Are we being inspired or influenced?

and does it really matter?

Jill Kortleve (@jilla.tequila) and Binx Walton (@binxwalton) wearing black top and skirt (Binx from Alaïa Spring 2025)

Black pareo worn as a top and a black skirt I thought would look just as cute on me as it did on Jill and Binx, and which I plan to wear to an upcoming Álvaro Díaz concert (link to my favorite Álvaro Díaz songs).

The other day I went to a store and picked up something that could have been pulled from one of my favorite fashion muse’s feed. On my way to the dressing room I felt the need to ruin all the fun by asking myself whether the impulse to try it on was about the item itself or about the comfort of knowing so-and-so would totally wear it.

Is this what I do now? Filter everything through someone else’s gaze? Live in a state of perpetual false consciousness where I don’t even know if my desires are even mine?

Maison Margiela, Fall 2006 RTW.

I observed the questions without jumping to easy answers or spiraling into guilt. I put the item back simply because I didn’t need it. Proof is that for the life of me, I can’t even remember what it was.

Of course, the questions didn’t end there. They never do. They expanded after the Prada show and conversations I’ve had with a couple of my internet friends about overexposure, what having style really means, and how much of it is a reflection of such overexposure. I thought about my mother-in-law who has great style and no social media, about the people I pass on the street unbothered by wrinkles on their shirts and, by and large, the whole fashion conversation.

A few days later while driving back from dropping off my kids, I had a thought that might not be the answer to my existential questions but did give me a new perspective. What if the woman wearing something I screenshot three times in a row is not influencing me at all, but instead reflecting a version of myself that I can’t always see? A mirror image that reveals the beauty I sometimes fail to recognize in myself but can see through her?

Leandra whom I follow since 2012 when I arrived in NY and shook so many beauty and fashion paradigms for me, and Melissa Jane Tarling both wearing The Row hat.

Not The Row but vintage velour fur hat I found for $35 in perfect condition

and wore with an oversized t-shirt to run errands and pick my kids up.

There’s something powerful in this, something I hadn’t considered in all the discourse about influence and overexposure. When I was younger, there was no instagram influencers, no one on TV that looked like me—at least not in the leading roles. No one who could reflect my mirror image, only unreachable ideals and conventional novela beauty. And sure, those ideals are still there—Instagram faces, etc.— but now there’s a diversity not only of faces, but of ways of embodying and relating to clothes. More importantly, now we get to choose who makes it into our moodboards and trick the algorithm to a certain extent. That was never an option before.

Denise Soued and I both attended SCAD during the same years, yet we never met. Instagram did its thing, and I’m so thankful to have found her because read what Denise wrote for the Cereal Isle: “I grew up Catholic in Mississippi, my parents immigrated from Central Mexico to open restaurants there, and I came to New York in 2013 after I finished college. I think part of why fitting in was so hard is because my parents were immigrants. I looked different, I spoke differently — I used to wonder if I was saying the right things. In Mississippi, it’s so much sameness. I wanted to be part of the sameness. But I guess it’s funny because I dress to stand out now. And I do often think to myself, “You’re probably going to get laughed at,” but I push that aside and remember this is for me.”

Through Denise I could see myself wearing a lot of things that bring me joy and that I wouldn’t have thought of wearing before, crocs included. I wore this on Monday for school drop-off.

Should I stop feeling so guilty about following the women I follow if what they offer isn’t just a curated lifestyle and shoppable links, but a mirror in which I can recognize my own potential? If they are muses we return to, not necessarily to copy their outfits verbatim, but to tap into that feeling—that sense of possibility, that reminder of who we are when we struggle to see it ourselves? A reminder that we, too, are creative and can access that creativity if we put in the work and tap into our childlike curiosity?

All the real-life mom style, all the vision, and all the substance via @nho_journal

Actual outfit I wore for school drop off, pilates (leggings and sports bra underneath), and then writing. Inspired by @nho_journal.

And maybe that is the line between inspiration and influence. One pushes us to create, to act, to discover something in ourselves. Influence? It tends to fuel derivativeness. But even that’s not always a bad thing: great artists start with master copies before finding their own voice—they learn technique through imitation before arriving at something entirely their own. They learn the rules so they can brake them later on their own terms.

Artist Li Saumet whose very personal interpretation of Caribbean idiosyncrasy through her style has always fascinated me, along with her stellar music trajectory.

I couldn’t help but think about Li Saumet as I put this together to write at home. These are my home slippers, and since my law school days, I’ve always liked wearing a high bun to do any kind of reading/writing/studying (the equivalent of rolling up your sleeves), which has since evolved into wearing hats or bandanas.

Is it possible that through imitating those we admire, we begin to see our own beauty, power, and creativity, and eventually stop needing any mirror but our own eyes?

Chloé and Isabel Marant are missing out on doing a collab with the real boho queen: Eva Fox (I wrote about her here). Her commitment to her vision and love for turquoise belts take my breath away every time.

A touch of Eva with a turquoise belt and suede on an outfit I wore for school drop-off and workout.

Because at the end of the day, everything we admire in someone else, there’s a good chance we already have within us. And authenticity might just be an understanding that we exist in the context (🌴🥥) and that we are a product of the inevitable circumstances that preceded us, but also of what and who we choose to expose ourselves to.

All I wanted on my moodboard before a trip to LA in March 2020 was Joan Didion during her California years. The trip, of course, didn’t happen because everything shut down the day we were supposed to leave.

Vintage 70s skirt from Etsy I could not wear in LA but have fortunately worn a lot in FL.