I've been on a recent shopping spree. It was bound to happen as last year I tore through approximately FOUR pairs of pants. I've gone the skinny and straight route, something I thought I would never do not necessarily out of disliking the style, I just have this pair of monstrous calves that I can be insecure about from time to time.
Fashion crossed my mind when I observed that about 60% of the pants I had procured over the past week were straight leg. I find that straight cut pants are just the skinny equivalent for people with big calves. When I wasn't buying clothes, I could not tell the different between skinny and straight, they all looked the same to me.
After this week, my conclusion:
"Style and fashion only diverge with the passage of a sizable amount of time."
- Christine, on her blog
There were many conclusions that I came across in the many postings about "style vs. fashion," the most popular being about how fashion fades, but style...persists, stays the same, is immortal. Yes, all of that.
The most helpful blog I found in relating my conclusion was the Style v. Fashion page from Samantha C's Style Pick. What I liked was her citation of an article from Psychology Today about how to have style.
My interpretation: "Style is what makes the artist. Fashion provides the tools."
- Christine, on her blog again
Was it a massive change in persona that led the majority of my wearable pants to become considerably skinnier? By some odd means of convergent evolution, my style is now fashionable? In my clothes-less year, in addition to assessing my own wardrobe, I couldn't avoid looking at the ways other people dressed and ask myself "would that look good on me? Would I wear that? Could I wear that?" Even to those who don't follow fashion , it's not hard to find people in a crowd who do. Even more so, since fashion does dictate what is in stores, it was hard to find things similar to what I tore up since a number of years had passed since I acquired those clothes. That, my friends, is divergence. Regardless of style persona, people have to work with the time and with what is available. If we consider "things available at the time" to be clothing sold in stores as a premise based off of three sentences ago, then perhaps style and fashion are closer friends than initially perceived.
By no means am I down playing anyone's style. Nor am I saying that to be stylish you should get with the times. Fashionable? Maybe. Stylish? I've always felt that style flourishes out of limitation whether it be monetary, body type, weather, or time.
To be a great artist, do you need to have every tool possible at your disposal or just the ones the you use the most? Any artist would pick as you also don't need to use every tool to create something amazing. Any tool used would be dictated by what is available at the time and I don't think that's ever stopped anyone from expressing themselves.
