Capsule #77 ft. Juno Kelly

Hello hello,

Lots of people have been talking about personal style and trend fatigue recently, and now here is the Capsule issue on the topic. If you have any thoughts or feelings to add, I’d love to hear them in the poll after the essay.

We’re about to hit peak December mayhem — sometimes it feels good and sometimes it feels impossible. Just pointing that out! It’s normal, we’re okay, it’s fine to sit back a little bit if you need to.

Juno Kelly is also here on the Hot & Not, and the ‘Adding to Queue’ section has some recs well worth your time.

Thanks for being here!

Holly x

Are we turning away from trends?

Last week, Emma Chamberlain shared a vlog of her closet clear out. In it, she admits that her shopping habits and appetite for following trends became out of control over the past decade. Loving fashion is not a crime, of course, but acquiring so much stuff you can’t even store it (in a huge house no less), and attaching shame towards things like repeating an outfit on Instagram, are feelings and habits worth interrogating.

Throughout the video, Emma shows us every item of clothing she’s chosen to keep, and justifies its existence. She still has a huge amount of clothing, but collectively it’s more pared back, within a narrower set of colours and styles, and has a greater focus on utility. “How are you supposed to narrow down your vibe when you have every vibe?” Emma asks, theorising that what’s left behind constitutes her personal style - like a sculptor carving away at stone to reveal the masterpiece.

Her theory is solidified in this neat quote, which feels primed for Tumblr and new year’s mantras: “The more you have, the less personal style you’ll have.” This excerpt stuck with me, because it’s almost the exact same sentiment shared by writer Haley Nahman in one of her recent newsletter advice columns. A reader is struggling with personal style and cultivating taste, to which Haley responds:

So, more weight to the argument that constantly buying new stuff and chasing trends is having the opposite effect than we might hope. I feel this too — since starting Capsule last year, I’ve become way more switched on to trends, and in turn, what I actually like to wear. Being tuned in to this stuff has helped me recognise that, with each wardrobe clear out, the stuff I choose to part with is often those fleeting trends. The ones that feel like you have a 2-3 week window to hop on before it’s too late, the pieces you instinctively want to photograph to prove you did it, but ultimately, come to feel a little off in a short period. I’m not proud of this, but you can see why it might happen. We watch influencers and tastemakers shift through mini style iterations, dozens in a year, and aspire to be on their level. We also - and this is the classic fashion defence - want to use clothing to show the world who we are. I’m someone who cares about design and aesthetics and enjoys telling people I like what they are wearing. But I’m not as hard line on fashion’s capabilities in this way as you might expect, especially when many of the trends of the last few years haven’t told us much about the people wearing them, other than how much time they spend online.

This is a point amplified by Mina Le, a YouTuber and influencer who spends a lot of time on the internet. Like Emma Chamberlain, she also published a vlog this week declaring the death of personal style, in large part due to algorithmic micro-trends. After building her personal brand on the basis of dressing eccentrically (period dressing, skinny eyebrows, doll makeup), she’s now transitioning into a more minimalistic, uniform style of dressing. She admitted that the constant pursuit of personal style had become a burden, and after a 10-day trial of wearing only two outfits (a black t-shirt with a black skirt, and a white t-shirt with a white skirt), felt liberated. This makes sense in practice - we know that having more choice makes us feel worse, and slimming down options conserves creative energy for elsewhere.

But that’s not the whole picture. Mina also shares that her appetite for dressing a little offbeat began in school, when she started using fashion as a creative outlet, yes, but also to attract friends. Clothing is a social mechanism for finding your tribe, and we’d expect its importance to naturally dwindle as we age and come to feel more comfortable both with who we are and the connections we’ve made. The same logic applies when people move to a new city and want to reinvent themselves - suddenly experimenting with clothing becomes higher priority again.

So where do we land? It seems that the current desire to shift away from trends is a direct response to the accelerated trend cycle of the past few years (Barbie core, fairy core, office siren, clean girl, mob wife, etc), but I don’t think it’s anti-fashion. Some people would argue that a turn towards minimalism is a trend in and of itself, one that will ultimately feel stale and lead its adopters towards more maximalist modes of dressing in the future. Mina admitted that her new look felt like borrowing cues from Joan Didion’s minimalism, making her feel like a "cool girl writer.” This of course gives weight to the idea that we’re cycling through another trend.

One thing that many stylish people do agree on is the difference between fashion (the clothes and the trends) and style (how you wear things, the essence of you). We often agree that true style is inherent, part of someone’s character, and a byproduct of their confidence, which, crucially, derives from the other things in their life.

The good news is that you don’t need to overhaul your personality in pursuit of becoming someone else. But this anti-trend sentiment is telling us that we could do with a little less outside noise, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these sentiments on personal style are bubbling up around this time of year. Our inboxes received 10x the normal volume of emails over the Black Friday period, which now lasts over a week for many brands. We have a long list of gifts to buy, and the cost of living is expensive. A Christmas dinner out with friends will set you back £50, and you might have committed to more than one of them. At the same time, work is busy, your home is cluttered, there’s a pile of stuff you’re hoping to put on Vinted but can never seem to face the task… it’s a lot. Too much stuff, too expensive, too much of everything.

The trend cycle plays its part in our collective fatigue, but it’s not the only issue. It’s a small part of a bigger system that requires constant reminders of how best to cope. By that I mean:

1. Spending more time outside, offline, engaging in IRL activities

2. Having a go at caring less about your appearance sometimes - going to an event without buying a new outfit, for example - and backing your personality to do the heavy lifting for you

3. The eternal reminder that external validation can only take you so far

4. Realising that your favourite thing about the people you love is not their clothing, and that means the same will be true vice versa

5. Remembering how it actually feels to make an impulse purchase (mostly bad despite the initial high)

Finally I want to say that I don’t think its helpful to always be so black and white on this issue - trends are not all bad or all good. They just exist. We can sit 80% of them out, have play with the ones that appeal, and respect their value as a time capsule to show us what a period looked like. I don’t agree with the type of fashion advice written with the aim of preventing you from feeling embarrassed in future about choices you made. That’s part of life!

I’m closing out with maybe the most helpful quote I have seen on this topic, shared in Haley Nahman’s newsletter but I think actually from one of those tech bro threads about how to change your life (sorry):

To buy or not to buy? Keep or sell? Do that thing or swerve it? Look for stillness and let it guide you.

And finally…

News you may have missed from the Capsule universe this week:

• The Fashion Awards was this week in London. See some great looks and moments 

• Sky Ferreira has a new song for Babygirl. She talked about that and her new music here

• Swedish Stockings and Camille Charriere are talking about tights and landfill

• Charli xcx shared the physical cost of putting on such great shows…😢

• But some nicer news: Miista made a special brat boot

• Another iconic Addison Rae paparazzi look 

• Fancy an immersive experience of some iconic runway shows? Of course you do. And here in London you can

• Pleasing, Harry Styles’s brand, has a new collab with JW Anderson, which includes nail polish, sweatshirts, and a penis keyring

• Gabbriette is the “International Sensation of the Year”, according to GQ Australia

• And another divisive shoe for your perusal…

This week, Juno Kelly popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Juno is a London-based writer focusing on internet culture, dating, and wellness, among other things. Her work has appeared in British Vogue, Dazed, The Fence, The Independent, The Cut, and more.

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📺 Watching: The first feel-good terrible Christmas films of the season on recommendation: Meet Me Next Christmas (Christina Milian!) and Hot Frosty (a hunky snowman comes to life). Also the new lo-fi video for ‘Sexy to Someone’ by Clairo, one of my top songs this year, and this exceptional Doechii performance on Colbert. Totally self-choreographed. You have to see it!

📖 Reading: All the album/song of the year lists, from Pitchfork, NME, Crack, Billboard, and Rolling Stone. This newsletter from poet Mark Leidner on all the films he hated in the cinema but grew to love over time, and this essay from Altered on what makes some people more enjoyable to be around than others.

🎧 Listening to: ‘Leash’, the new Sky Ferreira song for Babygirl. If you missed her album the first time around, now is a great time to get into it before we get more music next year. Also some good stuff for powering through the winter runs/workouts/whatever you need: this remix of ‘Eusexua’ by FKA twigs, Petrichor, the new 070 Shake album, GNX by Kendrick Lamar. And here’s Timothée Chalamet’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ if you’re curious.

Everyone’s thinking about work Christmas parties, and in particular, what to do with their hair. Searches for “xmas party hairstyles” was a breakout search on Google over the past week - the top trending query in relation to Christmas parties. A little more nuance: people specifically are searching for “hairstyles for high neck dress” and “xmas decorations in hair”. Bounty thinks you’ll look gorgeous regardless of what you do, but this idea is extremely sweet.

If you’d like to adopt Bounty or one of her friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

In some of the products we recommend, we may earn a small affiliate commission. We only ever recommend things we genuinely like and would buy, and this small revenue driver goes directly towards keeping Capsule going. Thank you for the support. 🫶