Some part of our style is inherited
There’s a photograph of my mother wearing a blue denim jacket with her hair combed out in an Afro that reminds me of the power that photographs have in our personal style. The daily repetition of standing in front of where you hang your clothes and deciding what to wear is inseparable from what you feel when you look at photos in a fashion magazine, stills from a runway show and editorials on your Pinterest feed. Style is a feeling. Photographs of people wearing clothes that they feel beautiful wearing function as one of the connections between ourselves and expression. It is an outpour of self-expression accompanied by captured moments of the world’s feelings sewn into garments. A denim jacket to me is not just hundreds of threads of blue dyed yarn cotton put together. It is not just a jacket that I can just throw over my shoulders. It is a form of self-expression that I took from my mother in that photograph. When you see me wearing a denim jacket, you see how I feel about a moment in which my mother felt like the most beautiful woman in the world, so how I can not feel what she felt? Even though she donated the jacket, I have no doubt that she passed down to the current owner what she passed down to me by keeping that photograph. Something as mundane as a a photo album in her drawer, a collection of moments where fashion, style and my mother were in a relationship contribute to how I dress. I believe that our decisions on what to wear daily are not just decisions, they are a part of ourselves that we inherited. Is there a photograph of someone you love wearing an item you have to have in your wardrobe?
