How style has impacted my life
Groovy pink pants with butterflies on them and a striped orange top adorned with a colored headband messily splayed atop my head used to be my definition of style. While I adored that look and would throw a fit if my mom tried to put me in matching clothes, I do admit it was a bit cringeworthy.
Regardless, that decision to pick my own outfit at a young age was only the beginning of me finding and owning my style, and it has been a long uphill journey since.
It was only recently that I realized what a huge factor fashion has played in my life. Picking out my outfit in the morning can either make or break how my day will play out.
Fashion makes me happy because it is a way to express myself. It is one of the reasons I have dozens of crazy socks. It’s the silly things like cupcakes on my feet that make a Tuesday morning spent in class more bearable.
Style is an “easy way to express myself,” Marygrace Schumann, a sophomore at Columbia College Chicago also noted. “Every time I put something on I’m expressing some part of myself and I think that’s really powerful.”
The power of style is limitless, as style can have an impact on how other people see and perceive you, along with how you see and view yourself, making it such a fundamental part of who we are.
Fashion and my personal style has allowed me to embrace myself and recognize the growth that happens each day, month, year. I look back at a favorite top from years before and wonder how it was ever my favorite, but appreciate it nonetheless.
Fashion has allowed me to express myself in the clothes that I wear and is something that can set the mood of any occasion. This is not to say I am always dressed to the nines in a-line skirts or printed dresses. I love my leggings and sweatshirt just as much as the next college student — I am only human after all.
It is through simply recognizing that my fashion and sense of style evolves on the daily that I feel comforted in knowing I am not stagnant. I am always growing and changing — regardless of how simple the change, as growing fond of a new pair of socks with French Bulldogs stitched into the fabric.
Simply put, “Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak,” Rachel Zoe once said.
A skirt embroidered with flowers and a light sweater with booties is more along the lines of what you might see me wearing on a normal day now. However, I can’t help but smile for that little girl who had the utter confidence to rock whatever without a care in the world — now grown into the young woman who wears her confidence in a more fashionable, matching way.
