Analog Dressing: Getting Dressed for Real Life
Recently, Women.com reached out to me for my thoughts on a new fashion conversation: “analog dressing.”
The term caught my attention immediately.
In a world where so much of fashion happens on a screen… we scroll, save, shop, recreate, and increasingly ask algorithms to tell us what looks good—analog dressing feels like a return to something much more human, and far more than a fall trend.
To me, analog dressing is an approach to getting dressed that prioritizes practicality, personalization, and creative styling of everyday clothes over scroll-stopping “lewks.”
It’s less about having the right or most current aesthetic and more about developing your own point of view.
And honestly, that’s what my clients ask for every time.
IRL, my clients want to be approachable but still look put together. They want classic, quality clothes with a modern twist, not an outfit that looks like it was assembled for the algorithm.
Their lives are physically active and increasingly fluid: work from home or at a coffee shop, errands, meetings, and casual dinners can all happen in the same day. They need clothes that can move with them through those different contexts.
The practicality of versatility matters to real people. We want our clothes to support our lives, not become another thing we have to perform for.
And I think there’s something bigger happening here, too. We’re collectively craving real human-ness in the age of AI.
Getting dressed is an intimate, ancient ritual through which we express our autonomy and individuality—precious commodities in our modern world.
My small closet keeps me accountable to not own too much.
Personal style isn’t supposed to be something we consume. It’s something we make. And crafting yours doesn’t have to mean abandoning Fashion or pretending you don’t care about trends. It can be much simpler than that.
Give yourself the time, freedom, and grace to experiment with your clothes.
Start by playing with new ways of wearing what you already own: create asymmetry, try unexpected layering combinations, or simply wear something a little differently than you have before, and see how it feels.
MAKE A MESS! Cut an angle into the hem of an oversized tee, use a pin to create a scrunched detail, patch a hole with sashiko stitches, or cover a stain with colorful thread that turns it into a flower. Doodle with a sharpie on a piece of denim like you’re in middle school.
The point is to connect with our clothes and to participate in the making of our own uniquely personal style and POV.
That’s the part of this conversation I really love: the antidote to algorithmic dressing isn’t another aesthetic to follow. It’s simply getting dressed for yourself, in real life, and seeing what happens.
I recently shared these thoughts with Women.com for an upcoming article on analog dressing. I loved the conversation so much that I wanted to keep exploring it here.