Poetcore on Monday. Gym clothes on Tuesday. Your mother’s saree on Saturday. On the quiet end of picking one style.
For a few years, the internet asked everyone the same question: what’s your aesthetic? Clean girl, dark academia, quiet luxury, coastal something. Pick one, build a board, buy the pieces. This September, the people whose job is to tell us what’s next seemed to stop asking.
The runways said: it’s how you put it together
Writing about London Fashion Week, Flair noticed styling becoming more spontaneous — pastels with florals, unexpected textures layered together, combinations that shouldn’t work but did — and suggested the most interesting thing about the season might not be any single trend. In Milan, Who What Wear made a similar point: many looks were about the overall styling rather than one particular item.
Aesthetics became moods, not identities
The named aesthetics haven’t disappeared — literary chic, or “poetcore”, has been one of the most talked-about of the last year. But people seem to wear them the way they choose a playlist: for a day, a place, a feeling. Not as a personality.
India got here first
Our read
Most Indian wardrobes have never had one aesthetic. Kurtas and jeans, sneakers with salwars, office shirts on weekdays and silk for a wedding on Sunday. Mixing isn’t a trend here — it’s just Tuesday. Maybe the rest of fashion is finally describing something a lot of us already do.
And maybe that’s the point. Personal style was never meant to fit in one word. It was meant to look like a life — and lives are rarely consistent.
How many aesthetics did you wear this week? Tell us about your style, lately.
