Style studies

What a style study is

A style study is a short profile of one person's public style, or of two people whose styles belong together. We choose people known for dressing in a consistent way, often for decades, and ask one question of each: what does their approach teach about dressing in repeats, buying less and stopping the chain of purchases that a single new thing can start?

Each study draws only on the public record: the person's own words in published interviews, profiles in newspapers and magazines, obituaries and museum collections. We do not speculate about private lives, we keep quotations short, and we use no photographs. A designer's own label is named only where it is part of the story. There are no product recommendations and no shopping links.

Why we write them

Most of us learn to dress by watching people we admire. That instinct is useful, and it is also how fashion sells. Features about admired people usually end in a list of things to buy, and seeing the same look again and again makes us want it more, which is the mere exposure effect working alongside the bandwagon effect.

Our studies turn that around. They look for the habits behind a consistent look, such as buying the same shoe for twenty years or keeping a decades-old dress in rotation, because habits can be copied without spending anything. For the method behind those habits, start with uniform dressing and the capsule wardrobe.