesn’t exist.
If someone compliments you, great. But all that shit you have in the back of your closet you’re too afraid to wear? That’s where your real style lives. All the stuff you think is too ugly, too weird, to whatever-the-fuck outside the lines? That’s what its gonna take. Those are the only clothes that matter.
With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List