A quest for personal style

Here we have a girl (just so you know, I'm going to be referring to myself in the third person for this post) who is just beginning to understand out who she is. As a freshman in college, she occupies that strange territory between girl and woman. She is not such a fan of college, actually. Not even a little bit. For one thing, she is confused as to why her peers believe The Gap is the epitone of style. She tries to protest by not having a single item from The Gap in her closet. Take the suede jacket she's wearing in the photo, for instance. Purchased at The Salvation Army for $7, this jacket encompasses everything she believes in. It's vintage, so as far as she's concerned, it's the only one available, anywhere. It's solidly constructed. She spent nearly two hours unearthing it, digging through layers of double-knit polyester shirts, high-waisted jeans, and oppressively smelly office softball-team tee shirts, which means that it represents hard work and dedication.


This girl is very very proud of the fact that she manages to be (what she considers) stylish while working with what she makes while babysitting. However, she doesn't feel all that confident because all the cool kids wear clothes from The Gap, and don't get her at all. 


Fast forward a bit. This girl has graduated college, gotten married, had children. She starts to think that maybe The Gap isn't that bad at all. Slowly she begins to incorporate button-downs and khakis and argyle into her wardrobe, and before you know it, all of her vintage pieces are gone, to cousins or her mother or friends or back to The Salvation Army, where some other desperate college student is willing to take them off her hands.


She forgets how much she loved thrifting, the excitement she felt when excavating a vintage embroidered sweater from the fifties, the perfect pair of Levis 501's, a mesh link handbag. And then she finds herself living in Iowa, where malls are far and few and a Goodwill is steps from her door. On day, feeling brave and flush with courage, she goes in, and her passion for thrifting is reborn. She become absolutely engrossed with pilfering thrift stores. With every item she brings home, her heart jumps a bit. Then she moves to Texas, and she searches for more. She learns how to blend her things from The Gap with finds from Goodwill. And, in the end, she discovers her own personal style. 

Sometimes this girl puts her clothes on in the morning and thinks, yeah, I feel great! Other days, she takes a picture and isn't pleased at all. And so she tries again. It's a long process, this personal style thing. But she's starting to get the hang of it.

Forever 21 peacoat; Ralph lauren cashmere sweater; Gap button-down; Gap Outlet jeggings; vintage Justin boots,; Anthropologie necklace.