Alexa Chung: how I found my personal style

I have always admired people who dress as though they know themselves. One of the most stylish men in my universe is Study Magazine editor Christopher Niquet, a tidy Frenchman so immaculately put together that Idea Books is releasing a fanzine dedicated to him during Paris Fashion Week titled simply “CN”. His take on sartorial semaphore is a sentiment I agree with: “Dressing well is very different from having personal style. I would always prefer someone with a strong personal style I may not admire than someone who replicates something I like.”

Personal style is difficult to talk about because explaining it would mean letting you, and myself, know the rabbit was delicately bunched in the bottom of the hat all along. What I do know is that my style is not simply limited to what I put on, but rather an amalgamation of everything I have an affinity for.

Although nowadays originality is something I strive for, there was a time in my youth when I would barnacle myself with items borrowed and pillaged from the women I admired. It would be remiss not to mention my early twenties, when the look I became associated with was nothing more than a wonky impersonation of Jane Birkin.

Birkin, alongside Chloë Sevigny, Kate Moss, Anna Karina, Annie Hall, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith and a constellation of other women I felt possessed a similar vibration, helped galvanise the idea that good style is a byproduct of a compelling personality. In my attempt to copy them, these women urged me to be more like me.

That desire to “be myself”, or at least be different, has resulted in a fly-in-the-ointment approach to dressing. If something looks too predictable I find it impossible not to want to throw it off with the wrong shoe or a violent misplaced colour. This led me to the once fresh but perhaps now more commonplace combinations, of red-carpet gowns with sensible flat shoes, men’s tailoring with feminine blouses, and sexy pencil skirts with grandma knits. When I wore such things in New York in the 2010s, some Americans, fastidiously loyal to rules such as No White After Labor Day, clutched their collective pearls. I found disrupting something traditional and formulaic amusing, and I think humour still plays an important role in how I dress myself. (I once wore cycling shorts to meet Karl Lagerfeld — oh how we howled.)

As I have grown older, the shapeless mini smocks and flat loafers I relied on have started to feel more mutton than lamb and have given way to a fairly consistent uniform of virtually impossible-to-come-by vintage Levi’s (straight, orange tab, zero stretch to flatter the bum) from Scout in California or Stella Dallas in Brooklyn, and men’s Charvet shirts (they cost an arm, a leg and a torso because the fabrics are perfect and the oversize men’s fit just-so). Classics then are the poles that the remainder of my wardrobe hangs around.

On a recent trip to LA I arrived but my suitcase did not. I pedantically made the uninterested man at the luggage belt write down “R-I-M-O-W-A” in the hopes my newly purchased green trunk would wash up on the shores of Tom Bradley International Terminal. With a seven-day flounce ahead of me and nothing to wear but the pyjamas and burgundy fringed jacket I arrived in (a weird combination in hindsight), my dismay at losing a haul of treasures it had taken years to amass swiftly became enthusiasm for the opportunity to rebuild.

In the same way you wouldn’t want a pilot to fly you long-haul in a tracksuit, perhaps being let go by a woman dressed as a toddler wasn’t the right call

I had just sold and given away a lot of my old wardrobe along with my East Village apartment in New York — a token from my twenties I had clung on to as if holding it would freeze time. Starting afresh seemed right. My first stop was Sandro. There I found a serious-looking black pleated skirt in the style of Celine, which had an air of schoolteacher about it. With my godson in the back of my best friend’s car teetering on the edge of meltdown, I knew I had to move through the next vintage shop I visited like a SWAT team clearing the premises. I came out triumphantly clutching an oversized white tuxedo shirt to make me feel as handsome as a Helmut Newton image, and an itchy nylon green and cream ’70s vest because I liked its irregular stripes.

Borrowing from the boys as a child was what I called getting dressed. I loved wearing my brothers’ jumpers because they made me feel safe. It is an approach to dressing style maven Caroline de Maigret, 47, is equally familiar with. The first time she remembers someone telling her she looked cool was her first day of university: “I went into my older brother’s closet and got one of his pairs of trousers, a classic white shirt and a belt. I wanted to look the same, to make no wrong moves.” Nowadays she strives to look a little rock ’n’ roll while keeping it elegant: “I have the same style 24 hours a day no matter what I do or where I go.” Perhaps good personal style is the conviction that you’re doing it right regardless of the occasion.

Of course, there are times when I wish I had dressed differently. In the spring of this year, to indulge in some online vernacular, I found myself girlbossing a little too close to the sun. Bringing the fashion line I founded in 2017 to a close was painful. The dreary day I had to inform my colleagues their jobs were destined to evaporate I wore dungarees. Looking back now, in the same way you wouldn’t want a pilot to fly you long-haul in a tracksuit, perhaps being let go by a woman dressed as a toddler wasn’t the right call.

In the wake of that time, it has taken a moment for me to love clothes again. But the first signs of healing have appeared in a familiar curiosity for how other people put together an outfit. I chased a man up the stairs at London’s Dalston Kingsland station last week, so I could look at his string vest, pleat-front trousers and moccasin trainers a while longer. The combination was both familiar and alien and made me want to know more about him. And then he vanished. Like a magic trick.

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