How Biz Sherbert Scoured the Country for 50 Stylish Young Americans

Reported by Vogue.

Style has always been personal — but getting dressed, it turns out, is also deeply political, cultural, and generational. Writer Biz Sherbert has spent years doing what most fashion media only pretends to do: actually talking to people about how and why they dress. Not editors, not influencers — college students, baristas, shop clerks. People getting dressed for their real lives. Those conversations became her newsletter, American Style, and now they've become something bigger.

When Vogue tapped Sherbert to find 50 stylish young Americans in honor of its 250th anniversary, she treated the brief as a cultural mission. According to Vogue, applications flooded in from Kentucky to Puerto Rico, with inspirants running the gamut from Georgia O'Keeffe and Pinterest to transcendental meditation — and, repeatedly, mothers and grandmothers. The throughline wasn't trend fluency. It was intentionality. The sense that someone had thought hard about who they are and dressed accordingly.

The Finalists Who Made the Cut

Sherbert traveled to Minnesota and Alabama to profile two of the 50 finalists. In the suburbs of Minneapolis, she met Owen Peters, 19, who pulls equal inspiration from frat-boy prep and Jackie O — a combination that probably shouldn't work and absolutely does. In Birmingham, she found Chelsi Banks, also 19, who sharpened her eye on fashion Twitter before using COVID's long pause to develop a point of view that's entirely her own. Two people, two completely different references, one shared quality: you couldn't replicate what they do, because you aren't them.

That's the metric Sherbert keeps returning to — an almost ineffable signal she describes as the feeling of having never seen quite this before, even when the look itself is classic or on-trend. It's not about novelty for novelty's sake. It's about specificity. An outfit that could only have been assembled by one particular person, shaped by their particular life. Scrolling through pages of finalist submissions, she describes feeling simultaneously inspired and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of that kind of singular vision packed into a single project.

What Sherbert has quietly built — and what this Vogue collaboration amplifies — is a counter-argument to the idea that young people are style victims, passive consumers of whatever algorithm-approved aesthetic is cycling through. These 50 finalists represent something messier and more interesting: a generation dressing on their own terms, informed by everything from high fashion to family archives to spiritual practice, and owing nothing to anyone's approval but their own.

The most stylish thing you can do, apparently, is dress like no one could have dressed for you.

Read the original at Vogue.