We Asked 6 Influencers To Share The Why Behind Their Style Aesthetic
What's a fashion uniform? It's your everyday armor that helps you slay every room you walk into. It's your trademark aesthetic. It's what makes you, YOU.
Everyone has their own appreciation of beauty and that's what makes fashion so intriguing. Finding your signature style takes time and intention. What do you want the world to see when they see you strutting down the street? Because it's no secret that your style speaks for you do. Wise woman, Alanna Nicole, gave some amazing advice for women searching for their very own unique style that sets them a part from everyone else. "Experiment, live boldly and ignore what anyone else says! For me, if someone is wearing the most outrageous or the most simple and chic outfit, once they are wearing it with unwavering confidence, I admire them so much," she shared with us.
When you think about your favorite fashion icons, you immediately think about their staples and what makes them unique. There's a thing that separates them from the rest. We all need that thing. The right outfit can make you feel like Beyonce on your worst day. So, we decided to gather some dope, stylish women and ask them about their trademark aesthetic.
xoNecole loves a good lewk and we love it even more when it's draping on an ebony goddess. If you're ever in need of instant inspo, these are your girls.
Jennifer Ogumbor-Larbi
Photo Courtesy of Jennifer Ogumbor-Larbi
Age: 30
Location: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Blog/Website: The Jeneralist (www.thejeneralist.com)
Instagram: @thejeneralist
"I pull a lot of inspiration from European street style and pop culture but my style is generally inspired by the places I've been and the people I've met. I realized at a young age that being boxed into a single category of any sort was a limitation I did not like and developed my aesthetic based on that. If I had to choose one word to describe my style, it would be 'dynamic'.
"You might catch me in muted/neutral tones in the middle of summer and in a bright yellow monochromatic look in the middle of winter. I love that I am not limited in style because there are days when I wake up feeling super feminine and others when I feel like rocking a fun tomboy-ish chic look. Sometimes, it's a quirky mix between the two. Regardless of what I'm wearing, I love wearing lipstick and throwing in some fun accessories to help complement and/or elevate my look.
"My style may be undefined but it's certainly a representation of who I am and the dynamic range that I possess. My advice to women searching for their own unique style is to do what works for YOU and have fun with it."
Vic Styles
Photo Courtesy of Vic Styles
Age: 33
Location: New York
Website:www.VicStyles.com
IG:@TheVicStyles
"What I wear is your introduction to who I am before I ever open my mouth. I tend to choose clothes that reflect my lifestyle and personality: mostly sustainable, comfortable clothing, I'm always in a hat, and I love color. Color sets the mood. I think my style fits the woman that I am, it is ever-evolving like I am."
Jessica Pettway
Photo Courtesy of Jessica Pettway
Age: 31
Location: Los Angeles
Blog/Website:https://www.youtube.com/JessicaPettway
Instagram:@jessicapettway
"My style is a literal illustration of my personality, chill with a bit of spunk. I look for pieces that are super functional and sustainable. An oversized thrifted blazer paired with a pair of faded denim and skinny sandals is my aesthetic. It's that effortless, cool girl vibe."
Shannae Ingleton Smith
Photo Courtesy of Shannae Ingleton Smith
Age: 38
Location: Toronto
Blog/Website:TorontoShay.com
Instagram:@TorontoShay
"For me, I like a combination of comfort and slayage (if that is even a thing?). I love high-waisted pants and denim. After having a baby, nobody is trying to see my stomach and a high-waisted pants keeps everything in. Pair that with a statement heel or a dope top, and I feel like a million bucks. I love wearing items that are different. I like to call those pieces 'conversation starters' because people stop you and ask you where you got it from. I find fashion is a great way to connect with others and break the ice in new situations. Rocking sneakers with a suit or a dress is another great combo. For me, I like doing things that are a bit out of the box, but slays at the same time."
Alanna Nicole
Photo Courtesy of Alanna Nicole
Age: 24
From: London, England
Blog/Website:www.alannanicolex.com
Instagram:@alannanicolex
"EVERYTHING inspires my style! Colors are my main source of inspiration – from seeing other peoples' color combinations, to furniture and buildings. I definitely try to take advantage of the surroundings that I'm in and allow them to fuel my style. Because of that, my style changes quite often! Last year, I was obsessed with loud monochrome looks and wild pattern mixing. But this summer, I've been really inspired by interior design. My looks have been more driven by soft pastel colours, which are more whimsical. I also take tons of inspiration from Barbados, where I grew up! Many of my tattoos are of flowers and plants that you can find there – the Pride of Barbados and palm trees! Since I'm there quite often to see my family, I also use the ocean and tropical climate to inspire my looks while there and at home in London!
"My #1 staple is definitely earrings! Since massive statement earrings became widely available two years ago, I jumped on that bandwagon and have never looked back! Since my hair is quite large, having earrings that can still be the star of the show is an amazing way to elevate my look! Also, shoes! I've always been a crazy shoe girl and absolutely love to have colorful and bold shoes on."
Nekiah Torres
Photo Courtesy of Nekiah Torres
Age: Grown
Location: Arizona
Blog/Website: From the Rez to the City
Instagram:@reztothecity
"Coming up with my aesthetic definitely didn't happen overnight. It took years! Initially, I would just find stylish people and copy them but the more I matured, I knew that had to change. I realized that personal style required authenticity because it signifies a considerable amount of self-knowledge. I had to get comfortable with my nontraditional looks and accept the fact that I was never going to look like the individuals I was copying, I had to dress for ME! When putting together looks, I always ask myself: 'What is my message to the world? What am I trying to express through my wardrobe choices?' My answer is: in order to be authentically me, I must always feel POWERFUL! So, my trademark aesthetic is CONFIDENCE and I love it because I love ME!"
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Featured image courtesy of Jessica Pettway
Originally published August 22, 2019
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Joce Blake is a womanist who loves fashion, Beyonce and Hot Cheetos. The sophistiratchet enthusiast is based in Brooklyn, NY but has southern belle roots as she was born and raised in Memphis, TN. Keep up with her on Instagram @joce_blake and on Twitter @SaraJessicaBee.
Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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Rabbit In Retirement: 10 Women Recently Told Me Why They Stopped Using Sex Toys
Y’all, if there’s one thing that isn’t going away any time soon, it’s definitely sex toys — most specifically, vibrators. That’s not just my opinion either because there is quite a bit of data out here to support the fact that a little over half of all women use them. And out of that bunch, interestingly enough, they’re the ones to get the pelvic exams and do self-vaginal exams the most consistently. If you are among them, kudos to you for that.
And while there are plenty of women who will basically do a free commercial that vouches for sex toys (again, especially vibrators) because of how reliable they are when it comes to achieving the Big O and even though there are also articles (and social media posts) that talk about how some women even prefer them to actually being intimate with men (I don’t get that part yet y’all do you), believe it or not, there are also women who have officially retired their rabbit and dildos. Their reasons may not all be the same, yet there seem to be no regrets for most. I’ve got 10 women here who were happy to state their case.
*Middle names are always used so that people will feel comfortable speaking freely*
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Angelica. 37. Single.
“I started using sex toys because I could never cum with a partner. It didn't matter if he was a casual partner, a boyfriend, or even my ex-husband — sex was fine, but I could never ever fully ‘get there.’ A girlfriend of mine bought me a vibrating bullet, and I was hooked! Too hooked because it caused me to not even care if a man was pleasing me or not. And that’s why I let it go. I’m not going to go through my life thinking that the only way I can orgasm is with a device. The man I’m with now agrees. He’s made it his goal to make me not regret my decision.”
Rheya. 29. Engaged.
“I love my vibrators, do you hear me? I mean, you would think that they were actual people, the way that I used to talk about them, because, yes, I gave them names and everything. Don’t judge me! But when my fiancé and I first started having sex, he would ask me why I had so many of them. When I told him that they were a ‘sure thing,’ I guess he took that as a challenge because, one day, I came home, and they were gone. He said he didn’t throw them away, but he did put them up so that we could focus on him being what I wanted the most. Girl, I ain’t looked for them things. He made his point. No — he makes his point at least once a week!”
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Sebbe. 27. Single.
“If you’ve never used a vibrator before, it can be addicting. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So much that it’ll have you out here mad at men for not being physically capable of doing what it can. I don’t even know if it’s healthy to cum in under two minutes, but what I do know is it’s not fair to expect humans to be like robots. So, I guess I’m on a fast from mine. I can’t promise you that it will be forever, but I do need to do some decompressing. I would hate to hate men for the rest of my life because their d-ck ain’t a rabbit.”
Xen. 32. Married.
“I recently watched a girl on Instagram talk about a vibrator can do just what a man can. I don’t know what the f-ck she was talking about. Back in my sex toy days, I was using them to tide me over in between not having a relationship so that I wouldn’t be out here in these crazy streets! But if any woman thinks that some little thing that you can hold in your hand beats a whole, complete, and entire man in their bed…they clearly have not met their match yet. I have, and I don’t have to see another sex toy again, thanks to him. S-it, let me call this man and tell him that.”
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Nora. 40. Single.
“A thrusting vibrator will change your life! I mean, CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I was out here turning down dates, not hanging with my girls, making it late to work — all kinds of craziness because that’s how much my thrusting vibrator was bringing me joy. That’s the problem: it was taking over my life. Women will talk all day about how porn can destroy a man’s view of intimacy, but they don’t wanna talk about that dependency on a vibrator can do to their cooty cat. One day, I threw mine out the window while driving down the street. I wasn’t going to part with it any other way. It was like I went through withdrawals — and that’s how I knew that it had to go. If no man is supposed to have me crazy actin’ like that, I know that no damn sex toy should!”
Quincie. 31. Single.
“I got scared silly out of not using vibrators anymore. I don’t really want to talk about it. I do want to share a warning: it’s probably not waterproof if it has to be plugged into the wall to charge. Folks don’t want to talk about that kind of stuff, but my vagina is happy to be alive right now.”
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Natalie. 46. In a Serious Relationship.
“Shellie, it was actually talking to you that got me to take the pressure off of myself and the men I sleep with when it comes to [vaginal] orgasms. For years, I would think that something was wrong with me because penetration wasn’t enough. When you said that the placement of the clitoris when it comes to the vagina can play a huge part in climaxing, that set me free! For a long time, I would bring sex toys in to stimulate my clitoris while I was having sex. The man I’m with now said that he preferred to do it — and the ways that he’s come up with, I prefer him too. That’s all I’m gonna say about that. Just know that there are a billion ways for a man to ‘apply pressure,’ sis.”
Bree. 28. Engaged.
“My situation might be different from other women you talk to. What I gave up was my rabbit and dildo, although my fiancé and I use BDSM stuff and cock rings. I got rid of certain sex toys because I like the feeling of only having my man inside of me. The feeling is different, and it takes more effort for me to cum, but I don’t mind that. The intimacy of real flesh is so much better than some silicone.”
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Chevele. 25. Single.
“My reason is simple. My first orgasm was with a sex toy, and I kind of regret that. I wanted to share that with a man — not [from having] ‘just sex’ either. I wanted it to be with someone I was in a serious commitment with, but I listened to my friends and put cumming before the intimacy I know I deserve. I’m seeing someone now, and I think I’m ready to have sex with him. I’m glad that I don’t have the dependency of any sex toy. I just want to see where things go and flow. We’ll see what happens.”
Hazel. 33. Married.
“Sex toys are alright. I’ve never been hooked but I won’t lie that they are very consistent. But when you’re in a happy and healthy marriage, the goal of sex isn’t just having an orgasm. You want to share yourself and learn your partner. Sex toys can make you lazy and almost apathetic if you’re not careful. Mine are in the garage. So long as I’ve got this big fine man in my bed, that’s where they will stay. I don’t miss them at all.”
____
There you have it: 10 women who pretty much loved and left as far as sex toys go. I must admit that the thing I enjoy most about these types of articles is that I get to share that there is more than one side to everything. In this case, yes, a lot of women are thriving in their sex toy box. Then there are women who have never touched one. And then there are women who can look back on their experiences fondly and still leave them in the past with no regrets.
My biggest takeaway? If you can’t see life without something, you probably need to scale back a bit. Otherwise, incorporate balance, know your “why” and do you — whether it’s a toy, your man, or…both. #wink
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Featured image by Maksymenko Nataliia/Getty Images