the many deaths of personal style
our screentime is telling on us
Mina Le, a fashion/culture vlogger, blames a supposed death of personal style on:
the homogenization-tendency of algorithms
dearth of true subcultures *with cultural coherence & political/social attributes*1 & IRL “scenes,” which have been lost to
the overwhelming pressures to sell out & engage in micro-trends (for influencers) or to simply fit in (for the rest of us insecure and uncertain dressers).2 Our lives are so very online. We lack “third spaces” for people to gather and organically find things
In sum, Mina Le argues that style is less finding the “right” elements to wear—as in, being fashionable—and more about who you are. Basically, style is a genuine expression of self✮ ⋆ ˚
That seems pretty reasonable, if difficult to use. After all, it’s damn hard to be genuine / to know one’s self. As if the self were stable. And it is even harder to be genuine when you are hyper-aware of your own reception.
Topic of today’s Collected Fictions: Does this death of personal style extend to literature & if so, what’s to blame?
When I am trying to wrap my head around something, I find looking for foils, for opposites, helpful.3 So. Q: what is the opposite of the Genuine? A: Irony.
Irony requires consideration of audience. (In dramatic irony, for the exacting example, a character is unaware of something the reader knows.) There are multiple layers in the text for the viewer/reader to slip between.
Irony is a very online aesthetic. It fits with the internet’s capacity for immediate response and regurgitation—take tiktok’s hyperactive ability to turn a joke> into an inside joke> into a joke format (aka, a meme) in a blink of the eye. It prefigures the response of the next person. So the online style adjusts, aware of this mirror, seeing itself in the reflection, inserting distance and deniability, accommodating in advance the interruption of another perspective.
No wonder we are collectively getting exhausted by it.4
What if we are trying to extricate ourselves from an ironic age and scrambling for its opposite?
I’m stealing a bit here from my husband, Samsun. A few weeks ago, as we stepped out of a packed showing of Nosferatu, he remarked on the film’s earnestness. There was some humor in the movie, but every line and shot was delivered straight. Compare with decades of MCU—or even the meta-maximalism of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was heartfelt, yes, but also layered with switchbacks. Everything Everywhere All At Once, in fact, seemed to only be able to access the heartfelt by way of anal-plug-powered multiverse karate.5 Imho Nosferatu was far from perfect, but it really did lean into being a single vibe, an immersive effect…a sincere style.6 Not one part of it felt hyperlinked.
Ironically, this line of thought made me return to Lincoln Michel’s recent substack “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind,” in which he makes a very convincing case about the outsized stylistic influence of visual media on contemporary prose:
We are tv-brained and we are internet-brained. Has irony, brought about by our online-ness, gotten in the way of our developing genuine style? (I fear it may be time to attempt Infinite Jest again.)
Hmm. We are conflating things in this death of style discussion. 1. Style as it relates to presentation of the self (individual—Joan Didion dressed like Joan Didion)…but also 2. Presentation as a group with shared interests (punks, emo kids, hippies)…and 3. Style as an identity goal (I am a petite white woman from California, so I want to recreate Joan Didion’s closet and produce metaphors about the Santa Ana winds).
We tend to talk about writing style in a rather American way, in the same way we talk about talent: you have it or you don’t. It’s individualistic and innate; it’s a-contextual and ahistorical. There are trends, but there are no regional camps, no ‘schools’ (despite the ubiquity of writing instruction), no battling pedagogies or manifestos, not really. With some exceptions, the market is ignored as a driver of style movements. Anyone who has tried to become published (traditionally or self-pubbed) will tell you how much of an oversight that is. As if my style’s genetic line originates with Me. No wonder it so often ends up being a pretty low-level, generalizing-at-best discussion of “I hate MFA fiction” or “literary fiction is elitist and boring” or “genre is plain prose.”
There is a great diversity of writing occurring right now, but so frequently (in fact, just this weekend, most recently) I hear from readers that so many books seem the same, especially within genre categories. They are overwhelmed with choices that seem similar.7
Perhaps there simply isn’t a healthy enough literary ecosystem rn for ‘schools’ and ‘scenes’ and competing visions of what is good taste. There are so few readers, and their attention is so hard to acquire and keep. Books compete with so many mediums of entertainment that are faster and easier to consume. There isn’t enough air to be particular, to be a hater, to defend the fugly as potentially leading to somewhere fresh and cool.
Personal style begins with others, by defining who we are and who we aren’t. If we aren’t among others—only their looming reactions— how can we commit enough to see what our style might become?8
There’s no fix at the individual level for the above, but I wouldn’t want to leave this substack without a positive vision of personal style, and how to nurture it.
Previously I’ve talked about style in terms of cohesion, layering, and limits; I shared a sort of writing mood board as I did. My go-to writing prompt for classes is also about style, although I usually introduce it as a method to generate ideas: the iconically stylish Kelly Link has a lovely bit of guidance in “write from your obsessions,” which advises tracking a set of interests, the ones that we tote around with us, mull in the back of our brains—this pebbling of different influences and inquiries, developed over time. Similarly: At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, one of my favorite lectures was by the speculative writer Samantha Hunt, which was less a how-to craft talk and more a tour of one creative person’s mental space, drawing on many other works visual and textual, in order to create a conversation on the theme of mapping. “Conversation” is an overused word, so perhaps instead we’ll call this a collection.
A collector has a slow, evolving practice of style. And a collection is not discovered by solely looking inward. It is found, again and again, out there in the world.
⊹₊Amanda｡˚
Look I’m a normie but I don’t think “-punk” should be appended to just any trend. I’ve yet to be convinced solarpunk/hopepunk has the juice to deserve the suffix
Very amusing to me to be writing about fashion when I, in my third trimester now, haven’t worn “hard pants” in months
A favorite method, after listening to David Naimon interview Mariana Enríquez on Between the Covers
White Lotus is the exception that proves the rule? White Lotus is also a comedy of manners, something that’s not very common nowadays
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once, and in their day, a lot of superhero movies, too
Anyone watching the show Severance? I’m a fan. Also, I suspect that Severance will be—once we know wtf is going on—another sincere offering, I’m calling it now. Just look how slowly it unfolds, all of a piece
My advice is always this: go physically to the bookstore, firstly. Second, try out literature in translation, or from indie presses, or that is older. Third, switch it up and get a book in a genre you never read
Reading is a way to be intimately among others when alone. But how do we find new books? For many, it is via the internet’s algorithms