Dressing for the Life You Want, Not the One You’re In

Finding Confidence and Identity Through What We Wear

By Isabella Donovan

Photograph by Serenidy Ryan

Throughout my upbringing in middle and highschool, I used to fear showing my own style. I worried that if I dressed in a way that actually felt like me, it would come across as “too much.” It was easier to blend in and to wear what everyone else was wearing to avoid standing out and to not give anyone a reason to form an opinion.

In more contained environments like middle and high school, identity feels fixed early. People know you, or at least think they do, and that version of you tends to stick. There is a sense that if you deviate too far from what’s expected of you, it will be noticed, questioned and judged. However, college disrupts that notion. Audacious outfit and style choices are more reflective of who we are becoming and not just who we are. In college, clothing becomes an intentional way to test out identity in a space where identity itself is still forming.

My suspicion was that this confidence is rooted from age and independence. However, I found that it is more rooted in scale. At a university like Boston University, you are surrounded by thousands of people who do not know you and, realistically, never will. You can walk down Commonwealth Avenue every day and pass the same faces without ever exchanging names. Anonymity like that does not exist in middle school and high school. In those spaces, people remember who you used to be and that memory shapes how they interpret who you are trying to become. Fear can circulate around testing out a new style because before discovering if you feel comfortable with it yourself, you are often made out to feel uncomfortable by your peers. However, in college, there is no single audience watching you. There is no unified social narrative that defines you. Instead, there are fragments of different classes, different friend groups, different environments and within those fragments, there is space to experiment. What you wear becomes one of the most immediate and visible ways to do that.

On any given day, the same person can move through multiple versions of themselves. A student might dress one way for class, another for a club meeting and another for a night out. Each version of this person's style can represent a slightly different identity. Over time, those versions either stick or fade and there is no judgment or standard that someone has made to feel held accountable to. Fashion becomes a trial and error of figuring out what works presently or long term and what does not.

Dressing “for the life you want” doesn’t mean pretending to be someone else. It is about closing the gap between who you feel like internally and how you show up externally. For example, someone who feels uncertain socially might start dressing in a way that feels more put-together or expressive. They don’t do this because they are confident yet, but because they are trying to become that version of themselves. The clothing itself does not create the identity, but it helps reinforce it. Fashion in college is developmental and dressing for the life you want is really about giving yourself permission to evolve without waiting for validation from others. Through something as simple as what you wear, you begin to build a version of yourself while still having the ability to change and adapt it to your present needs.