I find the ways that human beings respond to aesthetics to be deeply interesting. We, as a species, seem to possess a nearly animal sensitivity to congruence; that is to say, we are constantly, instinctively scanning for harmonies and disharmonies between things. We can notice when a song and a photograph somehow contain the exact same emotional texture. We notice when a painting reminds us of a particular person. We notice when somebody’s bedroom or dog looks exactly like them. We notice, at least subconsciously, when somebody’s outfit appears to be wearing them, rather than the other way around.
There are certain people who feel so coherent that every object surrounding them starts to look like an extension of their internal world. Their jewelry makes sense with their voice. Their apartment makes sense with their posture. Their makeup makes sense with the cadence of their speech. It all appears to emerge from the same source, the same underlying current. Even if you dislike the aesthetic itself, the harmony is palpable. Something in you relaxes around it.
What we often call a “vibe” is simply this underlying coherence made perceptible. A vibe is not tied to a particular medium. The same emotional essence can exist in a painting, a song, a building, a person, or a coat. Sassy and zany is a vibe. So is softness, sleaze, intellectualism, tenderness, sincerity, and industrial coldness. These things can all be translated between mediums like a kind of emotional language.
Artists do this constantly. A good artist can take a feeling and package it into their medium. Another artist, working in a completely different medium, can package the same feeling in a completely different form. The observer recognizes the commonality instinctively.
Humans are strange ecosystems made up of thousands of feelings, patterns, instincts, aesthetics, and selves layered on top of one another. The world responds to you according to the version of yourself that you present, but more strangely, you also begin responding to yourself that way. If you dress polished and elegant, people unconsciously expect elegance from you. If you dress chaotic and playful, people unconsciously make space for chaos and playfulness. If you present yourself like somebody worthy of being listened to, people often listen. Because humans (including you!) are socially porous creatures, you start actually becoming more of whatever is being reflected back at you.
This is part of why confidence is so reality-altering. Human beings reorganize themselves around certainty. The universe itself almost seems allergic to incongruence; if one person refuses to budge in their belief about who they are, eventually the social world around them starts bending to accommodate the claim. I do not fully understand it. I only know I have seen it happen too many times to ignore.
Clothing is especially interesting because it sits directly on the body. It is probably the fastest and most accessible way to alter your relationship to yourself.
To lead with my own example: for a long time, I dressed almost exclusively in ways that emphasized the intellectual parts of me. Respectably intellectual. Slightly frumpy. Thrifted. Eco-conscious. Clothes that suggested I cared more about ideas than appearances. Lots of sweaters. Ill-fitting pants and unflattering t-shirts. Things with holes (some of you know the horror of my old Converse hi-tops…) that at some point certainly crossed the line from charming to concerning.
And to be clear, that version of me is real. I am intellectual. I do love old things and books and little objects with history attached to them and wearing shoes until they fall off. But over time, I began realizing that I was not merely expressing that side of myself. I was reinforcing it. Every day, I was participating in a feedback loop that amplified a particular mode of being.
The problem was that this version of me was not always especially happy. She tended anxious. Self-conscious. Awkward and afraid of being perceived. Often uncomfortable with taking up space. Frankly, some part of her, somewhere, thought herself low on life’s social totem pole. There was a kind of flattening effect happening where my presentation was emphasizing some of the least joyful parts of my personality while suppressing others that were equally real.
I know now that I am not only that person. I also love softness. Glamour. Nice tailoring. Leather. Leopard print. The occasional hyperfeminine silhouette. Luxurious fabrics. Sleaze. Rhinestones and sparkles. Taken all together: the aesthetic sensibilities of a woman who has a well-paying job but put herself through graduate school on the dime of shady nightclub patrons.
What shocked me was not merely that I enjoyed dressing this way, but that doing so, even in small ways (but nonetheless really mentally and emotionally leaning into it), altered my internal landscape almost immediately.
When I dress in ways that feel glamorous and coherent and embodied and sensual, I become more audacious. Quicker. Wittier. Less fragmented. Less afraid. I make more eye contact. I flirt more with life, and encourage life to flirt back. I speak more directly. I stop shrinking. I become more playful. More magnetic. More alive. Importantly, this does not feel false, which is the part that interests me most.
People often talk about fashion as though it is either superficial performance or authentic self-expression, but this binary is incomplete. Humans are multifaceted. Most of us contain many legitimate selves, many dormant emotional configurations, many possible ways of moving through the world. Clothing does not necessarily fabricate an identity from thin air. Often, it simply calls one forward.
This is also why some outfits feel can “wrong” even when they are objectively attractive. Sometimes the proportions or colours are genuinely bad, yes. But often, the discomfort comes from the fact that the clothing is asking the wearer to embody an energy that they either do not possess or do not trust themselves enough to access. The body knows when crimes of incongruence are being committed. The most beautiful dress in the world cannot save an outfit that is fundamentally disconnected from the person inside it. Conversely, I have seen people wear objectively bizarre things with complete conviction and somehow transmute them into coherence through sheer embodied certainty.
I think this is why style can become something almost spiritual; selfhood is strangely malleable, and aesthetics are one of the ways we communicate with the subconscious mind. If there are parts of you, even unrealized, that are sensual, capable, elegant, playful, dangerous, soft, intelligent, glamorous, or bold, and you repeatedly present yourself as such, eventually a part of you, the doubtful part, begins believing it. And, as we previously established, once you believe it, other people often do too.
So, I think the goal of fashion and style is to become intimate with your own multiplicity, and to notice which modes of selfhood that your chosen aesthetics nourish. In other words, realize that you are not just choosing between authenticity and inauthenticity, but between different authentic modes of self-expression that can help you, each day, become the person that you want to be.
BRONZE FROG 