What is your uniform?
Capsule closets are personal brands for people who are too chill with their boss
When I was approaching 4th grade, freshly plopped down into a new school system and outgrowing my substantial layers of baby fat, I decided to take some big swings RE: my personal style. I made the bold choice of only wearing black and white (with touches of red). I started to cross my 7s (this one quickly fizzled out) and became a vegetarian (this one stuck to this day).
At a Super Clips in late August, I showed my stylist a hardback that I had nabbed from my parents’ bookshelf. I was enthralled by the women illustrated on the cover of Lauren Stover’s Bohemian Manifesto. They were the blueprint. I lusted after that jet black asymmetrical pixie cut as if it could transform me into a svelte young woman smoking in a hip French cafe. After she was finished with my hair, my stylist walked me out back through the employee exit behind the strip mall to show off her creation to her coworker who was taking a smoke break between the dumpster and the Big Lots loading dock. I felt like a million bucks.
My enthusiasm for the monochromatic look waned fast, especially after I found an amazing pair of velvety purple skinny jeans at the Ohio Thrift. Not possessing the proper hand-eye coordination to use heat tools without burning my ears, my new hairstyle was usually just a puffy mess. I abandoned the idea of limiting my stylistic choices for a more “eclectic” sensibility, terminology I picked up from a home decor pamphlet among the paint chips at Lowes. I attached heaps of retro buttons and brooches I collected from art fairs and gallery openings my dad took us to onto the lapels of every jacket I owned. I slashed and sewed all my tee shirts into new and novel shapes. No outfit was complete without a colorful scarf and leg warmers my mom decorated with vintage buttons for me. On the way to school, I paused to pluck plumes of ornamental grass from our front yard and stuck them jauntily into the side of my crocheted cap like a feather on a flapper's cloche.
I actually cracked open the Bohemian Manifesto for the first time last month. My review: Among items I brought to the barber’s as a child, it ranks above a printed screenshot from a Barbie.com Flash game. But among books on the ins and outs of counter culture, I’d rank it middling. The satirical advice format for those who wish to “live on the edge” is more cute than genuinely humorous or insightful, but the full color illustrations are fun. The section of the book devoted to apparel, titled “Bohemian Threads”, expounds on the beauty of ratty thrift store treasures, garish audacity, and sentimentality. I was struck by both how misguided my childhood attempts at bohemian style were, the black and white boat neck tee shirts failing to approximate French elegance, and by how accurately those passages described the way I’ve dressed since the 4th grade.
It was heartening to read this manifesto in support of eccentric and undefinable taste because it seems to me that everywhere I turn today, I am encouraged to rigidly define my “personal style”. On social media, I am inundated by self proclaimed experts in the field of personal style. They all hawk courses or coaching services that claim to simplify your closet and life. Body type analysts offer the service of assigning you a Kibbe type and recommending the shapes and textures best suited to your features.1 Anuschka Rees, who published the personal style and wardrobe organization guide The Curated Closet in 2016, now offers virtual color-typing so you can find out once and for all if you’re truly a deep autumn or strong winter or whatever.2 The blogger behind M Gets Dressed has developed a political compass style axis on which to plot clothing for the purpose of evaluating an item’s role in your wardrobe.3 Stylist Allison Bornstein went viral with her “Three Word Method”, in which she coaches clients to define their personal style with three adjectives to guide their shopping and closet purging.4
All of this advice and services boil down to the same idea: whittling down your taste into a personal brand.
I still fight the urge to erect narrow definitions for my personal tastes. The urge to curate a signature look or scent or voice for myself hunts me. Every once in a while, especially in the bleak first few weeks of a new year, I manically and impulsively convince myself that whittling my wardrobe down to a single unified color palette or aesthetic would fix everything for me. My name is Gray, at least the name I write under, and my head began to sprout gray threads when I was still in high school. It logically follows that the color gray should define me. Last year I decided to dye a nearly white streak of gray in my hair. It looked bad and didn’t really establish me as a character in the way I had secretly hoped. I wanted a gray streak to turn me into a cartoon character, the kind who wear the same thing everyday and are easily identifiable by their simple visual idiosyncrasies.
I have made some permanent changes to my appearance recently, a couple tattoos and a wedding ring, which have exacerbated my neuroses over the question of “What do I wear?” Sometimes, when I think seriously about the permanence of these modes of self presentation, I feel less like I am assessing my own taste, or even trying to approximate the taste of my future self, and more like I am attempting to establish my own personal brand.
I had a midnight diner conversation with one of my best friends a few weeks ago about the inclusion of personal experience in nonfiction writing and the personal branding of writers in our current cultural landscape. I expressed frustration with feeling like I need to sell myself in order to justify why I am a voice of authority on a topic. I often just want to write about topics I find interesting and struggle to find the personal angle, the connection that allows my own voice in. I hope my friend understood my frustration as disappointment with myself and not a dig at her own practice. I really admire the vulnerability of her work and know that my own experiences color my writing just as much, I am often just unaware of my own predisposition and less capable of self reflection in any meaningful way.
I usually don't trust my own perspective enough to write without backing up my statements with data and the musings of those smarter than I am. So here is a musing of my own, completely unsupported by any study or article I could find: There seems to me to be an inverse relationship these days between class and a willingness to dress up or down.
I mean to say, the most high effort going-out outfits are not worn by the wealthiest girls. Peek into any expensive wine bar in the East Village on a Friday evening and you’ll find white collar professional women in the same business casual they left work in, with barely any day-to-night alterations. Conversely, it seems to me that women with comparatively less wealth dress up fancier for a Friday evening on the town. From nightclubs in New York to Miami to Nashville to Atlanta to Manchester5, working class young women from different walks of life share a common propensity for high-glam night-out looks.
A study in 2019 from University of Melbourne seems to support my anecdotal observation, concluding that “financial inequality can lead women to maximize the limited tools at their disposal, including their looks,” but I’m not sure that this draws a 1 to 1 correlation.6
However, you must admit that there is a broad range of “dressiness” represented in the outfits of women out on any given Friday evening. If you search online for “night out”, “date night”, “girls night”, or “day to night” outfits, you’ll find anything from jeans and an oversized oxford with heels to bustier-as-shirts and thigh high boots. I don’t mean to point out any salaciousness or imply that there is any vulgarity in the clothing choices here, merely the fact that the line between “daytime” and “nighttime” clothing differs greatly among women.
I think about most stringent uniforms of dress I’ve been required to adhere to, handbook dress codes from high school, retail jobs, waitress jobs. In those situations, I enjoyed the experience of changing from my waitress slacks and white blouse into a skimpy dress or low cut top from Charlotte Russe in the bathroom of a Waffle House with my friends before we went to a show. It felt like shedding one identity and emerging a brand new person.
A racial element here intersects with class. Black women in America and the UK spend a lot of time and money maintaining a higher level of grooming than their white counterparts in order to meet the more stringent beauty standard they are subjected to. Cultural forces can make the decision to dress up into less of a choice. As Hena Bryan put it in a Glamour Magazine article on the subject, “For many Black women, services like wigs, acrylic nails, lash extensions, eyebrow threading, tinting or lamination, waxes or laser, and salon visits (to maintain the natural hair under the wig) aren’t mere luxuries – they’re part of an identity that align with our societal expectations of ourselves and one another.”7
Affluent women, especially the sort of wannabe WASPs who proudly claim that wealth whispers, are of course no strangers to extravagant spending on their appearance. But this beauty spending is much more covert: balayage and gray root coverage approximating a natural hair color, relatively short gel manicures, Botox striving to be as inconspicuous an alteration as possible. It is only when these women alter their appearance in a way that is too noticeable, like having “bad work done”, that their considerable beauty spending is considered vulgar.
In the words of Dolly Parton, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap!”8
In his 1991 review of Paris is Burning for the Washington Post, critic Desson Howe remarked on how the competitors in the New York drag ball scene depicted in the documentary donned drag not just to glam up as hyper-feminine alter-egos, but to visually embody any identity beside their own. “Not only do the competitors dress up as beautiful women and Upper West Side matriarchs, they become college students, tough street kids, prissy executives, construction workers and Marines.”9 As explained in the documentary by veteran queen Dorian Corey, “realness” within voguing culture refers to the ability to pose convincingly. That agileness of appearance is an important skill for individuals who are not afforded the comforts of stability and conformity. Within the context of drag,
The chameleon-like approach to self presentation benefits those at the edges. The impoverished are not allowed to have a set in stone appearance. From work uniforms to dressing up in a “respectable” manner for interactions with bureaucratic entities, clothing is highly dictated by context. Covering tattoos for a job interview or borrowing a suit for court appearance can function like a visual code switch. The ability to do so convincingly can make the difference between a new gig and a harsh sentence.
The wealthy and successful have the luxury not only to buy fine garments and refrain at will from activities that could soil fine garments, but also to disregard conventional dressing altogether in favor of always dressing exactly like themselves. These idiosyncrasies are not eccentric in the same way a kooky aunt with gray pigtails is eccentric, there is no camp at play. The marching to one’s own drum here is instead renegade, militia like, in a very American individualistic sense. These elites have achieved, through immense wealth and unchecked power, total personal freedom and they are not willing to shake that foundation by engaging in any form of drag.
The tech mogul’s singular uniform is both a powerful visual brand and a public testament to their monastic dedication to their work. More than that, I believe, the tech mogul uniform is a brazen display of obstinance. A founder who would capitulate to dressing up in a suit and tie for a board meeting could give the impression that he would further bend to the will of the board. A founder attending a board meeting in jeans and a hoodie communicates a lack of respect for their authority.
Speaking of Bezos and his ilk, I think that Lauren Sánchez’s peekaboob bra moment at the 2025 Trump inauguration is a fascinating example of these dynamics at play. Sánchez, an entertainment reporter from Albuquerque before her engagement to the world’s second richest man, dresses provocatively and has had very obvious cosmetic surgery. One might think that her rapid ascension in class would subject Sánchez to the chameleon-like vibe-matching behavior that many wives of wealthy men partake in. Instead, her insane new level of wealth allows Sánchez to show up to an event as austere as the Presidential Inauguration with a lace bustier on display.10 By refusing to alter her own personal style to appropriately blend into the occasion, Sánchez was kind of big-dogging anyone who dared to take the political theatrics seriously.
Designers, like tech moguls, are fond of their minimalist uniforms. Phoebe Philo dresses like Steve Jobs. Karl Lagerfeld wore a black tuxedo jacket with a white shirt, black skinny jeans, and dark glasses. Muccia Prada commissioned Milan’s most exclusive tailors of children’s clothes, the Ferrari sisters on Via Bigli, to produce a cohesive wardrobe of practical clothing in an adult size.11 By obtaining this Catholic school inspired uniform, Muccia Prada positioned herself as outside of the influence of fashion and, therefore, above the influence of her peers.
I am far from the fringes, a college-educated middle class white girl, but I still engage in a fluidity of personal style that is demanded of me by the space between my career and social life. When I buy clothing, items are filtered into my closet as an item I can or can’t wear to work, an office job that requires I dress somewhat professionally but still demands too many foot errands and too much heavy lifting for cute shoes. I work in apparel design and cannot show up dressed as casually as my superiors do because they wear $500 designer sweatshirts and can tell with trained eyes that my sweatshirts are cheap. A designer sweatshirt is as business casual as a cardigan from TJ Maxx, call that girl math or whatever. I dress a certain way to go to the doctor in hopes that I’ll be taken more seriously when I bring up my weird and easy to write off endocrine issues, professional and slimming. What is the point of developing an all encompassing personal style if that means I would still have to adhere to these limiting restrictions when I’m having fun with my friends?
Loved reading this!!!!! I could just see you with the grass in your hat heading to school!!
Also could picture you looking thru the paint chips at Home Depot…….
and finding an idea for your next “ look”. More, more!!!! 🥰🥰