Style

Fashion Changes; Style Is the Constant Inside It

The definition contains its own distinction, in the words distinctive and often constant. Fashion, as a popular style or practice, is collective and temporary by nature: it is what is being worn widely now, and its value partly depends on being current. Personal style is what remains recognisable about a person's dress while fashions pass through it. Two people can wear the same season's fashion and look entirely different, because each has filtered it through settled preferences: a preferred silhouette, a range of colours, a level of formality, a way of wearing jewellery or a refusal of it, a standard of fit. Those preferences are style. They explain why a well-dressed person's older photographs look dated in their garments but not mistaken in their choices: the fashion belonged to its year, the style belonged to the person.

This is also why style is the more useful word for anyone building a wardrobe. Buying fashion produces a collection of pieces that were each current once. Developing style produces a test that new purchases must pass: does this garment fit the shapes, colours and occasions that already define how I dress, and will it combine with what I own? A piece that passes the test earns its place across several fashions. A piece that fails it is worn while its trend lasts and then stranded. The fashion victim, in the neighbouring definition, is the person with fashion but no style to govern it, altering a look completely from season to season. The fashionista, by contrast, follows fashion closely in the service of a style that stays legible.

One Word, Many Trades

Style is a working term in field after field, and the shared meaning underneath the list is a characteristic manner of doing something. In music, style names a genre, the set of conventions by which a kind of music is recognised. In writing, style covers both literary genre and the practical machinery of the style guide, the book of rules by which a publication keeps spelling, punctuation and usage consistent, and stylistics studies variation in the language use of an individual, such as formal and informal style. In typography, style is one of the three traditional design features of a typeface along with size and weight, its values being regular, italic or condensed. In web design, style is literal code: cascading style sheets separate how a page looks from what it says, so one change of style can redress an entire site as completely as a new wardrobe redresses a person.

The older senses show the word's range. A style is the gnomon of a sundial, the part that casts the shadow by which time is read. Style is also a title or manner of address, including Chinese courtesy names, a formal name used in social life. Even the flower has a style, the stalk-like part of the pistil. These uses seem unrelated until the common thread is seen: in each case style is the characteristic form by which something is identified, whether that something is a person dressing, a writer writing, a typeface printing or a sundial telling time. Fashion uses the word most visibly because clothing is the style most people practise daily and in public, but the discipline is the same everywhere. Choose a manner, keep it coherent, and let it become recognisable. For the fashion-specific vocabulary that grows out of this word, the fashion terminology section, the style blog, trend forecasting and fashion colour trends, and the work of stylists and stylist agencies all develop different sides of the same idea.