Everyone is Dressed Alike

Outfits on a rack photographed by Marcus Loke

One of my biggest gripes with fashion has been how easy it is to walk out of the house and find multiple people wearing the same outfit as you.

It’s cute if it’s just one or two people. But when it gets to three, it’s like, okay, what am I doing wrong?

I recently saw someone on the streets of Ikeja, Lagos, and I could tell the exact Pinterest board they had recreated the outfit from. It’s like we’re all looking at the same mood board. And while there’s nothing terribly wrong with that, fashion has always been about personal expression. If we’re all looking at the same boards and recreating the same looks, then what happens to expression?

It’s easier to recreate an outfit, especially when you’re barely a fashionable person like me. You don’t want people staring while you walk, or to be “quietly” berated the way I was in public for wearing patterns on patterns. So you reach for what you already know works. No need to think too hard.

But Pinterest, TikTok, and all the platforms that serve as our fashion guides can’t be the only reason we’re all dressing the same.

Yes, our algorithms curate our feeds and show us the same style over and over, but fashion is fundamentally about community. So if we consciously choose to look identical, what does that say?

One of the biggest things social media brought to fashion is democratization. Designers and big publications are no longer the gatekeepers of taste; they’re just part of a massive ecosystem. Yet somehow, in this huge ecosystem, we’ve become more similar than diverse.

Think about it this way: the styling video you saw in Kigali, Rwanda, I saw the same one in Lagos, Nigeria. We’re all watching the same videos and being dressed by the same playbook, especially if our tastes align. Maybe we dress alike because we want to belong. Maybe we look alike because community feels scarce, and this is the closest thing we have left.

Fashion is, at its core, about community. Our clothes communicate what we want people to hear, hide what we want hidden, and signal where we feel we belong. But now, the online world gives us this overwhelming sense of belonging. We spend so much time online that our in-person relationships suffer. My friends knew I went to a party last night thanks to Snapchat, but they had no idea I was awake for hours because something in my room scared me half to death. And the same goes for you, and for many others.

We barely have real-life communities anymore, so we express our connection through the way we dress online, and it spills into the real world. I still get annoyed when I step outside and find two or three people dressed exactly like me. But honestly, it makes a pretty great conversation starter.

So maybe everyone dressing alike isn’t the end of the world. Maybe it just means we’re all trying to find each other in a world that feels increasingly disconnected. And if matching outfits are how we rebuild community, then maybe that’s not such a bad place to start. 

There’s still the worry about personal style and expression that I’m hoping we don’t lose. Perhaps if we all feel okay with looking like we want to without worrying about whether we’re breaking the third-piece rule or other fashion rules, we would be better at both this community thing and self-expression.