Unpacking Style Class

In and out of the Tibi rabbit hole

In the fall of 2020 I began to hear whispers about an Instagram Live series about style that was blowing people’s minds. “Have you watched Tibi Style Class? What do you think of it?”, an IG friend of mine asked me. I had heard of Tibi, the American clothing brand that showed at New York Fashion Week, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I was much more interested in quirky vintage clothes and old Dries Van Noten, and in comparison Tibi seemed a little lifeless to me. I looked up Style Class at my friend’s suggestion, and because I was searching for new style-related content on social media at the time, I decided to give it a go. I began with the latest episode, but quickly went to the beginning to get the whole scoop. There was a backlog of about 20 episodes, and I devoured them.

If you’ve never watched Tibi Style Class, it’s essentially a weekly, hour-long Instagram Live session, where Amy Smilovic, Tibi’s creative director, and her team talk about personal style, trends, styling tricks, and clothes (mostly Tibi clothes). Because Style Class is live, the audience can jump in with questions that the team tackles on the spot. It’s an informal, entertaining set up, with few frills and a very casual vibe about it. 

What appealed to me about Tibi Style Class initially was the talking. There was so much of it, and it wasn’t your usual, rambly “oh I just love fashion” -kind of style talk. It was thoughtful and intelligent from the start. It felt revolutionary. The conversations between Amy and the brand’s head stylist at the time, Dione Davis, were smart, funny and packed with knowledge. They both seemed like really cool people with cool styles and cool lives. 

From the beginning Amy and Dione introduced me to new style concepts. They talked about proportion, wardrobe editing, colors and prints in ways that were different from personal style guides that I had been reading. As interesting as all of this was, what reeled me in was how Amy would often say things like: “if you’ve ever wondered why you don’t feel great in your clothes…” or “if you find yourself buying all this stuff and still have nothing to wear…” That was me, right there. I had had a shopping problem for over fifteen years and I was at a point where I was doing two wardrobe edits a year, and every time during and after an edit I’d tell myself that I was going to change, but I never could. 

When I started to watch Tibi Style Class, I was 42. It was a weird time. The year before had been tumultuous for me: after years of struggling with a massive fibroid and the numerous ailments that had come with it, I finally had a hysterectomy. Before I got better, I didn’t quite realize how poorly I had been feeling. My iron levels built back up and I could walk for a few blocks without getting out of breath. The pains were gone and I wasn’t bloated all the time. I didn’t have to schedule every minute of every day to figure out bathroom breaks. After my surgery I had a bit of an identity crisis. I wanted to redirect myself and to regain my sense of self. I was confused about my personal style, which was fueled by my shopping shame. I came into Tibi Style Class looking for answers, not new clothes. I was after a theoretical framework that would allow me to see clothes, shopping and style in a new way.

I was looking for a framework and I discovered one. I watched Style Class episodes with a notebook and a pen in hand. There was so much to learn. Early on my Style Class journey Amy and Dione had introduced me to Tibi’s method of breaking down a wardrobe not into clothing categories, but wearability. I found this incredibly helpful. When Amy and Dione talked about the Without Fails (wardrobe fundamentals you wear most of the time), In-and-Outs (trendier pieces that come and go) and Had-to-Haves (things you feel that you just had to buy even though they weren’t practical or sensible), I understood that my wardrobe was full of In-and-Outs and Had-to-Haves. This was a big moment for me. I began to understand my shopping problem better.

The screen capture from Amy Smilovic’s IG stories that changed everything.

When Amy shared in her IG stories a picture of a bunch of fashion week darlings wearing whatever was supposed to be cute when that picture was taken and called it “stuff, not style”, it was like a lighting strike. It made sense to me. This was it: I kept buying all this stuff that had very little to do with having style. As important and revelatory as this was, I was beginning to slip. Up until this point I had managed to watch Style Class mostly through my own aesthetic lens, but “stuff, not style” made me doubt my personal style preferences and my aesthetic. 

There was a part of me that thought that I didn’t have style because maybe I didn’t have good taste. I obviously kept buying the wrong things. So when Amy and Dione said that they liked vintage leather pieces but thought that leather-covered buttons made the pieces themselves look dated, I went through my vintage leather pieces to see if they had leather-covered buttons. (Some did, and I was troubled.) I ditched almost all of my vintage print blouses after Amy said that she thought vintage print blouses were matronly. (If I looked carefully, weren’t they? I sent Amy a DM on Instagram, telling her that she had opened my eyes.) When Dione called classic Birkenstock Arizonas “crunchy”, I bowed my head down in shame, and felt the need to mention in the captions of my IG outfit pictures that I “knew” that my classic Arizonas weren’t the best fit for the rest of my outfit. I never actually stopped to ask myself if I liked or disliked leather-covered buttons, vintage print blouses or the classic Arizonas. I just went with the new gospel. I was influenced.

I began to abandon some of my old favorite clothes because they didn’t fit the Style Class rules. I started to see people around me and their style through a Tibified lens: I imagined how other people’s outfits would look better if they used Tibi styling theories like “big, slim, skin” or “one, ton, none”.  I slowly warmed up to Tibi clothes as well. They were much simpler in style than the clothes I had liked to buy and wear previously, but I couldn’t deny that Amy and Dione just looked great wearing Tibi. The aesthetic crept up on me, almost without me noticing it. The clothes on the models on the Tibi website seemed unremarkable, and I had noticed that some of the clothes drew heavily from other brands, but when Amy put the clothes on during Style Class, they came alive. This wasn’t fashion with a capital F, but cool clothes that people could wear in their everyday lives. The narrative of Style Class supported this. What was there not to like? I was bothered that there was no sustainability section on the Tibi website (there still isn’t, I checked), but because I wasn’t a paying customer, I overlooked it.

I didn’t buy any Tibi products because I didn’t have the money. The clothes were way beyond my budget. The second hand market for Tibi in Europe at the time was more or less non-existent, so I was never in the know about the workmanship, the materials or the fit of Tibi pieces. I have always been a tactile shopper, but here I was, psychologically invested in a brand whose clothes I had never seen in person. In hindsight I’ve often thought that the fact that I didn’t have money to buy Tibi products was a blessing in disguise. I would have spent an awful lot of money on clothes that weren’t really my style at all. 

The chill, modern and classic Tibi aesthetic sneaked inside my wardrobe in other ways. Instead of Tibi clothes I bought clothes at thrift stores that resembled Tibi clothes. Things I bought because I watched Tibi Style Class include two baseball caps, two oversized blazers, four oversized shirts, two camp shirts, three shoulder-padded tops, several tank tops with a high neckline, two pairs of sneakers, a pair of pointy-toe mules, a big bomber jacket, a puffer jacket, wide-leg polyester pants, a bright red handbag, and a sweatshirt. That’s probably not even all of it.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was buying my way into a particular look, and I was searching for my personal style within a projected, very specific brand aesthetic. The vibrant IG community that had been building around Tibi Style Class embraced the same aesthetic as well. On the surface we were one happy, chill, modern and classic family. I was following the rules the best I could, but I didn’t feel any less anxious about my personal style. I didn’t realize yet that my scope of understanding my personal style had narrowed dramatically.

Around the time when Dione Davis left Tibi, it seemed to me that Style Class became much more geared toward marketing the Tibi products. Because I couldn’t afford the clothes, I was starting to feel like a bit of an outsider. It was a sentence here and an opinion there that eventually got me questioning my involvement with Style Class. They introduced the concept of the Modifier, and with it, the theoretical framework as a whole was starting to seem too complicated and overwrought for my liking. I just didn’t get it anymore. 

When Amy said one time that she thought that Dries Van Noten’s women’s line was “too precious”, I knew that I disagreed with her, hard. When the Tibi team started chopping up vintage clothes during Style Class, I felt somewhat upset. (Don’t chop vintage. Just don’t.) When The Creative Pragmatist book was in the works, I considered pre-ordering it, but I was so appalled by the book’s price that it completely turned me off. I’ve always known I’m not wealthy, but to not have money to buy a book felt almost humiliating. I’m somewhat hazy on the timeline, but I think this came some time after my first reading of

Subrina Heyink

’s great essay on how over-analyzing our personal style was killing our wardrobes. Subrina was debunking Allison Bornstein’s three-word-method, but I felt that there was something there that also applied to Tibi Style Class’ rules and the ways I had chosen to interpret and adopt them.

Eventually it began to dawn on me that Style Class was primarily a marketing channel for Tibi products, for embracing a very particular aesthetic, and it was quite obviously geared toward people who were wealthy. None of this should have come to me as a surprise. Amy had been very open about these things. She often talked about running her business, the company’s past and present, her career, her customer base, and obviously, the products Tibi was selling. She was always open about her approach to the Tibi aesthetic (“...and if that’s not for you, that’s fine”). She talked about Tibi customers being lawyers and doctors, these amazing, successful, hard-working, intelligent people. It was all there on the table from the get-go, but I just hadn’t grasped it. I felt pretty stupid. 

After I read W. David Marx’s fabulous book Status and Culture (2022), I could no longer unsee the bigger picture. I was participating in the narrative of a consumer tribe, but I always hovered on the outside, looking in. What initially seemed to me like an innocent way to learn about style, had turned out to be a channel through which I had begun to feel less, not better, about myself. I’m reasonably smart, but I am not successful. I had a burnout in my mid-to-late 30s. I’m relatively poor. I’m a giant nerd, not a cool person. I know what I like, but what I like is often not considered tasteful or modern. I come from a lower middle class family, and I am not cultured. I don’t hang out at art exhibition openings. I don’t go to barre class. I’m so far removed from the ideal Tibi woman that it’s laughable. If something should have alerted me, it was the countless Style Class episodes about packing for trips and vacations. I can’t afford yearly vacations. The last time I was on a plane was in 2019.

I stopped playing with style adjectives and I began to ask myself more often the simple question: “do I like this?” The more I asked myself that question, the more it became evident that I had been surrounding myself with an aesthetic that I didn’t really care for all that much. I was once again reminded of the scene from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) that I often like to quote when talking about fashion trends and wants: the one where Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) is helping Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) figure out a serial killer’s identity by asking “what does he do, Clarice? […] He covets. [...] We begin by coveting what we see every day”. Once a week, for months on end, I had been staring at products that didn’t speak to me, but when you’re exposed to something long enough, you get used to it, and you might even begin to think that you want it. The algorithm had taken notice. My Instagram was full of Creative Pragmatists and Tibi fans. It became painfully clear to me that I hadn’t been able to separate my own sense of style from theirs. 

I stopped watching Style Class over a year ago, during my three-month IG break. Initially it felt hard to not stay involved, even though I was never a Tibi customer in the money-spending or Tibi-wearing sense. I was no longer in the know and I felt that I had lost my community, even though I wasn’t really ever a part of it, not like some other people were. After a while I noticed that I didn’t miss it. When I eventually went back to IG, I followed Amy’s personal account for some time, until I started to feel that I was falling back into feeling inadequate. I kept asking myself why Amy’s opinions weighed so heavily on my mind and why I felt so triggered. Was it her social status? Was it my insecurity? The fact that she had given me so much, in the form of helping me understand my closet and my shopping problems? Or just that I didn’t really want to see myself as I was, as I am? All of the above? 

What had initially appealed to me about Tibi Style Class was what eventually led me to turn my back on it. It was the talking. Most brands (luxury, designer or highstreet) don’t talk to you. You see them from afar, and you keep your distance. I’ve never felt bad about myself for not being able to afford all the great Dries Van Noten pieces out there. They just exist, somewhere, outside of my life and my person, and I can appreciate them. The brand is detached enough from me to almost reside in an alternate reality. Tibi came too close. It got to me. It crept inside my home. For a while it felt like we were friends, but we weren’t friends, not really. I felt almost angry at myself, and at Tibi, but eventually I was ready to cut the cord, with no hard feelings. I look at my involvement with Tibi Style Class as I do some of my past romantic relationships. I picked the wrong guys for a good while, but I learned a lot about myself in the process.

I will always be thankful to Amy for having introduced me to the concept of “stuff, not style”. She was right about that one, and my sense of personal style is better and I shop smarter because of it. I still find Tibi’s method of breaking down a wardrobe into Without Fails, In-and-Outs and Had-to-Haves very helpful. I’ve moved away from analyzing my style through style adjectives and similar methods, but if I hadn’t spent time thinking about these things, I would not be where I am now. Amy and Tibi have helped a lot of people find their sense of personal style through the brand and through Style Class. I’ve seen countless women wear Tibi on social media with the biggest, most authentic smile on their face, and that says a lot. I’ve become friends with some of those people, and their aesthetic matches the Tibi aesthetic like mine never did. Even though I am not a Tibi woman, my wardrobe is much more balanced now and it better reflects who I am. I have Style Class to thank for that, but perhaps by hiring a good personal stylist I would have reached the same outcome much faster and with less headache and confusion.

There are times when I still think about Style Class as I’m getting dressed. From nowhere comes a notion of a shape, a color combination, or a proportion, or a Tibi styling trick that I might consider for a minute or two. It feels strange, as if I knew that within the Style Class universe my style could be better, more modern, or more cool, if I just tried harder. As I’m editing my wardrobe now, I can see through the Style Class influence. It’s not all bad. I have a cool pair of cotton barrel leg trousers that I wear a lot and I probably wouldn’t have bought them if I hadn’t seen the Tibi Brancusis when they first came out. But stuff that I’ve bought to pretend to be cooler than I am is going. It feels good to let go of the pretense, the baseball caps, and the pointy-toe mules. Something will always remain, though: I can never unsee the skin sandwich.

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