Social media floods us with different aesthetics. Endless pictures, mood boards and hashtags of the next new style you just have to try out. Cottagecore, dark academia, fairycore, edgy-this, soft-girl that. Just add a hyphen between a random collation of words, and just like that, you’ve found a brand new aesthetic to buy into.

Sometimes, aesthetics and cores are inspirational, but at other times, they can feel restrictive, unoriginal, and often require spending far too much money on clothes you probably don’t need. What’s the point of fashion anyway if it’s already thought out for us? Shouldn’t there be some kind of process, some sort of individual instinct that drives how we choose to dress?

“Rather than only adhering to one aesthetic, fashion should ... express how impossible it is to just have one version of yourself!”

To investigate this dilemma, I spoke to an old school friend with an affinity for fashion. Fiona You is a fifth-year medical student – so you can imagine how busy she is most days – yet she manages to put together the most intricate, colourful, and runway-ready outfits I’ve ever seen. I know it sounds unreal. A STEM student who knows how to dress? The universe is unravelling.

I dragged Fiona to a poetry reading in typical English student fashion. Huddling together as we walked through the freezing January cold, we started talking about poetry forms. In poetry, a form might initially seem very strict and rigid, but it can force you to think in unexpected ways. As a med student, Fiona often faces restrictions on what sort of clothes she can wear but she refuses to let this stifle her creativity. “It just means that you have to work within those confines. It’s like giving you a prompt!”

On theme for the evening, she paraphrased Oscar Wilde’s argument that, if you know who or what to be, you will inevitably become it and that is your punishment. Fiona says, “If you go for a certain core, a certain aesthetic, you will end up being that aesthetic, no more, no less. You are living someone else’s description.”

Rather than only adhering to one aesthetic, fashion should express your inner self. In fact, it should express how impossible it is to just have one version of yourself!

“That’s why I like all the pictures I sent you. It could be like fifty different people, but that’s basically who I am! All of those personalities pieced into one. And, every day, different parts of that get amplified and other bits get diminished depending on my mood that day. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing! It really gets reflected in the outfit. That’s why every day I put on an outfit and I’m like, is this me? Do I feel like myself? Or do I feel like I’m living for someone else’s gaze?”

“When you have your own style, it’s like a kaleidoscope of all your past experiences, everything that has influenced you”

Fashion seems to be an affirmative practice. When Fiona talks about gaze, I immediately think about social media; with her experience posting outfits online, I ask Fiona whether being a sort of fashion influencer might threaten her individuality and authenticity since there is inevitably some sort of external gaze you need to pander to.

She agrees that there is definitely some pressure. “You do have to play the game a little, even if you are self-knowingly deceitful to yourself. Sometimes, I felt inauthentic.”

“But when you have your own style, it’s like a kaleidoscope of all your past experiences, everything that has influenced you. Like, why be cottagecore, when you can be a whimsical fairy pirate!”

This is Fiona in a nutshell. Her style varies so drastically, that you really can’t put it in one box if you try. With different colours and shapes, layering and jewellery stacking, she has a kaleidoscopic worldview and is letting us in on it.

More interesting than a particular core or aesthetic is your own interpretation of it. You might take bits of one and combine it with another. For Fiona, the fun is in the contrast: “I am a bit of cottagecore, I do like to sprinkle it on top of my dark academia glam-rock outfit as a garnish. It’s so fun! Little ribbons with chunky skull rings, a smokey eye with a little flower earring. Leave them confused, leave them guessing. What core is she? She is just Fifi-core!”

Despite being a self-proclaimed “maximalist to the death”, Fiona also cultivates sustainable fashion practices. She prefers buying secondhand and tries to sell or donate clothes whenever she can. Being more mindful with shopping helps her find pieces that speak to her. “I go shopping with no purpose or aim. If I look for something, the curse is that I will end up just buying that thing.”

Fiona thrives stylistically by creating a dialogue between how she feels and how she wants to feel. Let your mood determine your outfit, and let your outfit influence your mood. This sort of dialogue can extend beyond yourself – why not engage with the internet and its excessive aesthetic cores and trends? Think about which ones inspire you and make you feel like you. She sums this up quite succinctly: “I don’t have to look snatched all the time in order to look fashionable… some days I will just be a texturally interesting potato sack with fun colour blocking.”

Fiona’s own digital dialogues have led her to an obsession with frogs. “With any obsession that I, or people of our generation have, unfortunately, it can be traced back to some dank internet meme.” Draw on anything for inspiration, who knows what might jump out of that internet pond. I tell her this and she lights up, “Yeah, maybe the next hottest thing will be frogcore!” I don’t have the heart to disagree.