Notes on style and the doomscroll

Fashion is no stranger to flux. It is arguably the most poignant manifestation of the ephemerality of all things excreted by markets and conglomerates. Whereas designers attempt to give a shape to the mood in our society, we use clothes to inscribe the richness of our internal worlds onto our bodies. For those new to the world of fashion, and wanting to build some sort of style, trekking into the world of fashion can be an arduous and confusing journey as you navigate what type of clothing makes you feel at home in yourself, and what doesn’t. It’s a process of endless trial and error that doesn’t ever really end. Style isn’t something that is entirely dictated by your personal desires either; what you wear is in continuous contest with what other people wear, politics and the rigmarole of trends, where your own wardrobe marks both your place in the world and your detachment from it. But despite the changing nature of our world, we’d still want something solid for ourselves — something that lasts, or in other words: a wardrobe we can call uniquely ours.

As someone who’s been “into” fashion for the past 15 years and following the industry and its trends at varying intensities over the period, I’d still grimace at the idea of giving someone style advice — perhaps even the notion of “finding your style” in general. Nobody can do this self-exploration for you. Some will argue that a cohesive style doesn’t exist, and that our tastes constantly change — especially in modernity, be it out of necessity or desire. Or even that we intuitively copy each other and nothing of ours is really “original”. But even if this may be true, it doesn’t satisfy me. Maybe it even makes me somewhat depressed. And despite the critical fashion theory insights I’ve read (at my own expense) over the years, my temperament still finds itself drawn to the “uniform”. Be it the Alan Delon’s trusty beige trench coat in Le Samourai, the quirky gothic disposition of Donna Tartt and how it manifests in her tailoring, or Takeshi Kitano’s Yohji suits in Hana-Bi — there’s just something irresistibly romantic about characters who wear variations of the same thing. And in a world that feels so fluid, I suspect many of us are secretly craving this. A variable turned into a constant — like a rock heavy enough to weather the modern world.

But how? The internet has no shortage of fashion content and musings on style is a tried and true concept that attracts attention from audiences. Almost as a right of passage, everyone ventures through the phase of replicating others, and finding enjoyment in it. But ideally we’d want it to lead to a place where we know what we like on ourselves. You can’t learn to ride a bike by watching others do it — and in the age of content overload, there’s a real risk of being an observer and subservient to the opinions of others, and thereby never really becoming satisfied with oneself. Though it’s impossible to not find inspiration in others, and be influenced by them, I like to believe we can still train our intuition to the aesthetics that draw us in, and those that repel us. In fact, to create anything is as much an exercise of exploration as it is restriction and annihilation.

Among fashion enthusiasts, rarely does one go onto an online marketplace without at least a slight idea of what they want. Some know it exactly and are simply waiting for it to appear, whereas others have a desire for something new, but struggle in giving it a solid object. And those wholly uninitiated to the richness of fashion’s history, delving into the doomscroll might as well be likened to falling through a rabbit hole, where the symbols you meet stop to cohere. With no filters selected it may confront you with a landscape that doesn’t really have a shape: worlds and eras colliding and intermixing into a flattened ecosystem that breeds everything but where nothing sticks out. The filters here function exactly as a way of giving shape to the chaos, your own chaos — that makes sense to you. Though overwhelming, the doomscroll provides a new relationship with the fashion landscape — a type most aren’t used to, but probably wished they had. After all, most of our desires are curated for us through the marketing machine of global conglomerates; with KURB we can define the feed ourselves.

Earlier, I expressed my aversion to the notion of “style advice”, but this same sentiment can be extended to fashion at large, making my relationship with it characterized by a constant back and forth between desire and disgust. Among the arts, fashion has undoubtedly been kicked to the gutters, and many will not consider it a form of art at all. But this can’t be because of some inherent limits to clothing as a form of self-expression, evoking emotions or bonding, it’s because of its entanglement with commercial interests. Like a bonsai tree bound to grow only in one direction, neither it nor we can imagine any alternative shapes, almost as if we are censored from experiencing fashion in new ways. As a fashion consumer, I can still find myself enjoying a well-curated retail store, but am simultaneously saddened by the fact that this is all there is to the field. And the projects capturing my attention are few and far between among those whose marketing playbooks the cynic in me has trained to quickly disregard — knowing it’s mostly the same wine, but in new bottles. For aspiring fashion professionals, the situations may be even more dire; they are shoved down the same lane or be banished to rocky shores where financial stability is much less a given. In short, we need new pathways, and the tools to walk them. Which is exactly why we made KURB.

KURB and the creative spirit in the form of curated second hand stores it platforms was never made just to make resale consumption easier. We want to represent an alternative path towards the joys found in clothing in general, both by helping curators in being seen, and offering consumers a choice that’s not bound to the dominating cycle of fashion. Going down this road as a consumer will not just confront you with an endless array of clothes from different eras, maybe even yourself - as you gain a new perspective of what fashion can be, and what you want from it. For some it can be challenging at first, but it will also eventually give you a new form of solace and appreciation for the richness of fashion, its history and possible futures.