I just read “The Style Imparative” on Psyshology Today, which continues to be one of my favorite websites. In it, Estroff Marano clearly articulates the difference between fashion and style. What you wear not only says a lot about you, but it communicates so much more

Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself. Fashion is in the clothes. Style is in the wearer. The distinction could not be more revealing.

Style is, for starters, one part identity: self-awareness and self-knowledge. You can’t have style until you have articulated a self. And style requires security—feeling at home in one’s body, physically and mentally. Of course, like all knowledge, self-knowledge must be updated as you grow and evolve; style takes ongoing self-assessment.

“Clothes are separated from all other objects by being inseparable from the self,” Anne Hollander writes in her classic Seeing Through Clothes. “They give a visual aspect to consciousness itself.” Through clothes, we reinvent ourselves every time we get dressed. Our wardrobe is our visual vocabulary. Style is our distinctive pattern of speech, our individual poetry.

As the speed of all our transactions increases, we need fast ways of transmitting information about ourselves without losing authenticity

Style, on the other hand, doesn’t demand a credit card. It prospers on courage and creativity. Unlike fashion, style consumption isn’t promiscuous or random, at the whim of the marketplace or the urging of marketers. Rather, it is focused on what is personally suitable and expressive.

Style presumes that you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, that life is worth making the effort for.