On Style, Imitation, and the Art of Becoming

A girl sits beside a picnic table, her tortoiseshell headband carefully placed, red lip precise, her Hermès-adjacent bag resting at her side. Her style is cool, controlled, deliberate—black top, black pants, a look assembled down to the last detail. It reads as if it stepped straight out of the 90s.

And I’ve seen a million more of them online.

It reminds me of the “cool girl” era—the performance of effortlessness. You were meant to be beautiful, but not trying. Polished, but never admitting it. The kind of woman who could “crack a beer with the guys,” or “eat a burger,” and still somehow exist within a very narrow idea of beauty. I think about the pendulum often—how we swung from body positivity in the 2010s to something much thinner, much more controlled again now. Culture shifts. Aesthetics follow.

There is a moment when something beautiful stops feeling like art and starts feeling like imitation. You can see it most clearly in fashion—when a look is so precisely replicated that it no longer breathes. It sits on the body like a memory that doesn’t belong to the wearer.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about why that happens.

We often talk about inspiration as if it’s a straight line: one person inspires another, who inspires another, and so on. But that isn’t how creativity actually moves. It moves in loops. Architecture shapes art. Art shapes fashion. Fashion reflects culture. And culture, in turn, reshapes architecture. It is a living system, constantly translating itself across mediums.

You can see this clearly in the contrast between Art Nouveau and Art Deco. One is soft, organic, almost dreamlike—curves that mimic vines, hair, water. The other is structured, geometric, forward-facing—lines that echo skyscrapers, industry, progress. These weren’t just aesthetic choices. They were reflections of how people were living, what they believed in, what they were building—both physically and emotionally.

And that same conversation is still happening now, just in quieter, more personal ways.

Fashion is where most of us participate in that loop without even realizing it. But there’s a difference between participating and copying.

Copying is easy to recognize. It looks like stepping directly into someone else’s closet and wearing it exactly as they did. The silhouette, the styling, the energy—it all belongs to someone else, preserved too carefully to become anything new. It can be beautiful, but it often feels distant, like a photograph rather than a life.

Participation, on the other hand, is messier. It requires translation.

Media plays a huge role in this. What we watch, what we idolize, what becomes popular—it all quietly shapes what we think is beautiful, desirable, worth imitating. When a certain look becomes culturally visible, people naturally gravitate toward it. But visibility can blur into repetition very quickly.

I’ve noticed this especially with the resurgence of interest in figures like Caroline Bessette-Kennedy. Suddenly, entire corners of social media are filled with women recreating the exact outfits, the exact silhouettes, the exact mood.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I’ve been part of acting and cosplay communities, and I understand the joy of embodiment—the art of stepping into something that isn’t “you” for a moment. Cosplay is intentional. It’s expressive. It knows what it is.

But everyday style is something else.

Because style isn’t meant to be a replica—it’s meant to be a language.

When you copy someone exactly, you’re speaking in their voice. When you’re inspired by them, you’re learning from their vocabulary but forming your own sentences.

I love Audrey Hepburn. I love the legendary high-waisted trousers of Katharine Hepburn. I love Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the effortless hair of Farrah Fawcett, the polish of 90s supermodels, and the restraint of Caroline Bessette-Kennedy.

But I am inspired by them—I am not trying to become them.

I think about Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, explaining how a simple cerulean sweater was never just a sweater. It was chosen for you, filtered down through designers and collections and decisions made long before it ever reached your closet.

Nothing we wear exists in isolation. It all comes from somewhere—art, culture, architecture, history—whether we realize it or not.

The difference is whether we engage with that process consciously, or simply inherit it.

I’ve been learning this in small, tangible ways. In how I dress. In how I’m learning to care for myself again after spending so long in survival mode. Style, for me, isn’t about becoming someone else—it’s about rediscovering how to exist in my own body with intention.

The other day, I wore a dress that felt like a painting. White, but not quite—washed through with soft violet blues, hints of green, a whisper of peach. It didn’t demand anything on its own, but it invited response. So I layered a peach sweater over it, something that didn’t originally “belong” with the dress, and suddenly the whole outfit shifted. The colors began speaking to each other. Gold buttons added structure, a quiet echo of something more deliberate.

It wasn’t planned. It was composed.

That’s the difference.

Style, when it’s alive, feels like composition. It borrows, but it also edits. It listens. It responds. It allows different eras, textures, and references to coexist without forcing them into a single narrative.

I find myself drawn to art, to antiques, to pieces that feel like they’ve lived a life before me. A small, unlabeled brooch can mean more to me than something instantly recognizable. Not because one is better—but because one feels like a discovery. It feels like I chose it, not the other way around.

And maybe that’s where the question lives:

What makes fashion art, versus fast fashion?

I think it’s this—intention. Movement. Choice.

It’s being inspired by what you love, whatever you love, and allowing it to pass through you instead of stopping at you.

Because the goal isn’t to recreate a person or a moment in time. The goal is to translate what resonates into something that can live now.

And this is where fashion reconnects to art—and to architecture.

Architecture is, at its core, about how we move through space. Art is about how we interpret that movement, how we give it meaning. Fashion is how we carry that meaning on our bodies. Each one informs the other. A structured city gives rise to clean lines and sharp tailoring. A longing for softness creates flowing fabrics and organic shapes. A culture obsessed with progress builds upward—and dresses accordingly.

Then, inevitably, the cycle shifts again.

What we wear influences how we feel. How we feel influences what we create. What we create reshapes the spaces we inhabit.

It loops.

And somewhere inside that loop is where authenticity lives—not in perfect replication, but in thoughtful translation.

That’s why some outfits feel like costumes, even when they’re beautiful. They haven’t been translated. They haven’t been lived in. They’re too intact, too faithful to their source.

But when something has been filtered—through experience, through body, through emotion—it becomes something else entirely.

It becomes personal.

It becomes real.

Because style, like art, isn’t about preservation.

It’s about transformation.