What is style? (I defy...)

After reading a Lifo piece on 'the others', the alternative influential people of athens, which included DJs, bloggers, musicians, artists, I discovered Greek fashion blogs. I have to say, I am a bit slow with the Greek blogosphere, and I am always very happy to see something new that I like. The ones I follow are Fashion Architect and Streetgeist. They are very different from each other, visit in each of them will show you what I mean, but they both care about style, and recently I have been asking myself the old question, what is style?

We all have some ideas about what it is, what it means to have it and how it works. Hallow Kitty once told me that style rests on mix and match: one expensive piece with H&M trousers for example. In general, style seems to be something very personal, almost innate, intuitive, something that people either have or don't, it seems not be able to be easily acquired and definitely not purchased. The problem is that style means something different each decade and it is easily confused with fashion. So, these days, for men, style usually means nerd-chic: oversize black-rimmed glasses, checked shirts and cardigans. For girls, I am not sure: I think vintage (perhaps because I like vintage), oversize glasses (again) skinny jeans and ballet pumps. But this is not style, and it pisses me off, this is just a cheap imitation of Vogue.

All of this makes me think that style is to be able to go against fashion and superficial trendiness and still look fashionable and trendy. And that's why I think that streetgeist captures style perfectly: alkisti and aris photograph people who ooze individuality and seem to defy any good fashion rules. They sometimes seem to have tried too hard, and this, for me, is always off-putting: I think a necessary ingredient of style is being (or at least giving the impression of being) effortless, anything that looks thought to perfection looks very clinical to me. But in general the people photographed by the streetgeist guys look oblivious to fashion trends and magazines. They look like aliens, you cannot pinpoint them chronologically. And therefore they look stylish and cool.

If style then is defying superficial trendy rules then being stylish is a deeply revolutionary act and therefore it carries my seal of approval forever. (Viva la revolution siempre!)