Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
Back when modems made banshee-like noises and webpages took full minutes to load, the internet was already driving fashion. Whether it was the dawn of e-commerce, the rise of street-style blogs, or the rabbit hole of niche designer forums, being online became a periscope out of the limited “real” world. Later, logging on to Lookbook or Tumblr was a way to find the community you were lacking in your small town. And now, while it remains an IRL medium, everything happening in fashion really happens online, whether it’s TikTok microtrends or Substack essays decrying TikTok microtrends. The physical world’s surrender to the digital realm is something of a done deal.
But what if that’s no longer the case? Along with a rise in analog-ophilia—film photography is back, print books have triumphed over Kindles, tactile hobbies are offering an antidote to screen time—has come a nostalgic mode in fashion. New independent print publications are springing up and luxury houses are paying homage to literary figures. Fashion magazine and book archives (like the recently opened Library 180) cater to Instagrammed-out creative directors looking for new visual fields to till. Even online, everyone now aspires to be offline, chronicling their digital detoxes and offering tips for looking at your phone less, though they broadcast these messages from their phones, of course. Pinterest declared 2025 to be a “digital detox summer” after finding that searches for digital detox-themed vision boards went up 273 percent. And being offline is increasingly a luxury, a sign that you’re not subject to the whims of Slack or scheduling software. In the same way that, circa 2022, food motifs became a fixture in fashion as a symbol of plenty, time away from your device has become the ultimate flex.
It goes along with a broader lamentation of the way social media has led us all to dress the same. Or, as ELLE’s own fashion news editor Alexandra Hildreth said, in a statement that has spawned multiple think pieces, “You can tell someone’s screen time from their outfit.” The more you’re plugged into the matrix of microtrends, the more it bleeds into your everyday wear, along with styling tics like pairing soccer shorts with ballet flats. If being, as they say, extremely online has such a chokehold on the way we get dressed, what happens when you take the off-ramp? And is there really one?
Phoebe Taylor, a YouTuber who has explored these questions in her videos, is, thematically enough, “vacationing slightly off the grid” when we speak. But even before this sojourn, Taylor often used her channel to think through the intricacies of carving out personal style in a digital-first world. For example, the back-and-forth about male gaze fashion versus female gaze fashion, which she calls “slut-shaming in a different font,” inspired a video about “the demonization of sex in contemporary fashion dialogue” and how “sexy” dressing has become vilified in online style discourse.
“The direction that fashion is going in right now, and I think is particularly a product of it being so online,” she says, “is that so many of the trends that are considered fashion-forward are heavy in juxtaposition and contrast…almost purposefully incorrect things going together.” (Like the ballet flats with Umbros mentioned above.) That began as a way of proving oneself different from the herd, but now we see it replicated endlessly. Once, we went online to escape the normies around us; now those normies are living in our phones, inescapable.
These days, Taylor says, she gets her inspiration from people who don’t follow fashion, like “an 80-year-old man who was in the ice cream line one night, a guy friend of mine who exclusively shops at Walmart and Goodwill and isn’t doing the whole ‘thrifting for cool trends’ thing, and my neighbor in her 50s who has had the same wardrobe for 20 years.”
Emulating those who are somewhat out of the loop has helped her feel freer to put clothes together intuitively, rather than shopping from an influencer’s link. “Being online also makes you scared to make certain fashion mistakes,” Taylor adds. “It scares you away from wearing things because you don’t want to be scrutinized by all these New Age fashion rules that are totally outdated ways of thinking about fashion, repackaged into modern dialogue.” Rather than lash themselves to the algorithm, many creators she knows are giving up the game, and “using that as a reason to just make what they want anyway.”
That said, it takes a lot for even an aspiring Luddite to completely disconnect from the contemporary style landscape. Even if you spend the summer touching grass, that online panopticon remains embedded in your brain. Not to mention that “so much is trending right now that even purposefully avoiding trends is not necessarily going to lead you to your authentic personal style,” Taylor says. “If you avoid all of them, you’re still strategically trying to do something that you might not necessarily avoid if you weren’t online at all in the first place. It’s hard to find your authentic balance of, ‘What trends actually would captivate me enough to want to participate in them if I weren’t online, and which ones am I just participating in because I am online?’ To disconnect yourself from it in order to be authentic, without also accidentally disconnecting too much to the point where it’s not authentic.” If anyone figures out that calculus, let me know.
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