You're Not Expressing Yourself. You're Following a Trend.

Sarah Kanaan
24 hours ago
4 min read

At this year's Met Gala, themed "Fashion is Art", Emma Chamberlain arrived in a hand-painted Mugler gown that took over forty hours to complete and used thirty base colours in its design. She described it as "Very much made for me as I am." Everyone online agreed, it felt so her. But here is the question nobody asked: how much of what feels like us is actually us, and how much is a performance we have rehearsed so well, we can no longer tell the difference?

Authenticity has become the holy grail of contemporary fashion. We all want to appear original, individual, and genuine in the way we dress. But the desire for authenticity is itself a construction, manufactured and performed within a culture that has turned everything into image. The authentic self in fashion is always already a fake. And we keep buying it anyway.

There is a line that has stuck with me: "To be an individual means to be like everyone else in the crowd" (Bauman). It’s something nobody wants to hear, but look around: the desire for individuality produces conformity. The more we try to be ourselves through fashion, the more we look like everyone else. We shop in order to perform a self. And the self we perform is almost always one we borrowed from someone else first.

This is not new. Authenticity originally meant something real, valid, genuine, an original artwork rather than a copy. But the desire for it is a modern phenomenon, born out of mass production. When goods became standardised, people lost access to handmade and local objects. Out of that loss, nostalgia for the authentic was born. The countercultures of the 1960s sought authentic lives outside of consumer society, yet did so while wearing mass-produced Indian dresses, Afghan coats, and Levi jeans. Nothing has changed.

As a reaction to fast fashion and overconsumption, we glorified thrift stores, Depop and Vinted as a way to wear something original, protect the environment, and opt out of the machine. The consequence: Depop sellers triple their prices, thrift stores become curated boutiques, and what was supposed to be an alternative becomes another market. The authentic gesture gets absorbed and sold back to us, like it always does.

Celebrity culture made this visible in a way nothing else could.

Coachella tells the same story in real time. It started in 1999 as a scrappy music-first alternative to corporate festival circuits, fifty dollars a day, festivalgoers in band tees and flannel, there for the bands. Today, it generates over a hundred million dollars annually, and the fashion gets more coverage than the lineup. The template for what festival style is supposed to look like was set by Kate Moss at Glastonbury in the early 2000s: denim cutoffs and wellies, no stylist, no plan, genuinely unstaged. That look became the most copied festival aesthetic of the last two decades. The authentic moment became the uniform. Every April now, thousands of people arrive in the California desert in outfits carefully assembled to look effortless and individual. The result is a sea of identical spontaneity. Everyone is expressing themselves. Everyone looks the same. The festival that began as a rejection of mainstream culture has become one of its most efficient content machines, a place where personal style exists mainly to be photographed, shared, and replicated before the weekend is even over. The authentic gesture, as always, gets absorbed and sold back.

Nobody has understood this better than the celebrities who built entire careers on it.

Hailey Bieber's clean girl aesthetic is just one stop on a longer journey. For a while, everyone wanted the slick bun, the Erewhon smoothie, the glazed skin routine. Then Charli XCX dropped Brat, and suddenly, nobody was a clean girl anymore. We move from one lifestyle aesthetic to the next without ever asking whether any of them actually fit us. We are not expressing ourselves. We are just looking for the next train to board.

Sabrina Carpenter is the other side of this. She built an entire persona around the man-eater archetype, playful, self-aware, unapologetically sexual. It works. It’s distinctive, and people love it. But did she create that persona because it is authentically who she is, or because it is what the industry required to make her impossible to ignore? And does the distinction even matter anymore? If you perform something long enough and well enough, does it become you? When the copy circulates long enough, the original disappears.

And nowhere is this more visible than at the Met Gala. Every year, celebrities perform for a theme. This year, breast plates and exposed silhouettes dominated. Bodies became art. When Bhavitha Mandava arrived in a simple white Chanel look, consisting of jeans and a shirt, the same look she had opened her first Chanel show with, people did not understand it. The comments were cruel: too simple, too quiet, not enough, “Chanel did her wrong”. She was the only one actually being herself and not joining in on the performance. And she was the one who got criticised for it.

In the end, we are all performing for an audience we chose, in outfits we were shown, expressing a self we assembled from other people's feeds. And somehow, it still feels like us.