Bad Advice

Hang tight, guys, it is almost Labor Day weekend. In 24 hours, god willing, I will be kayaking on a small recreational lake in Ohio with a cold beer and far too many vegan hot dogs, fresh off the grill, churning in my stomach.

As the days get shorter and, hopefully, cooler, you may be told that it is time to put away your white clothing. We here at HALOSCOPE heartily disagree. We believe that he only unwavering fashion maxim you should live by is that all fashion rules are dumb! Brown and black don’t clash. Mixing prints rock. Socks look fun with sandals. You don’t have a “color season.”

Gwenda-lin Grewal's “Fashioning Death” for LARB utilizes ancient Greek etymology to position fashion as a type of “beautiful order”, but goes on to praise the ephemeral, cosmic randomness that defines good style. I much prefer this approach to evaluating fashion choices as opposed to dogmatic adherence to outdated rules:

Some good advice? Read these new HALOSCOPE articles:

HALOSCOPE regular Laura Rocha Rueda defends your right to wear white after Labor Day and dissects the boxes that so-called style experts try to put us in:

Finding Your “Color Season” Is Actually A Trap!

No White After Labor Day, Being a “Bright Autumn”, and Other Style Traps

By Laura Rocha Rueda

From the 2000s style blog, to the 2010s YouTube channels, to the 2020s TikToks, the internet is littered with tips on “how to find your personal style” and “style rules to look more fashionable.” From the creators of “How to find your Three Words” now we have “I got a color analysis! Is my entire wardrobe wrong?”

And frankly I cannot see another one of these clickbait titles without my heart shattering. I hear thoughts along the lines of: “I love this shirt but it’s not in the colors of my season. Do I need to get rid of it?” And my answer is no! If you love the shirt wear it!

To me, these color analyses that define your undertone in order to determine what colors you should and shouldn’t wear are equivalent to Vogue calling wearing white after Labor day a “sartorial sin” in the year of our Lord 2024. The same Vogue article traces this outdated idea back to the Gilded Age (!!!) when wearing white in the summer had a specific function: keeping the body cool. But personally, I do not want to live like they did in the 1870s. I like social progress, in the same way that I like personal style being… well, personal. If we flatten “finding your personal style” to a limited color palette defined by a season, then we will miss out on the real, deep, beautiful experimentation that comes with having a truly unique personal style. You cannot follow the rules if standing out is your goal.

 Rachel Tashjian once wrote about this on Opulent Tips and she didn’t put it lightly: “SORRY BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN HAVE STYLE AND YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M IN FACT NOT SORRY!!!!!!!!!!”

Personal style requires committing the sartorial sins that Vogue seems to fear. Tashjian’s point in Opulent Tips is that personal style is actually a lifestyle, and that people who have it a) strive for it their entire lives, and b) are subversive. I’d argue that finding your “color season” is another one of those cheat codes that seem helpful to people who are lost in fashion, but in reality end up causing people to lose themselves. 

According to style analyst Ellie-Jean Royden, the goal of finding the “right” color palette for a person is to use fashion to highlight their natural features. But like the No White After Labor Day rule, the concept is, well, old. It was popularized by the book “Color Me Beautiful” by Carole Jackson that was published in 1987.

In a color analysis done for Canadian influencer Christina Mychas by Danish influencer Signe from UseLess, they conclude that Mychas color category is Cool, Clear, and Deep. They then try to style a button up shirt with a light green and white stripe pattern, and indicate that for Mychas to look her best in it, they need to add more contrast, so they decide to layer a black blazer over it, or, alternatively, a black turtleneck underneath. But the shirt by itself looks great! On her! It simply has a different energy! 

The risk with these videos is that people at home are then focusing on defining their own color scheme or season or category to find out what is wrong with their wardrobe. They are refraining from buying unique pieces because they are not in their palette. They are having meltdowns because they must now declutter their entire wardrobes. What a nightmare.

While in principle I agree that we may feel our best in specific colors and may gravitate towards them, putting ourselves in a box will only hinder our personal style. And if you are fashion inclined enough to be curious about finding your personal style, but not confident enough to trust your own instincts or look a little crazy sometimes, odds are these rules and tips and tricks are only confusing you, causing you to over-consume, and creating style overwhelm. 

You cannot follow the rules if being yourself is the goal. 

Debunking a few more dumb rules:

Getting insanely worked up because Stacey and Clinton dulled this queen’s sparkle:

Stanford Law professor Richard Thompson Ford’s Dress Codes is a fascinating and entertaining history of sumptuary laws and clothing mores from the middle ages to the present day, examining how strict fashion rules have always played a role in maintaining social structures and political control:

And, finally, some satirical fashion advice from The Atchison Daily Globe, Kansas, August 29, 1896: