On a windy Monday morning, I was walking my usual route for a cup of coffee when the wind shifted — and suddenly, I was back in my mother’s arms, wrapped in a haze of citrus and aldehydes. Someone passing by had been wearing Chanel No. 5, her signature scent. It was so vivid, so unmistakably hers, that even hundreds of miles away, I felt her presence as if she were right beside me.
That moment is why I’ve started to think there’s something deeply assured in finding your signature scent — or signature anything — and never wavering from it. After years of online discourse over what “chic” means, I’ve come to believe the chicest thing someone can do is know what they like and wear the hell out of it until the two become inseparable.
Chic is usually taken to mean polished or elegant, but it’s less about a specific look and more about an alignment — when something fits a person so naturally it stops feeling like a choice. It might show up in a coat they always reach for, a pair of shoes worn into the same rhythm of walking, a piece of jewelry never taken off, or a fragrance that arrives before they do. Across all of it, the pattern is the same: recognition. You don’t just notice the object — you recognize the person in it, and feel that it couldn’t quite belong to anyone else in the same way.
We tend to talk about style as something in constant revision — there’s always a new and improved version of yourself waiting on the other side of your next purchase. With trend cycles accelerating, it’s worth asking how much of what you own actually feels like you, versus the version of you that you think you should be presenting.
I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit my closet is a black hole of vintage pieces purchased with good intentions. After years of trial and error, I’ve finally landed on the silhouettes I return to time and time again. Now, I’m editing out everything else and only buying what earns its place.
I realize that means fewer options, but sue me. I think outfit repeating — with pieces that feel authentic to you — is chic.
This is also why imitation so often falls flat. Entire aesthetics are built around trying to reproduce a presence: Jane Birkin’s undone ease, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s effortlessness, Phoebe Philo’s disciplined minimalism, Princess Diana’s off-duty informality. On another body, in another life, it becomes a costume. Not because the pieces are wrong or look bad, but because what made them compelling was never the clothes themselves, but the person who chose them and wore them religiously until the two became synonymous.
I think of my dad, who like my mom, has worn the same fragrance for as long as I can remember. Not out of habit, exactly, but because nothing has ever felt as accurate to his personality. It’s how I recognize him in a crowd and how I locate him in my memory. Once you’re attuned to it, you start noticing it everywhere: a coat that’s softened into someone’s posture, boots creased by a particular stride, a bag worn down exactly where a hand always rests.
What stays with us about other people isn’t how often they changed, or how closely they tracked what was new. It’s what they returned to — the remarkably unremarkable things that absorbed their habits, their gestures, their rhythm, until they carried something of the person themself.
Long after we’re gone, what remains is the trace we left in repetition: the outline of something worn so often it learned us by heart. That, to me, is what chic looks like.
