How influential people use personal style to craft their identity

Exploring personal style with Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, and Steve Jobs

May 01, 2024

When I was younger, I was obsessed with fashion magazines. I stacked them so high they formed the Leaning Tower of Pisa next to my bookshelf. Those magazines represented the timeline of my youth. The pre-adolescent Chilean magazine Tú (“You” in English) was later exchanged for the more mature yet very celebrity-center Seventeen Magazine, which was later switched to the transitional Teen Vogue magazine.

I’d flip through those magazines, scanning outfits like searching for a needle in a haystack; no accessory went unnoticed, and no designer or brand was left unidentified. I was looking for clothes that represented the person I wanted to be. Button-down blouses were my staple for a while, but of course, as a teenager, the person I wanted to be changed on a monthly basis. That was the fun of it. Every new magazine edition was filled with possibilities.

As a teenager, I misunderstood many things, but I was convinced that personal style is a means of self-expression and communicating values. While flipping through the pages, I was looking for outfits so my exterior was coherent with my interior.

Suddenly, adulthood arrived, and, like a switch, my interest in personal style was turned off.

Transforming wardrobe worries into style inspiration

I went from looking for clothes that made me feel the best version of myself to looking for outfits that served more as office costumes. Then, while working from home, the remaining atoms of my interest in personal style dissolved. Suddenly, I’m wearing sweatpants every day.

Nowadays, looking for clothes is no longer an activity I look forward to but a stressful and overwhelming task. What type of style is most faithful to my personality? What message do I want to communicate? What garments match my qualities? It’s burdensome. Sweatpants are the easiest choice.

But all these years of repeating the sweatpants + hoodie combo left me missing my old passion for personal style. I’ve been feeling like I betrayed my younger self.

Right now, there’s no coherence between my exterior and interior.

A few weeks ago, after years of working from home, I was notified that I was returning to the office. I was horrified.

My childhood BFF, Lizzie McGuire, is always relatable.

Instead of panicking, I took it as an opportunity to rekindle my relationship with expressing myself through clothes. And because I want to do that deliberately (and because I already made a trip to the mall, which was intense and unsuccessful), I’m looking up to individuals who embodied their principles and philosophy through their personal aesthetic choices. I’m taking fashion lessons from Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, and Steve Jobs.

Emily Dickinson: Simplicity with significance

We are starting in Massachusetts in the 19th century with poet Emily Dickinson, who, since her thirties, dressed exclusively in white.

The garment belonging to Dickinson that survives to this day, a white cotton pique dress, is comfortable, easy to clean, and does not require a corset. She must have liked simplicity since her gown is a conventional and practical attire of the early 1880s. The t-shirt and sweatpants of the day.

What stands out is what dressing almost exclusively in white possibly represents. There are several hypotheses. The three most realistic ones are:

Spiritual devotion: Her white dress might suggest renunciation, purity, spiritual devotion, escape from the daily world, or fierce dedication to art. English and Literature Majors state that Dickinson’s habit of dressing in white resulted from “her frustrated love for married man, [and] that she dressed in white in order to be the priestess at the altar of love.”1 That’s so dramatic, I love it.

Functionality: Let the writer be comfortable. It’s known that she retreated from the larger society, so she possibly stopped changing into day dresses or visiting clothes, a contemporary practice, and started dressing in a gown comfortable enough for writing.

If functionality was the decisive factor, her style choice helped her embrace who she was and what she did. I also approve. Still, she was a poet, so I don’t think functionality was the decisive factor.

Obsession with death: Now, here we are talking! This theory states that “it could be that wearing white represented an obsession with death, or on the other side of the same coin, eternity, both subjects treated extensively in Dickinson’s poetry. It might symbolize purity or vocation as a poet, or maybe it could be her alternative to association with organized religion.”2

Either way, there’s no doubt that whiteness had a particular position and bore some sort of personal significance in Dickinson’s life. What she wanted to tell remains uncovered, but the dress is still a literal embodiment of her identity.

I wish I had such an iconic and meaningful piece in my closet (sweatpants and hoodies do not qualify). Yet, finding it is a challenge that will keep me ~~visiting the mall~~ entertained.

I learned through Emily’s white dress that we can define meaning in our style by making conscious decisions about what we wear.

Frida Kahlo: Defying convention

We are now traveling in time to 20th-century Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City. Its most famous resident, Frida Kahlo, empowered herself through her art and fashion choices after suffering a devastating near-fatal bus crash at the age of eighteen, which left her bed-bound and immobilized for prolonged periods.

After the accident, she incorporated her physical disabilities into her fashion choices by decorating and painting her corsets and orthopedic braces, transforming them into artistic expressions of her identity and strength.

She was eccentric, a communist, and a disabled person who devotedly and meticulously chose her clothes, accessories, makeup, and hair to construct her own identity. Her clothing and accessories were frequently adorned with political slogans, symbols, and imagery related to leftist causes, such as communism and socialism.

Her successful attempt left her with an enduring legacy in art, feminism, and cultural identity.

Her Mexican heritage was shown through her embroidered huipil blouses, long flowing skirts, and colorful rebozos (shawls). She often adorned herself with indigenous jewelry, including necklaces, earrings, and bracelets inspired by pre-Columbian designs.

She also defied societal expectations of femininity by embracing her unibrow3, even emphasizing it with an eyebrow pencil, rejecting conventional standards of beauty that dictated women should pluck or hide their facial hair.

The look was hyper-feminine and, despite how iconic it is today, very atypical for what was worn by most of the Western world in 1940. She used her striking appearance as a political statement, crafting her style to reflect her mestizo identity and allegiance to Mexican culture.

I admire how she rejected conventional standards of beauty. She’s a clear example of how we can use our style to send messages and support the causes that are important to us. The next time I'm unsure about a garment or outfit because it's too risky, I'll think, Would Frida approve?

Frida Kahlo extended her creative process from the canvas onto her own body. For her, life was theater, and fashion was her costume.

Steve Jobs: Shaping the uniform of innovation

A black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 original fit jeans, and New Balance sneakers make one of the most famous attires of the present time. Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, started wearing this outfit as a uniform by the end of the 1990s.

This look seems like an extremely simple and modest choice, but it was a deliberate decision. What surprised me was that he had ordered it from the famous Japanese designer and stylist Issey Miyake. He aimed to develop a uniform that would not distract him from work and detach him from competitors like Samsung, whose leaders always led their presentations in classic suits (yawn).

Miyake deliberately chose each element:

The black turtleneck was universal and appropriate for every situation.
The Levi’s blue or light blue jeans were comfortable and convenient because, unlike trousers, they didn't wrinkle.
The grey New Balance sneakers were the finishing touch. According to Issey Miyake, they suited Steve’s image “pretty well”.

While he aimed to show that those leading Apple were not like everyone else, he also built a strong personal brand through clothes. He was giving the message that, like him, his products are different from everything else available on the market.

As a marketing professional, this is a brilliant way to use personal style to strengthen one's brand. Steve Jobs is this century's embodiment of exterior and interior coherence and of manifesting his principles through style.

For Jobs, clothes were not just pieces of fabric that covered the body but a tool for communicating messages to achieve goals. In the way he dressed, you could see his commitment to simplicity, functionality, and user experience in product development. His personal style embodied his principles and philosophy of creativity and excellence.

It also came in very handy for him. As Steve Jobs famously said, by selecting a uniform for himself, he ensured he had one less decision to make daily.

When I find a style I want to maintain over time, I’ll create a capsule wardrobe4 to simplify the daily decision of what to wear.

The culmination of my obsession with fashion magazines led me to 151 West 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan in 2012, home to the Condé Nast Building, the editorial of Teen Vogue magazine, and other leading fashion magazines worldwide.

I was eighteen and visiting New York City for vacation, so I jumped at the opportunity to meet my favorite editor: Teen Vogue’s Fashion News Director, Jane Keltner de Valle.

A cold email led me to walk through the halls of the magazine, which, through bold editorials, showed me that style exists to help people be their most authentic selves.

*I would apologize for my outfit, but it was 2012, so you get it.*

When I look back almost twelve years later, besides cringing at my chosen outfit, I feel nostalgic for my enthusiasm for personal style and fashion in general. I longed to be one of the Teen Vogue editors and write to encourage teens to express themselves genuinely through clothes and accessories.

I’m sad I lost that in adulthood, but I’m eager to apply what I have learned from now on. I’ll make an effort to express my obsessions through clothes using symbolism, as Emily Dickinson did, and be fearless while going against the conventional standards of what’s cool nowadays, like Frida Kahlo. At the end of the day, I want my style choices to be deliberate, like those of Steve Jobs.

Embracing and expressing one’s unique identity and worldview through personal style is a powerful communication tool that can inspire creativity, innovation, and social change.

I’ll start using this tool wisely.

-Catalina

Do you have recommendations from Substack publications to follow that write about personal style? I started following
Irene Kim (김애린)
recently and would love to read more style-related ones.