There is a particular kind of woman who has always known what she likes without being able to explain it.

She reaches for something and knows immediately. She puts something back and knows that too. She has been making these decisions her whole life, quietly and without fanfare, and they have accumulated into something that is entirely her own. It’s her taste. It might not be precisely “good” taste, but it’s hers and that’s enough.

She didn’t really build her aesthetic, but uncovered it over years of paying attention, trying things out, keeping pieces just because they felt exactly right, of walking away from things that were almost right because almost was never quite enough.

Let’s talk about that uncovering. And about what happens when you finally stop trying to acquire a style, a taste, and start trusting the one you already have.

Cost per wear is just girl math, but sometimes it’s a lucky side effect of choosing the right thing to wear

I have a few pairs of jeans, you know, the usual suspects. Three different blues, a black, a white and some that are harder to justify on paper, a pink, a khaki, a sweet floral that I cannot bring myself to regret. The cost per wear on most of them is, if I’m honest, quite high. They get an outing occasionally, when the mood is right and the occasion fits.

Apart from one pair.

They were expensive. But I wear them three times a week. With a t-shirt. With a blazer. With shirts and jackets and boots and flip flops and trainers. Whatever the day requires, these jeans go on and simply work. They make me feel joy. They are right. So right that they have inspired one of the core items of Slightly’s first capsule, because that feeling, of a thing being so exactly right that you reach for it instinctively and it delivers every time, is precisely what Slightly is trying to make.

It isn’t only the jeans. Most of the clothes I wear on repeat produce the same feeling. And it extends far beyond clothing. I will walk into a home store and gravitate immediately toward one object among hundreds. A vase, a plate, a piece of art. I am drawn to it before I have consciously processed why. Instinct. Years of taste being quietly formed, decision by decision, until the knowing became almost instantaneous.

RISING ABOVE THE WHITE NOISE

Here is something that happens to most of us on a regular basis. You get dressed. You feel good. You leave the house. And then you open Instagram. Someone is wearing something that makes you look at your own outfit differently. A stylist has posted a reel about the three things that are ageing your wardrobe. A woman whose taste you admire is wearing something you would never have chosen and it looks extraordinary on her. By the time you put your phone down, the outfit you felt good in twenty minutes ago feels a little inadequate. Your confidence has just ebbed away.

This is an entirely normal response to a feed that of course, shows you people at their most visually compelling. The woman who looks effortlessly put together has usually tried on four things and has a photographer who knows her angles. The stylist whose reel made you feel behind is selling you a problem so she can sell you the solution. The woman whose outfit you envied was probably having one very good morning in a week of ordinary ones.

And that’s okay, as much of it is genuinely useful. The best stylists on Instagram show you trends and principles and ways to wear what you already have. It’s great inspiration, as long as it confirms rather than replaces what you already know. These people can give you the aha moment, or even the recognition that you’re doing something right already. Sometimes you need someone to hand you the language for what you already know but can’t articulate.

But there is a difference between using external inspiration to illuminate your own instincts and using it to replace them entirely. And the line between the two is easier to cross than it looks.

ON TREND?

An example of a trend, Poetcore, combines high fashion with bookish aesthetics and references to literature, and gained significant traction early this year. It celebrates soft intelligence, literary charm and the beauty of clothes that look like they tell a story. Which is a beautiful idea. But a beautiful idea worn by someone who doesn’t actually feel it is just a costume. The woman who has always loved books and worn blazers and carried a notebook, who has been doing this quietly for twenty years without a hashtag is at home with it, actually resents it becoming a “trend”, because she was there first and doesn’t want to share it. But the woman who saw it on Pinterest and bought the whole outfit because it looked like a personality she wanted to try on is probably just borrowing it whether it suits her or not.

The Cool Girl has been a dominant aspiration of the last few years. She is the woman who looks effortless. Whose style appears unconsidered, throws on a white Tshirt and vintage jeans and a blazer she found somewhere and looks, inexplicably, exactly right. She doesn’t try too hard. She doesn’t care too much. And yet everything about her is immaculate in a way that is very difficult to replicate without regular facials, nail appointments, blow dries and sessions at the pilates studio. And even then…

She is aspirational precisely because she appears not to be trying to be aspirational. And she has generated an entire industry of women attempting to acquire her particular brand of effortlessness. The slicked back bun. The clean skin. The perfectly imperfect outfit. The matcha.

But this effortlessness, by definition, cannot be acquired. The aesthetic of not trying very hard requires an enormous amount of trying. And a great many women have spent a great many mornings attempting to replicate a feeling that was never theirs to begin with. Because the cool girl isn’t a style. She is a disposition. And either you have it or you are performing it. The cool girl is cool because she is entirely herself. It’s more of a personality than an aesthetic. That is the whole secret. And you cannot become entirely yourself by copying someone else’s version of it.

The makeover is proof of this. It’s one of the most enduring formats in mainstream media because it flatters a particular belief, that the subject’s taste was wrong and that a professional has corrected it. The before and after. The transformation. The reveal.

Watch the after shot carefully. The subject is standing in something that photographs beautifully, the stylist is satisfied, the lighting is good. But am I the only one who thinks the new woman looks slightly uncomfortable? Because nothing she is wearing is hers. It is someone else’s vision of what she should be. What happened to her history, her accumulation of style decisions and treasures? Is she meant to erase it in favour of this improvement?

The more uncertain we are about our own aesthetic, the more susceptible we become to other people’s. And the more we override our own instincts in favour of external validation, the quieter those instincts become. The good news is that they don’t disappear. They just wait.

YOU CAN'T CONSTRUCT TASTE. YOU JUST SORT OF... EXCAVATE IT?

Slowly, over years of paying attention and keeping things and walking away from things and returning to the same colours and shapes and textures without quite knowing why, every decision, even the wrong ones, was part of the map.

I have often been shopping for that one unicorn piece I have in my head. I scour every shop and site until I have to accept that it doesn’t actually exist. Conversely, when I come across the thing that’s perfect, that I didn’t know existed until the moment I laid eyes on it, there is the immediate and physical certainty. Yes. No deliberation, no second opinion, just the recognition of something that was always going to be mine.

And I’ve come to believe that that recognition is not random. It is the accumulated result of years of paying attention, wearing clothes that work and don’t work. Of knowing what almost feels like. Of having walked away from enough wrong things to know immediately when something is right.

The woman who trusts her aesthetic is willing to act on it without apology and without the long detour through other people’s opinions.

She still notices trends. She finds some of them beautiful and some of them baffling and some of them interesting on other people and entirely wrong for her, while others offer inspiration and new ideas. She follows the stylists and editors whose eye she trusts, and uses what they give her to confirm what she already suspected.

She keeps things for the joy of them. She walks away from things that are almost right. She returns to the same colours and shapes without needing to justify the returning.

And she experiences, more and more often, that particular feeling. The thing being exactly right. The outside matching the inside. The quiet, physical, certain joy of a life that is more and more frequently exactly as it should be.

It’s not necessarily objective taste. But it is hers. And that’s just fine.

If you enjoyed this story, you can find more on Slightly's Substack, Slightly Contrary 

SLIGHTLY CONTRARY