Why Aesthetic Culture Is Ruining Your Personal Style
Personal style is one of our favourite things to talk about here, especially because the fashion world can feel so overwhelming. Knowing your personal style is honestly the best thing you can do. It stops you from chasing every trend, wasting money and dressing like everyone else. And honestly, these days it feels like fewer people really have their own personal style, because so much of it is being shaped by whatever aesthetic happens to be trending at the moment. “Old Money,” “Clean Girl,” “Chic”, the list never ends, and neither does the pressure to squeeze yourself into one of them.
Aesthetic culture is never about self expression, it’s about fitting into a visual category that already exists online. It looks pretty and photographs well, but it kills originality. The more we chase an aesthetic, the less we actually look like ourselves. We want to help you break out of that mindset and start dressing like you again.
We’re not saying you shouldn’t take inspiration from different aesthetics. In fact, inspiration is great. But when you follow them too closely, there’s not much room left for imagination or creativity. Everything starts to feel the same: overly neat, overly safe, and honestly, kind of boring. The key is styling your pieces in a way that feels like you.
So if you feel like you’ve been sucked in (don’t worry, you’re not alone), it might be time to strip things back and get honest about what you actually like. Step away from the trends and aesthetics for a minute and reimagine your wardrobe using the pieces that feel the most you. Stick with it and slowly but surely, your personal style will start to make sense. Personal style is supposed to be weird, and true personal style is inconsistent, it contradicts itself and it doesn’t fit into an “aesthetic”.
Aesthetic culture has this way of confusing taste with trends. You start to think you like something when really, you’ve just seen it everywhere, and the repetition starts to turn into a desire. Seeing something constantly doesn’t mean you have to have it. At the same time, aesthetic culture chases perfection: matching sets, clean lines, carefully curated looks. And that can create a lot of pressure to stay “on brand” and always look put together. It’s one of the reasons so many people struggle to get dressed in the morning. They want to wear something that feels true to them, but feel too deep into an aesthetic to step away from it. So if you needed a sign, this is it. You don’t have to dress “on brand” every day. Wear what feels right, not what fits the aesthetic.
What you want to remember is personal style isn’t about fitting into a trend, a mood board, or an aesthetic. It’s about discovering what truly feels like you, the pieces you reach for again and again, the combinations that make you feel confident, the little quirks that no one else would copy. Trends come and go, aesthetics fade, but style that’s built from your own instincts, experiments, and memories lasts. So step back from the aesthetics on the internet, trust your taste, and start dressing in a way that tells your story, not someone else’s!
