Photo by Jeanne Malle/The Choate News
Recently, patterns and daring colors have been filling the streets of the fashion capitals of the world. At Choate, this aesthetic and style is ever-so-slightly becoming more predominant, and these characteristics are incorporated into Sarah Bonnem’s ’19 day-to-day style. She said, “I always try wearing some sort of pattern or print. I also wear lots of big flowy pants, because they are not only comfortable, but also seem to make everything I do feel more dramatic.” When I asked her where her inspiration came from, the Yves Saint Laurent 60’s and 70’s “Rive Gauche” collection immediately jumped to her mind. “He did a lot of fun things and sort of played around with more casualwear in ways that had never been done before.”
She also noticed that a large part of her influence came from a blog called “Man Repeller” that has recently gotten more famous than ever. A part of this website shows the finest street style of New York City, lots of which plays around with crazy patterns and colors. The idea behind the name. “Man Repeller” is the belief that expressing yourself or sharing a crazy sense of style can be done, and mostly should not affect the way people see you or you see yourself, even if does not fit the colloquial, conventional, accepted beauty standard. It is interesting that Bonnem connected a revolutionary moment in fashion that occurred in the mid-60’s with style trends that are still influencing our world. The joining of the past decades with our own time show that the prior modern fashion exhibited the mentality that letting loose and wearing daring items of clothing empowered not only the fashion business but also the people wearing the clothes. Today, many people still come to this conclusion, unaware that these thoughts are not new. Bonnem concluded, “You have to learn to stand behind fashion being a public thing, but still not take it too seriously. There is something to be said for being able to be in a place with what you’re wearing in which — when someone makes fun of it — you can say ‘ok!’ and know that it does not matter.”
