Dictators of Taste 

By Giovanna Lino

Some people are just born with a natural talent for style. They know how to set a trend and how to make pieces work together. Think about it: we all have that one friend who influences your style in some way. Someone who is known to be fashionable. Sometimes, this person's style does not even match your own, however, for their personality, it works. Those people are what I like to call, 'dictators of taste', making bold fashion statements with their daily outfits. 

To dictate taste you do not need to be a social media influencer. A woman in finance can customize her business professional attire and influence her coworkers to do the same. Dictators of taste have a natural instinct to dress fashionably in different settings while influencing those around them to showcase their identity in their outfits. 

GW is a campus with a range of different styles. Being in a diverse city often helps when differentiating GW's sense of style from that of a campus in a smaller university town. An example of fashion influence on campus is GWU Fit Check, an anonymous Tik Tok account that records students' outfits on campus and posts them on social media. There, you can see different students dressing in unique ways. With the widespread reach of social media, a user seeing that video may be influenced by another student to wear something similar the next day to class. 

When talking to my GW friends about their fashion influence, they said that they usually do not pay attention to what other people are wearing and that their sense of style is not influenced by anyone in particular. Some argued that their sense of style is inherent and instinctual, meaning that it is mostly due to how they were raised. Nevertheless, I believe that even though the place where you grew up influences your sense of style, it does not define it. Current fashion trends and what your closest friends wear are just two factors that can also affect your sense of style through your unconscious bias. Subconsciously, you see someone with a similar style and think about ways you can create new outfits with similar pieces of clothing. This happens quite often with myself, since I live in two countries: Brazil and the US. Different hemispheres, climates, and cultures culminate in different fashion senses. Even though it is mostly the same style, the pieces of clothing, fabric, and combinations are different. 

Though we often give credit to social media influencers, there certainly are dictators of taste all around us that subconsciously influence our daily styles. Who dictates your style?