After Personal Style

Personal style is esteemed as a virtue whose achievement allows its aspirant bearers, the stylish, to rise above the fleetingness and changeability of fashion. “Fashion fades, style is eternal,” so the edict attributed to Yves Saint Laurent goes. On account of that fossilised aphorism, style promises individual transcendence above the whims of a given social environment. For all its ubiquity across the cultural artefacts that make up “fashion” as a cultural object, it is a curious comment from a designer whose métier is arguably to shift desire towards a season’s latest sartorial propositions. And yet its strangeness is not contradictory: personal style is the form this commercial desire should ideally take, as the tasteful selection of this sweater over that one, choices that distinguish one individual from another. Consume, but consume well. This has become truer as the elite couture clientele of Saint Laurent’s time has given way to a time when his name is owned as subsidiary within a universe of publicly traded global conglomerates whose survival depends on mass sales. The commerce that personal style necessarily implies obtains an ethical patina when it becomes a central defence against being swept away in a sea of commodities. There is a common sense in which failing the test of personal style — becoming a proverbial fashion victim — not only marks the spoilage of poor taste but a kind of moral deficit, too. To have and to maintain personal style becomes one of the contemporary subject’s petty aesthetic responsibilities.