WE NEED TO WORRY LESS ABOUT PERSONAL STYLE

Cogitations on Prada, misplaced philosophies, and a century of the fashion industry's new favourite term.

Did you like the Prada show? I did–mostly. It was refreshing, if not wholly exciting, to see a collection that hasn’t been tightly edited. It felt much like Marc Jacobs’s S/S 2020 collection which was challenging to look at (and even more challenging to sell) but has, at least in my humble opinion, seeped into the everyday motions of how we dress post-pandemic.

There were greater uncomfortable similarities to designs of the not-so-distant past at Prada too. Old Hollywood gowns paired with Space Age Sunglasses, flea market furs enlivened by shocks of silver, and the overall genderless-ness was heady with the scent of–and I swear I’m not just saying this because I’m such a big fan–Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. (Ms. Prada and Mr. Michele have always existed in the same category, designers who value storytelling as much as they do making good clothing, but she has always been the crisp-skirted academic and he the wistful collector of antiques. With Raf Simons in the mix and intent on making sales, the distance between these two Italian greats is flattened). The newest silhouette added to the Prada lexicon, a cropped Peter Pan-collar jacket paired with baggy trousers and boots, felt perhaps the least inspiring. It harkened back to Molly Goddard’s same look from 2022, which was fresh when worn by Harry Styles but would now hardly garner a second glance if I passed it on the street.

TOP: Prada S/S 2025. Gucci S/S 2022. BOTTOM: Prada S/S 2025. Molly Goddard S/S 2022.

Most worrisome, however, were the jumble of show notes, which read: A sequence of concurrent realities are here dedications to the individual, every look a unique reflection of their present…The notion of the superhero becomes a representation of the centrality of the individual, their agency, and of the power of creativity as a means to transform. Everything changes.

The fashion industry is in a moment of frenzy about personal style, one pervasive from top to bottom. If you’ve been reading Old Fashioned for a long time, you’ll know that I did most of my graduate research on the literal origins of the term personal style. This should be my proudest moment, my time to shine! And yet I worry that the use of the term has become so muddied, so riddled with our own flawed philosophies that it has ceased to be useful.

To make a  long, winding story very short: much of what we now mean when we say ‘personal style’ is indebted to American women in the 1930s. That’s not to say that no one in any time or place before then had unique taste in clothing. What I mean is that the way in which we conceptualise personal style to be a force that is both intertwined with and counter to mainstream fashion is, in many ways, a product of developments in design and media of the American 1930s.