Meet the 50 American Style x Vogue Finalists
Vogue tasked writer Biz Sherbert with finding 50 young people across the United States who best represented American Style to her. Meet them here.
Reported by Vogue.
America turns 250 this July, and instead of defaulting to denim and apple pie as the aesthetic answer, Vogue asked a sharper question: what does American style actually look like right now? According to Vogue, the magazine enlisted Biz Sherbert — writer behind the newsletter American Style, which tracks how young people dress across the country — to find 50 finalists who could answer that. The brief was straightforward: U.S. residents aged 18 to 30 submitted four photos, a short video, and responses to four questions via the Vogue app. What emerged was anything but simple.
The 50 finalists stretch from Birmingham to Boston, Philadelphia to Fontana, and their references are gloriously all over the place. These are internet-native dressers who pull from Pinterest boards and Lizzie McGuire reruns in the same breath as Hilma af Klint paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Their icons include grandmothers, frat boys, Jackie O., and Yohji Yamamoto — sometimes within the same person's answer. Chelsi Banks, 19, from Birmingham, copped a Miu Miu 2008 runway dress for $30 on Mercari and wears it with a ruffled underlayer exactly as it appeared in the show. Owen Peters, also 19, from suburban Minneapolis, describes his style as "prep and glamour" and cites Gene Kelly, Marc Jacobs, and oversized Nike basketball shorts that hit his calves like a skirt as equal sources of inspiration.
Style That Refuses to Be Categorized
What's striking isn't any single aesthetic — it's the refusal to pick one. Isaiah Collins, a 23-year-old welder and creator from Philadelphia, talks about his Prada Brixxen boots the way a conservator talks about art: something to be cared for, cleaned, treated with intention. Varvara "Bobby" Diakonenkova, also from Philadelphia, inherited suitcases of designer pieces instead of a college fund and now finds inspiration on the subway. Samantha Burnett from Fayetteville, Arkansas, has been styling a bullet cartridge belt from a local vintage market — "I'm not really a gun person," she clarifies, "but the kitsch and drama of it really appeals to me." That sentence is basically a thesis statement for what's happening here.
The range of references reads like a mood board that crashed into a library. Nicole Quinonez-Frias from Fontana, California, made a pact with her younger self to only buy clothes she genuinely loves — her current favorites are a 1960s royal blue jacquard gown and a 1950s beaded cocktail dress. Asha Aden from Columbus traces her entire visual vocabulary back to Yohji Yamamoto. Orlande Mensah from Newburgh, New York, describes her state's style as "everything, everywhere, allatonce" — and honestly, that tracks for all 50.
What Sherbert's selections make clear is that American style in 2025 isn't a look — it's a methodology: deeply personal, historically promiscuous, and completely unbothered by coherence.
Read the original at Vogue.
