God and Personal Style

Photo from the marvelous Coco Avant Chanel

I have loved style and fashion since I was little, and I have always been particularly interested in the way style creates a narrative of identity.

When I was a kid, everyone around me (real and fictional) seemed to be a defined, and therefore real, person in a way that I -- it seemed -- was not.  If I could style myself, define myself, narrate myself, I believed I would finally, indelibly exist.

As I have avidly consumed every visual and written declaration of style to come my way over the years,  the concept of defining a singular or "signature" style has emerged as the holy grail of the style narrative.  To attain this height seemed not only to enter icon territory (paging Coco Chanel/Diana Vreeland/Audrey Hepburn/Jackie O) but to become, truly and at last, oneself.  Surely you don't need to question who you are anymore when when you know you are the woman who wears white men's shirts and hunts big game in Africa/adores florals and drives a red convertible/whatever.  I imagined that to arrive at this (immensely sophisticated, refined) point was to reach a sublime self-realization that would free me from further striving.  I would know who I was, once and for all.  And I'd be free to go ask some other question.

Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 3, Verse 18) that "all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."  

Unveiled faces...transformed into the same image...from one glory to another.  It sounds an awful lot like what I hoped style would do for me, but on steroids: answer all those questions about who I was with a simple, final, "You are glorious and flawless and forever."

Isn't it that what we're looking for when we try to find that perfect lipstick/skirt length/accessory/fill in the blank?  The miraculous transformation into our best selves -- into what we were made to be?

God prescribes we get there not through a honing of self, but through a shedding of self through immersion in Christ.  This demands so much more of us than the pursuit of style does.  As C.S. Lewis writes, "I have come not to torment your natural Self, but to kill it.  No half-measures are any good...Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked -- the whole outfit.  I will give you a new self instead.  In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours."


One day, when I am a much better Christian than I am today, style will mean something different for me.  It will mean whatever He decides to do with me when I have "handed over my natural Self."  And even though I can't seem to loose my terrified grip on the controls yet -- hello, Romans 7 -- I know that when I do, it will be better by far than anything I ever could have cooked up on my own.