Why style is more personal than ever in the digital age
'It's not a catwalk,' admonished my mum on
repeat from 1990 until six years later when I left home, a small seaside town on the south coast of England, for university. Over half a decade of despair at her teenage daughter's protracted efforts to find the perfect combination of Levi's 501s, Dr Martens boots and a lumberjack shirt/bodysuit combo for a trip to the dentist would go unheeded as a politics degree turned into a job in journalism, which became a 20-year career in fashion magazines, culminating as Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar Arabia, the GCC's first international luxury title. Within the rarefied environs of high-end fashion, life, or certainly work, was officially a catwalk.
For the rest of the world, however, it was business as usual. That is until 2007 and the birth of the iPhone, with Instagram, the first style-obsessed social media platform (who can forget the sepia hues of a Valencia-filtered photo?), hot on its heels in 2010. Today, with a 12-year-old daughter of my own to coax out of the house in a timely manner, 'It's not a catwalk' rings hollow. The relentless, post-iPhone digital documentation of our lives means that, like it or not, how we present ourselves and the way we live our lives is a conscious lifestyle choice.
Statista tells me that 115 per cent of the UAE population are active social media users (I do fashion, not finance, so please direct queries as to how this stat is possible to my more learned colleagues on the economics desk). This compares to 82 per cent in the UK, 75.2 per cent in China and 69.7 per cent in the US. Like it or not, in the UAE, we are living online and everything we portray in pixels is a lifestyle statement for the world to see, dissect and analyse. It's this culture shift that powers Life, Styled each week in KT LUXE.
As 2025 finds its flow, the fashion industry is at a flexion point. The post-Covid conspicuous consumption boom has, at least in markets such as China, Europe and the US, deflated. Social media has myth-busted much of the magic around luxury goods' creation, leading consumers to question why we are being asked to pay $2,780 for a Dior handbag that we now know costs $57 in labour to produce. Get bombarded with pictures of a cute dress by your algorithm? Try reverse image searching in Google and you'll likely find it, or similar, on Alibaba or Temu, often for under Dh100. Last week, details emerged that fast fashion giant Shein is set to report a 40 per cent drop in net profit, despite sales growing 19 per cent, in part due to a race to the bottom in pricing. Neither the galling margins of the designer handbags at the top of the market, nor the landfill-destined throwaway fashion of the algorithm are sustainable economically, environmentally or emotionally. Value, right across the pricing spectrum, matters. Relevance and authenticity matter. Being intentional and thoughtful about what we buy – maybe not to the extent of my teenage self – is no bad thing.
Whether you lean into trends or actively avoid them, whether you prioritise comfort or creativity, whether you prefer to blend in or stand out; style should always be personal. Life's not a catwalk, but with AI increasingly making decisions for us, I'll be holding onto my personal style and showing up in real life and online on my own terms. I hope you'll join me.
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