By Jussara Da Silva
There is something wonderfully strange about the fact that some of the things we will eventually love most are things we do not even know exist yet. Somewhere there may be a restaurant that will one day become the place you always want to return to, but right now you have never walked through its doors. There may be a city you will eventually know so well that you develop your own little rituals there, the café you always visit, the street you prefer to walk down, the hotel you return to, the shop you always stop inside, and today that city may be nothing more than a name on a map, or perhaps somewhere you have never even considered visiting. There are people who may eventually become enormously important to you whose names you don’t know. There are conversations you haven’t had, tables you haven’t sat around, mornings you haven’t woken up to, books you haven’t read, songs you haven’t heard, clothes you haven’t worn and versions of yourself you haven’t met. Even some of your future favorite memories are currently completely invisible to you. I think that is such a beautiful thing to remember because we spend an extraordinary amount of time looking backward. We remember summers and think, Nothing will ever feel quite like that again. We look at old photographs and miss the person we were, the people around us, the places we went, the clothes we wore and sometimes even the ordinary routines we barely appreciated while we were living them. Fashion does this too. We talk about the greatest designers, the collections we wish we could have witnessed, the eras when a particular house felt magical, the bags we should have bought before the price increased, the pieces that disappeared before we realized we wanted them, the magazines we miss, the campaigns that somehow seemed more beautiful, the Fashion Weeks that felt more exciting. Nostalgia can be wonderful. There is nothing wrong with honoring something simply because it was beautiful and it ended. But sometimes I wonder whether we become so convinced that the most beautiful things belong to the past that we forget the enormous possibility contained in one simple fact: there are beautiful things that haven’t happened yet.
One of the nicest things about the future is that we have absolutely no idea which ordinary day will eventually become one of our favorite memories. The days we remember most vividly do not always announce themselves when they begin. You don’t necessarily wake up in the morning and think, Today is going to become one of those days I talk about for the next ten years. Sometimes you get dressed exactly as you normally would. You reach for the same bag you have carried a hundred times. You put on something without thinking particularly hard about it. You leave the house expecting a completely ordinary day, and somewhere between morning and evening something happens that gives the day a place in your memory. Maybe it isn’t even something dramatic. Maybe it is a dinner that lasts longer than expected because nobody wants to leave. Maybe it is a conversation you didn’t know you needed. Maybe it is walking somewhere on a warm evening when everything feels unusually beautiful for no particular reason. Maybe it is discovering a place accidentally and returning so many times afterward that eventually you cannot remember your life without it. Maybe it is meeting someone who, at that moment, seems like simply another person and later becomes part of your world. Sometimes we understand the importance of a moment only after it has passed. Years later, you see a photograph from that day and suddenly remember the weather, the shoes you were wearing, where everyone was sitting, what you ordered, what happened afterward, and you realize that while you were living it you had absolutely no idea that one day you would miss it. That means there are probably days ahead of us that will work exactly the same way. Somewhere in your future is a memory you haven’t made yet.
Fashion, for all the criticism it receives for constantly looking toward the next thing, actually contains something deeply optimistic because fashion is always imagining a future that hasn’t arrived. When a designer begins working on a Spring/Summer collection, that summer does not exist yet. Nobody has lived it. The holidays haven’t happened. The dinners haven’t been eaten. The photographs haven’t been taken. The women who will eventually buy those clothes don’t yet know where they will wear them. A dress begins as an idea long before someone dances in it, travels in it, celebrates something in it, falls in love while wearing it, spills something on it, photographs it, keeps it for twenty years or eventually gives it to someone else. An Autumn/Winter collection imagines a winter nobody has experienced yet. The coats are designed before the streets become cold. The boots exist before anyone knows which journeys they will take. The bags are created before anyone knows what will eventually be carried inside them. There is something almost romantic about that. Fashion is constantly creating objects for lives that haven’t happened yet. Every collection is, in some small way, an act of faith in another season. The designer has to believe there will be somewhere to wear the dress. The atelier has to construct something without knowing whose body will eventually inhabit it. The house creates a world and sends it forward into a future it cannot control. Perhaps that is part of why new collections can feel so exciting even when we don’t intend to buy anything from them. They remind us that there is always another possibility for what fashion can become.
We sometimes speak about nostalgia as though everything truly extraordinary has already happened. We say fashion used to be better, people used to dress better, magazines were better, campaigns were better, designers were more creative, luxury felt more luxurious, cities were more interesting before everyone discovered them, restaurants were better before they became popular, holidays were better before everyone had a phone in their hand, and perhaps parts of those observations are true. There are things worth missing. There are periods of fashion history that possessed an extraordinary creative energy. There are designers whose absence is genuinely felt. There are places that have changed. But I don’t want nostalgia to become so powerful that it removes our curiosity about what comes next. Imagine someone living during one of the fashion eras we now romanticize believing that everything interesting had already happened before them. Imagine watching the beginning of a designer’s career without knowing that decades later people would study those collections. Imagine seeing a bag for the first time that would eventually become an icon and thinking it was simply another new release. History is strange because we experience it without knowing which parts will become history. There may be something happening in fashion right now that we won’t fully appreciate for another ten years. There may be a designer whose most extraordinary work hasn’t been created yet. There may be a silhouette we haven’t seen, a bag nobody has designed, a way of dressing that hasn’t entered our visual vocabulary. The fact that we cannot name those things is precisely what makes the future interesting.
And the same is true of our own style. We put so much pressure on ourselves to find our style as though somewhere there is a final wardrobe waiting to be discovered, and once we identify it correctly we will never need to question ourselves again. But I don’t know if I want style to work that way. There is something far more exciting about leaving room to surprise yourself. Maybe there is a color you currently ignore that will become one of your favorites in five years. Maybe there is a designer whose work doesn’t speak to you now but will suddenly make complete sense later. Maybe you will discover that you love something you once considered completely wrong for you. Maybe the handbag you think you will carry forever will eventually give way to something you haven’t seen yet. Maybe you will travel somewhere and notice the way people dress there and bring one small element home with you. Maybe someone you meet will introduce you to a brand, a piece of jewelry, a perfume, a fabric, an artist or an entire way of seeing clothes that changes your taste slightly. Maybe your style will become simpler. Maybe it will become more expressive. Maybe it will move back and forth between the two. There is no final version of your style because there is no final version of you. And I don’t think that should make us feel uncertain. I think it should make fashion much more fun.
There is a tendency, particularly online, to want to understand ourselves completely. We want to know our aesthetic, our colors, our proportions, our signature pieces, our ideal wardrobe, the brands that represent us, the things we would never wear, the things we will supposedly wear forever. There is value in knowing yourself, and understanding your preferences can make getting dressed infinitely easier, but I also think there is joy in leaving a few doors open. You are allowed to encounter something tomorrow that changes your mind. You are allowed to walk into a shop looking for nothing and discover a dress that makes you rethink an entire silhouette. You are allowed to spend years insisting that you dislike a particular shoe and suddenly see someone wear it in a way that makes you think, Wait, maybe I understand it now. You are allowed to love something for five years and then move on. You are allowed to return to it ten years later. Taste does not have to behave like a contract you signed with your younger self. One of the pleasures of being alive is that we are still capable of being surprised by ourselves.
I think this is also why anticipation deserves a little more appreciation. We often treat waiting as the annoying space between wanting something and having it, but anticipation can be part of the pleasure. Think about waiting for a trip. For weeks beforehand, the trip begins existing in your imagination. You think about what you will pack. You look at restaurants. You imagine the weather. You consider what you might wear to dinner. You perhaps buy something specifically because you can already picture yourself wearing it there. The trip has not begun, and yet in another sense it already has. Or think about the beginning of a new fashion season, when the first collections start appearing and suddenly your mind moves forward. You begin imagining coats before it is cold enough to wear them. You start thinking about boots while still wearing sandals. You see a color and wonder whether it might become part of your wardrobe. There is pleasure in not having arrived yet. Wanting, imagining, preparing and wondering are experiences too. Sometimes when the thing we have been waiting for finally happens, we realize that looking forward to it was part of what made it special.
Perhaps that is why I don’t think optimism always has to mean believing everything will become perfect. Life doesn’t work that way. There will be difficult seasons. There will be disappointments. There will be plans that don’t happen, people we miss, things that change before we are ready, and moments when looking forward feels much harder than looking back. Saying that some of the best things may still be ahead of us isn’t a promise that every year will automatically be better than the one before. It is simply an acknowledgment that we haven’t seen everything yet. And I find that thought comforting without needing it to guarantee anything. There are possibilities we cannot account for because we don’t know they exist. There are things we don’t know to hope for. There are people we don’t know to miss yet because we haven’t met them. There are places we cannot imagine loving because we haven’t been there. There are experiences that would never appear on our current list of dreams because our current selves don’t have the information required to dream about them. Sometimes the best things that happen to us are not the things we planned most carefully. They are the things we couldn’t have planned because we didn’t know they were possible.
Maybe you have experienced this already. Think about something you love now that your younger self could never have predicted. Perhaps it is a place. Perhaps it is your work. Perhaps it is a person. Perhaps it is something incredibly small, like a morning routine, a favorite café, a handbag, a book, a hobby, a particular way you spend Sundays. There was once a version of you who did not know that thing would become part of her life. She couldn’t have written it on a vision board because she didn’t know enough to want it. And yet somehow life brought her there. I think we forget how often this has already happened. We look toward the future and imagine it using only the materials we currently possess, but the future will contain information we don’t have today. You are trying to imagine tomorrow using today’s vocabulary. Of course you cannot see everything that might be there.
Fashion makes this particularly visible because our desires change alongside what becomes possible. Imagine trying to describe your current wardrobe to yourself ten years ago. There might be things that younger version of you would immediately understand, but there would probably also be choices that surprise her. Maybe she would ask why you stopped wearing something you once adored. Maybe she would be shocked by how much you love something she currently dislikes. Maybe she would be delighted that you eventually bought the thing she used to dream about. Maybe she would be confused by the fact that the thing she thought would matter enormously eventually became almost irrelevant. And that isn’t sad. It is evidence that a life happened between those two wardrobes. Your taste absorbed places, people, experiences, mistakes, confidence, age, changing priorities and thousands of images you had not yet seen. The wardrobe changed because the person living inside it did.
There is something wonderfully freeing about realizing that we don’t need to predict ourselves perfectly. You don’t need to know today what you will want at thirty, forty, fifty or seventy. You don’t need to construct a wardrobe at twenty that will somehow anticipate every version of the person you might become. There are things you may buy now and love forever, and that is wonderful. There are things you may love intensely for a period and eventually stop wearing, and that doesn’t automatically make the original love a mistake. There will be pieces that travel through decades with you and others that belong very specifically to one chapter. A life is long enough to contain both. We can respect timelessness without demanding permanence from everything. We can enjoy what we love now while remaining curious about what we might love later.
And maybe this applies beyond clothes in the most ordinary, lovely ways. Somewhere there may be a table you haven’t sat around yet where you will laugh until your face hurts. There may be a morning when you wake up somewhere you never imagined visiting and think, I can’t believe I’m here. There may be a meal you haven’t tasted that you will spend years trying to find again. There may be a little shop on a street you’ve never walked down where you discover something you keep for decades. There may be a friend you haven’t met who will eventually know exactly how you take your coffee. There may be a photograph that hasn’t been taken yet that will one day sit framed somewhere in your home. There may be a song you haven’t heard that will become attached to an entire year of your life. There may be an outfit you haven’t worn that will eventually become the outfit you remember when someone asks you about a particular night. There may be a completely ordinary Tuesday that, for reasons you cannot possibly predict, becomes important. The future isn’t only made of enormous milestones. It is full of tiny pleasures we haven’t encountered yet.
I think we sometimes forget this because adulthood can make life feel increasingly familiar. We develop routines. We know what we like. We return to the same places. We understand our taste better. There is comfort in that, but familiarity can create the illusion that we have already seen most of what life has to offer us. Yet the world is enormous, creativity continues, people continue making things, designers continue imagining, cities continue changing, restaurants continue opening, books continue being written, music continues being made, conversations continue beginning and we continue becoming people capable of appreciating things our younger selves might have overlooked completely. There is always something we haven’t noticed. Curiosity keeps the world larger.
Perhaps this is why I want to resist the idea that growing older means becoming increasingly fixed. I would rather imagine that age gives us more references without taking away our capacity for discovery. Imagine having a beautifully established personal style and still occasionally being surprised by a new designer. Imagine knowing exactly what suits you and still trying something simply because it delights you. Imagine having favorite cities and still being excited to visit somewhere you’ve never been. Imagine having traditions while still creating new ones. There is no contradiction between knowing what you love and remaining open to loving more. Certainty and curiosity can live together.
And there is something particularly joyful about thinking that we may currently be standing inside a period of our lives that will one day become nostalgic too. We are very good at recognizing beauty retrospectively. We look at photographs from five years ago and suddenly everything seems charming: the clothes, the restaurants, the people, even little details we barely noticed at the time. But what if there are things happening right now that future us will miss? The bag you carry so routinely that you barely look at it. The café you stop at without thinking. The person you speak to every day. The view from the window. The way your room looks in the afternoon. The clothes you are currently slightly bored of. Maybe one day these ordinary things will acquire the softness that memory gives almost everything. It is an interesting reminder that while we can be excited for what comes next, we don’t need to rush through what is here.
That is perhaps the balance I love most: nostalgia without believing the past contained all the beauty, anticipation without wishing the present away. We can miss an old fashion era and still be curious about the next creative director. We can treasure a handbag we’ve owned for years and still become excited when something completely new appears. We can remember an extraordinary summer without assuming no future summer could ever surprise us again. We can love who we were without believing she was the final version. Life doesn’t require us to choose between appreciating what has happened and being excited about what hasn’t. There is room for both.
Maybe the best outfit you will ever wear is still ahead of you. Maybe your favorite handbag hasn’t been designed yet—or maybe it is already sitting in your wardrobe and you simply haven’t lived the memories that will make it your favorite. Maybe there is a designer whose name you barely notice now whose work will eventually speak to you completely. Maybe one day you will wear something you currently swear you would never wear and wonder why you resisted it for so long. Maybe your style at forty will contain something your twenty-year-old self would find completely unexpected. I hope so. Not because there is anything wrong with who we are today, but because how wonderful would it be if there were still things capable of surprising us?
And perhaps one day you will look back at August 2026 with enormous affection. Maybe you will remember exactly what you were wearing, what you were thinking about, what you wanted, what you were waiting for and who you were becoming. Or perhaps August 2026 will simply become another month you barely remember, absorbed into all the ordinary time that quietly makes up a life. We don’t know yet. And maybe that’s the wonderful part. Somewhere ahead of you are clothes you haven’t worn, places you haven’t seen, tables you haven’t sat around, people you haven’t met, conversations you haven’t had, mornings you haven’t woken up to, songs you haven’t heard, photographs you haven’t taken, meals you haven’t tasted, jokes you haven’t laughed at, traditions you haven’t created and versions of yourself you haven’t discovered. There are beautiful things you don’t even know to want yet. Fashion will keep designing another season. Life will keep giving us another one too. So perhaps we don’t always need to look backward and wonder whether everything beautiful has already happened. We can treasure what has been without treating it as the limit of what can be. We can enjoy what is here while leaving a little space for what we cannot yet imagine. Because maybe some of the clothes you will love most, the places you will return to most, the people who will matter most, the memories you will tell most often and the ordinary days you will eventually wish you could experience one more time are still somewhere ahead of you, waiting to happen.
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