hey im 19 and i feel like i really dont fit in with people my age and ive been trying to be like trendier?? idk tht sounds lame but i just want to look like a young person and be able to walk into a starbucks or a sephora and not feel like im being judged so hard. im also lightweight sapphic but idk how to incorporate that into my style bc im pretty femme. any advice??

Hi sweetie, 

First a disclaimer- I think you should just dress however you want and try to pump yourself up about the way you dress. Even though you apparently find my fashion sense good (I guess haha), I often feel very insecure about the way I dress. Especially when I wear more flagging clothing (for example, my double venus necklace or my shirt that says “why be racist…when you could just be quiet?”)

I have had kind of an eccentric style since middle school, so a lot of times I did not fit in in that way. Despite this, in high school a lot of people would compliment my clothes in the hallway, so I guess it shifted to a good change. I guess my style is a bit more curbed nowadays, so I can kind of answer this. 

Basically you can take a few different approaches. The easiest way to fit in/classic style is t-shirt and jeans. Very basic. You just buy a few plain t-shirts of various colors (white and black are always pretty much wardrobe essentials imo). You probably want a skinny leg cut of jeans– boot cut hasn’t really been in style since like the early 00′ It’s fall/winter right now, so the color for those seasons are usually blues/wine/mustard (mustard has been very trendy for like the past 3-5 years basically in any season.) Then shoes– I’d say basic tennis shoes (but they have to look like nikes or adidas if you want to look “trendy” honestly looking “trendy” is basically just looking rich. Even if you’re not. I got my nikes on sale for like half off. They were still like $50 though…so…it’s expensive.) I got some REALLY cute shoes from H&M for like $20 though. Or you could buy those plain black shoes from walmart for like $5-10 dollars. Those usually aren’t too bad. IDK how to describe the ones I’m talking about tho. Boots are really in, usually brown. i cant wear knee-high boots because my calves are way too big :-( but those are really in. 

Striped shirts are always trendy. Lets see…light brown skirts are really in right now. Personally, I wear a lot of cardigans that are pastel. I just mainly wear pink/pastel clothes bc that’s what I personally like. If you really just want to look trendy, I suggest looking through a Seventeen magazine and then going to cheaper stores to find stuff that looks like that. 

I feel like 80s type clothing has become very trendy lately too. So wind-breakers, ect. 

So you could go that way OR you could go the way I go and basically I feel like South Korean fashion is like 2 years ahead of us at all times. So you could go to a website like Storenvy or like any website of that type and buy basically any shirt/sweater from there. Also I kind of dress like a 30 yr old business woman, so I just wear dress pants and skirts every day. I feel very gay and look very femme and femme is lesbian because you’re NOT dressing for men, you’re subverting this expectation. 

I am very feminine and this is how I incorporate loving women like explicitly: I bought a double venus necklace that I sometimes wear, I have the same shirt Frank Ocean wore (the “why be…”), and on my backpack I have a pin that says “Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians.”   I have one crop top with a rainbow on it, but I feel like it’s subtle enough that it doesn’t necessarily out me. I live in a very conservative state, so I feel unsafe being too explicitly out–so I feel like I can’t help TOO much in that regard. I feel like I just try to project my lesbian aura the best I can, and that’s that.