By Omia Haroon

TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Depop; my rotations for fashion inspiration are no longer my salvation for an outfit blocked brain. I no longer go to stores and peer at mannequins with entirely new ensembles each week. I cannot force myself to shop on a clothing website. It may sound like I extricated myself from fashion as an interest and as a hobby, but that could not be further from the truth.

For me, finding my “perfect piece” was always an easy task. With the abundance of marketplaces and stores, any article of clothing that I could envision would materialize in a shopping cart. In fact, there were so many perfect pieces out there, the ability to afford them became the main issue. Price aside, with outfit inspo abound, no piece, it turns out, stays the perfect piece. There was always something that could be better. And I could find it, with ease. A queue would form in my head, and I’d save to buy the next piece that was going to completely transform my wardrobe. But, by the time I got it, there were new items in line. My favorite skirt with colorful detailing perfectly matches thousands of shirts bookmarked on my computer. But would I know which one was the right one? I could even find a matching necklace, or accent socks, or statement shoes that would complete the look. Finding those items didn’t mean affording them, however, and resulted in hours wasted to defeated window shopping. The endless possibilities and infinite options only made creative expression a suffocating compulsion.

Discussions of fashion on TikTok and YouTube were my main avenues to learning about it. Hauls, styling, trends, aesthetics, and histories flooded my feed. The visual variety and consistent creativity dazzled me, and I craved recreating it for myself. Except, the more I consumed the content, the less creative I felt. My mind siloed outfit options into smaller, more niche categories. It tunneled to curated aesthetics, seemingly fluid, yet quite strict when working with a more limited wardrobe. Most of the creators providing the inspiration made it their lives, and with that came more clothes and pieces. My recreations would never satisfy me, as there was always something missing. The outfits didn’t spawn naturally. Instead, I was training myself to dress like other people, other aesthetics. It just didn’t work. Fashion became frustration–a grossly saturated medium that continued to elude me despite my affinity for it.

Change was slow. A long story, even. Shortened, I ended up doing the typical self-optimization things. I started budgeting, which beyond removed new clothes from the equation (there was never a time I was even affording them!) and I deleted (some) social media. I limit my clothes shopping to the thrift store, for pricing, but also because it limits me. With that prerequisite, I can’t seek out the perfect pieces over swaths of the internet. I can only find something I like that exists right in front of me, and make it work. Now, my outfits are genuinely inspired by the clothing that I own. They come from my wants, feelings, and imagination. I never feel like I am bending my mind to think like someone else. This is not to say that anyone who does fashion differently is doing it wrong. But, in finding my own style, I found my fashion.