I DIDN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO DRESS, I FIGURED OUT WHO I WAS DRESSING FOR.
I've been interested in clothing for as long as I can remember. By thirteen, I had already figured out that getting dressed could be more than getting dressed. Clothing could be expression. It could be armor. It could be a way of finding your people, testing the boundaries, or quietly telling the world something you weren't quite ready to say out loud.
I spent years learning the rules anyway. I worked in retail. I managed stores. I built wardrobes, studied trends, styled people, and learned how clothing actually works on real bodies and in real lives, not just on moodboards. I started writing about style in 2012, eventually stepping away to get treatment for a rare form of cancer.
And then I changed....A lot.
I came out. I questioned the binary I'd been dressing inside of. I rebuilt my relationship with my own clothes. And eventually, I realized something that changed the way I think about personal style entirely: Most people don't actually need help learning how to dress. They need help figuring out what they're trying to say. That's the work I do now. Ten years after I paused my first attempt at a career in style , I came back to it with a completely different understanding of what style could be. Not as a set of rules to follow. Not as an aesthetic to achieve. Not as a list of pieces everyone supposedly needs. But as a language, a Stylexicon. A way of translating the person you are, or the person you're becoming, into something other people can see.
THAT'S where VJS began
I don't believe you're bad at style. I believe you've probably been given bad instructions. We're surrounded by systems that want to tell us what looks good, what belongs together, what our bodies are supposed to wear, what men wear, what women wear, what is flattering, what is appropriate, what is timeless, what is trendy, and what you should buy next. Sometimes those rules are useful....but sometimes they aren't yours.
My approach to personal style starts somewhere else: you.
Who are you?
How do you want to feel?
How do you want to be perceived?
What parts of your wardrobe already belong to that person?
And what are you still wearing because somewhere along the way, you learned you were supposed to?
Yep,
that's me...
I don't want to put you into an aesthetic. I want to help you develop a way of getting dressed that actually makes sense for you.
I've spent more than a decade working at the intersection of clothing, identity, retail, and personal expression. But the most important credential I have isn't a title, it's that I've had to do this work on myself. I've been the person trying to dress correctly. I've been the person questioning the rules. And I've
been the person who eventually realized I didn't need to keep asking whether I was doing it right. I
needed to decide what was right for me. That experience became a methodology and that methodology became the Stylexicon: a living vocabulary for thinking about clothing beyond the boxes we inherited.
Because sometimes there aren't two right answers. Sometimes there are more.
And sometimes the most useful answer is the one you didn't know you were allowed to choose.
So, what happens when you stop dressing according to an aesthetic and start dressing according to yourself?
That's the question I'm still exploring. You can explore it with me through Clothes Don't Have Pronouns, my Substack. Or, if you're ready to stop thinking about your wardrobe as a problem to solve and start treating it like a reflection of who you've become, let's work together.
