What Is Stylish?

At my alma mater, you can "concentrate" (aka "major") in some wierd things, like Big Problems* or Fundamentals: Issues & Texts. In Fundamentals, you ask a question, read classical texts concerning that question and then, I don't know what happens. You graduate with the same inchoate degree everyone else has, I guess. Anyway, I always wanted to concentrate in Fundamentals, but never found the right question.

Because my intellectual capacity has dropped off considerably since graduating from that fine institution, I have lowered my standards for what constitutes an adequate question and, in doing so, have found my question. "What is stylish?" and its correlary: how do people choose their style?**

In particular, I am curious about two diametrically different phenomena. First, the people who choose a style that has no currency in popular culture, present or past, and second, people who actually wear stuff featured in fashion magazines. To illustrate the first: the 14-year old daughter of our kids' nanny wears rubber bands around the ankles of her jeans to cinch them. Why? Otherwise she looks put together in the young soft-tough Latina style. When I was her age, I also pegged my jeans, only I folded them tightly. Why did I do that? Nowhere in popular culture are tightly pegged or rubber-banded jeans identified as cool.

To illustrate the second: some of the mothers at Liam's preschool actually wear asymmetrical felt coats. Why? do? they? do? that? I am sure that its all over the Italian Vogue or something but it escapes me why anyone would apply that fashion to their lives. So ugly and uncomfortable, but not even u/u in the skewed "fashion" sense of Berkeley. And by asymmetrical, I mean this, not this.

* "Big Problems" is a set of courses offered to fourth-year students but my experience was that most people had their "big problems" in their sophomore year.
** My classical texts would be Ways of Seeing and Color Me Beautiful, I think.

Alrighty, folks, I will be out of town this weekend at a wedding. Hopefully, I will live to tell about it, rather than becoming one of the special dead.