Branded

So I've spent the past 48 hours cleaning my disaster of a room, including my very overstuffed closet.

When I did a post asking about personal style many of you responded with things like "Just make sure you love what you're wearing" I used your advice while cleaning out my closet and ended up giving away 143 items of clothing.

As great as I felt after, there was something seriously disturbing to me about some of the items I had thrown away. More than half of them were clothes from nicer brands that I hadn't even considered throwing away in the past no matter how poorly they fit or how little I actually wore them just because of the name on the tag.

This got me thinking about how drastically my definition of fashion has changed over the past couple years.

In middle school there were 3 categories that you could have belonged to in terms of fashion.

Most Fashionable - wore Juicy Couture and Coach

Fashionable - wore Abercrombie and Hollister

Least Fashionable - wore clothes from Kohl's or Walmart

Being the naive girl I was I fell into the trap of belonging to one of these groups - the first one to be specific. Every time my uncle went to New York he would bring me back a knockoff bag from Coach, Versace etc which I would then proudly carry into school. The Juicy obsession was worse. I got a fully tracksuit from one of my relatives for Christmas a couple years ago and incorporated it into every dress down day at school (we had to wear uniforms so dress down days were a way of showing off "fashion"). All the money I earned went toward buying every color of their signature velour jacket.

I remember on one shopping trip in CT I bought 3 at once with my mom nearly having a heart attack at the register saying

"What is so special about these jackets that you feel the need to spend hundreds of dollars on them?"

Too which I responded by pointing at the J on the zipper and saying " See, the J. The other jackets don't have these because they're not Juicy Couture."

She stared in disbelief and said, " I could make a velour jacket and sew every letter of the alphabet in diamonds on it for the price of that jacket."

Even though I have long since grown from the obsession I was surprised at how young I had been sucked in to believing that the more expensive your clothing was the more fashionable you became.

It also seems that when we are younger and have been exposed to all of these expensive brand names that it makes us more vulnerable to acquiring a false sense of entitlement - a "I'm better than you because I can wear more expensive things" type attitude. It really butchers the word "fashion" when people use it this way. Fashion (to me) is supposed to be a way to express yourself not a contest to see who can squeeze the the most designer brands into one outfit.

It's nice to have purged any remains of that from my wardrobe.

Before

After