Unlock Your Personal Style Potential With The “Outfit Nucleus”
Why a go-to fit can help you figure out what clothes you actually want to wear, and which are at odds with your vibe.
The internet is full of advice on how to do, well, pretty much everything. A lot of this advice is terrible, but this is especially true when it comes to content about the topic of developing, learning, and building one’s sense of “personal style.” Whether it’s a random passerby being interviewed on the street or a professional stylist breaking down a red carpet look, so much of it seems to boil down to something I don’t find all that helpful—the dreaded, hackneyed, cringe-inducing phrase that is “just be yourself.”
If a piece of advice does go beyond this platitude, it often includes some “the journey is the destination” type beat that more or less means feeling your way through the ups and downs of acquiring and wearing clothes, then adjusting based on mistakes. I suppose the idea is that if you do this long enough, one day you will arrive at something that seems like a clearly defined aesthetic. Yet even that doesn’t feel all that concrete to me, which has often led me to dismiss the whole notion of “personal style” as anything truly attainable. At its worst, it’s a mere figment of the content economy’s collective imagination that is endlessly clickable and debatable because of its vagueness. Perhaps its real secret is that there is no secret, as it’s something that is impossible to have. In the immortal words of Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf Of Wall St., “It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s fairy dust.”
But in the interest of pragmatism over pontification and positive vibes over cynicism, I’ve opted here to lay out what I think is a real world, tangible way to think about and implement the “personal style” idea. The concept is new even to me, but it’s one that I’ve, well, personally found to be helpful so far. I call it the “Outfit Nucleus,” and in this post my aim is to a) explain what the hell that means, b) how to implement this concept into your own shopping and fit planning and c) lay out my personal favorite Outfit Nucleus items—meaning stuff I actually wear a lot—in my closet right now. It’ll all make sense once you start reading, I promise. (Or, you know, I hope.) So let’s get to it.
This newsletter is funded by subscriptions. I don’t use affiliate links (meaning I make nothing if you buy a pair of shoes below), and I’ve endorsed these products because I actually like them. Point is, your subscriptions are both extremely cool and very much appreciated. Thank you!
OTHER POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE:
Okay, so, what is an “Outfit Nucleus?”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to JAKE WOOLF to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.