How to Make Fashion Your Slave

We all have to wear clothes. Some of us just have more fun with that fact than others. Okay, first things first Nobody is forcing you to care about fashion if you really don’t want to. But after you read what Brandon Holley has to say, you might realize you’re missing out on some fun.

Brandon is the editor-in-chief of the ELLE girl magazine, a teen fashion and beauty magazine that “celebrates an independent attitude with an international flair.” Here’s what Brandon says:

Don’t be a slave to fashion. Instead, make fashion your slave. Our philosophy at ELLE girl is to get up each day and dress yourself in a way that expresses you on that given day.

People sometimes dismiss fashion as unimportant. But fashion is not shallow, not superficial — if you look at it the right way. Fashion gives you a great opportunity for freedom of self-expression. Autonomy starts with your mind, of course but it can be very much reflected in what you wear. When you dress independently, you tend to think freely. You develop your own personal style.

Style isn’t just what you put on your body. Fashion is what you wear; style is what you emanate. Style is more than simply your clothing, but it also consists of the conversations you have, the way you conduct yourself, the way you move. Audrey Hepburn was so much more than her Givenchy wardrobe; she had true style. The way you walk through your high school with your head up, shoulders back — that will be what clinches your style.

Here are some of Brandon’s ways to have fun with your style:

Dress to express your mood.
Check your mood and then dress to reflect how you feel. Maybe today you feel Marilyn Monroe glam. Tomorrow you’ll feel Vintage. The next day you’ll be Peasant. Just get into the mood, get into character and dress the part.

Don’t be a fashion lemming.
If everyone else is carrying around the same bag, carry a different one. Don’t feel you have to dress like the in-crowd if you don’t feel like it. Be your own person, and don’t feel pressured to conform. I just got together with some of my friends from high school. We were the girls who dressed, well, different from everyone else in school.

Although we took great pride in how we looked, we didn’t bend to the trends. And now, we’re all very successful in what we do and lead creative, interesting lives. We are not like some of our classmates that always went along with the crowd, who are now still part of the crowd in boring jobs. This was the path, my friends and I all discovered that we took in life – still one of the being independent and interesting.

Experiment with fashion.
When you’re a teen, fashion is your oyster. All opportunities are open to you now to try new things with your hair, your clothes. You’ll make some fashion mistakes, but that’s fine; at least you tried. You aren’t supposed to just wake up one day and know your perfect style.

Mix it up.
Style doesn’t mean buying only clothes with labels or designer brands. It might be a jacket from your dad’s closet and your grandmother’s brooch, paired with a button-down white shirt and jeans. Girls with style today are mixing it up, wearing DKNY pants with a shirt from a vintage store that cost $2. They’re wearing their dad’s button-down shirts, his tie as a belt, their own jeans—and looking great!

Be inspired by fashion.

I’m a fashion-magazine junkie but there are other ways I get inspired as well. Here are some of them:

Watch fashion shows for fun and for ideas. I like to go to fashion shows of my favorite designers, like Marc by Marc Jacobs. It doesn’t change my life, but it’s fun and exhilarating to be in this creative environment. There is an enormous amount of artistic expression and there are so many buzzes surrounding the event.

However, you don’t have to actually go to a fashion show to have fun with them. You can read about them in magazines and online.

And you can look at more than the clothes and the trends. I admire the creativity and individuality in the shows and the photography. I love to see how the different photographers take pictures of the same model walking down the runway, and then interpret it so that each ends up telling a different story.

Look to the past.
This idea is from Jennifer Brandt, one of our contributors. Go to the library and check out fashion books from different eras. Grab what appeals to you, say, some sixties new wave French books. Xerox the pages you find inspiring. And buy some old magazines from the sixties and seventies from a used bookstore (you also can get them on eBay, but they tend to be expensive there). Look through them for style inspiration.


Make an Inspiration Board.
I have my fashion editors make an Inspiration Board before every shoot. Here’s a way you can adapt it for yourself. You’re going to pretend you’re a fashion stylist. Go into your closet and say you have twenty items, pull them out. Then raid your mom’s closet (with permission, of course) and your dad’s, for things like a tie you like, button-down shirts, and big jackets. Now . . .

1. Lay out all the clothes around you in your room.
2. Put the pieces together to make different outfits.
3. Experiment with different looks.
4. Take a Polaroid or a regular photo of each outfit.
5. Hang all the pictures on the inside of your closet door, on your wall, on your bulletin board.
6. Label the photos according to what mood or look, they seem to fit.
7. On the days, you don’t know what you want to wear, or feel uninspired, you can look at your Inspiration Board and say, “Oh! That’s today!”

You can even take it a step further and put up pictures of not just clothing, but anything that inspires you—record covers, celebrities,. . . Hey, it could be pictures of Gandhi. Whatever inspires you!

Get your friends in on it.
Sleep over at a friend’s house and put together an outfit of her clothes for you to wear. Then hit your closet for her wardrobe. Wear your “new” outfits to school. (A random funny thing to do is to go into the girl’s bathroom and trade outfits with your friend.

Then walk out and pretend like nothing happened and everything’s totally normal. See if anyone notices!) Get together with your friends for a photo shoot. Take pictures of yourselves in different fashions.