Feeling burnt out from trying to keep up with fashion or style can look different for everyone, but a common sign is the urge to “burn it all down.”

Thoughts like “I should just throw everything out” or “Maybe I need to be a minimalist” . These statements sound like clarity in the moment, but for me they usually meant overload, not insight. They often led right back into another round of aesthetic hunting and buying.

One thing I noticed during those times is that I kept defaulting to black.

At the time, my “style brain” tried to explain that symbolically. Maybe I had a dramatic essence. Maybe I wanted to look chic, mysterious or intimidating. But really, I was just overloaded mentally. Black is an anchoring color for me. It lowers visual input. I can wear it and stop thinking.

My burnout wasn’t about identity confusion. It was about system fatigue.

A big contributor to that fatigue was the constant “translating” I was doing. Because I’m good at pattern recognition, clothing-as-language felt like an interesting game at first. I could see the references, the signals, the codes. But over time, I started mapping everything. Every outfit, every person, every image became something to decode. It kept my mind in analysis mode all day long.

Even during my “black phases”, the semiotic thinking would creep back in, usually triggered by outside feedback. I remember wearing a charcoal sheath dress to lunch and my sister joked, “So, do you think you’re in the The Devil Wears Prada now?” We laughed, but my mind immediately went to archetypes. Could I pull off that role? Was that what I was communicating?

That’s what learning about style helps you do, though, take someone else’s way of seeing things and make it part of your own identity.

But it was never about fitting into a specific archetype. My sister was just giving meaning to what I looked like. I didn’t have to shape myself around her opinion.