Dressing for Nobody’s Approval
Presenting yourself to the world with any kind of coherent style is genuinely hard, and most people fail at it in spectacular ways. The person who hasn’t checked a mirror since 2004. The guy who thinks Ed Hardy is still a personality. Fashion has rules, but the interesting people ignore them in specific, considered ways—not randomly, not in ignorance, but with a kind of earned defiance that turns whatever they’re wearing into a point of view.
Take Tiffany, 18, from Montevideo. Redheads don’t usually stop me in my tracks, but she’s assembled something out of her grandmother’s wrinkled wardrobe that works far better than it has any right to. There’s a lesson in there about expensive branded clothing versus what you already have access to, but I’ll leave that to someone who owns fewer vintage pieces than she does.
Lorena from Sweden is 22 and wears bracelets and necklaces from Cocoo, which is fine, but what I can’t stop thinking about is her room—this bright, high-ceilinged space with photographs and clothes draped over everything, parquet floors, light coming in from a window placed exactly where a window should be. The kind of room where you’d stay up talking until 4am without noticing. I don’t know much else about her and that’s probably for the best.
Then there’s Mavi, who has apparently decided that the entire fashion industry—Topshop, H&M, American Apparel, all of it—can go straight to hell, because all she needs is a man solid enough to drape herself across. Bold wardrobe strategy. Cruella de Vil would see the potential immediately.
Aren from Detroit is 25 and calls himself a wanderer, which, given the tattoos and the beard and the general lumberjack energy, seems about right. He’s standing in a forest wearing Levi’s and Vans like he was grown there—broken out of some fat, firm bud, born mid-wilderness. Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor would weep with pride.
Finally, Liisa, 14, from Tallinn, who has figured out something it takes most people a decade longer to learn: geography doesn’t determine taste. She’s in Estonia wearing Cheap Monday and Gina Tricot and Pull & Bear, and she knows what’s happening right now. The internet handed her that, same as everyone else. She also hates school, loves photography, and likes music—which makes her exactly as individual as every other teenager, and somehow that’s still kind of charming.