“Style from Within”: Notes on Style and Personal History
July 29, 2026 | Written by Tomisin Fasosin
In this moment of my life, I believe style is the central medium of my creativity. It is the way I understand myself and the world around me. Fashion is an industry. Garments adorn the body. But style is essence. One you can see, feel, and bear witness to.
There are many things I have come to know about style. First and foremost, style moves inter-generationally. My father’s mother was a seamstress. She owned her own fashion store in Lagos and would train young girls as apprentices under her. I never got to physically meet her, but my grandfather keeps her memory alive through the sweetest anecdotes and photographs hung all over his home in Lagos. My mother’s mother was the most stylish woman I have ever known. She consistently adorned herself with the most precious jewelry and never went anywhere without a matching bag. I was very close with my grandmother when she was alive, and I still style myself with her pieces. I have both of my grandmothers’ to thank for the stylish woman I am now, and I like to think I am continuing their legacies through my style practice.
Image 1: My father’s mother Florence Fasosin in an outfit she designed. Image 2: My mother’s mother Alice Akingba with her husband at his doctoral graduation. Image 3: My grandmother and mother at my mother’s engagement party. Image 4: Both of my grandmothers’ together at my aunt’s home.
Style is informed by trust and your relationship to your own choices. My father was the first to recognize my potential as a stylist. He is extremely fly, with a collection of garments and accessories that would make Dapper Dan’s eye turn. He would consult me before every Sunday church service on which socks matched his tie, or which blazer went best with his button up. He fully trusted in my vision, and would immediately switch a piece out if I did not approve. I admired my dad’s sense of style as a kid, and his trust sowed the seeds of confidence in my own curatorial eye.
Image 1: My dad looking quite dapper in his 20s. Image 2: On the wall of my current bedroom, I’ve placed a photograph of my father on his 32nd birthday next to one of my first. I love how we are looking at one another. Images 3-4: My dad post Tomisin Archived Style consultation, looking extremely dandy! Image 5: My dad and I at my college grad party.
Style is shaped by our physical and digital environments. Like many in my generation, I joined the Internet quite young. We can talk at length about how early online exposure produced my current social media addiction, but for now, what you must know is that the internet was my mode of expressing and developing my style. I was an avid lover of Tumblr and WeHeartIt, inspired by the styles I would see on my screen and eager to create my own. From my sparkly pink knee high Uggs and green army jacket to my red Jays and skinny jeans, the internet expanded my taste for fashion, giving me references to play with and make my own.
My sophomore year of high school (2018-19) was when I began to craft a digital space for myself to explore my style. “@fitsbyt” (now @tomisinarchivedstyle) was my first exploration into digital style archiving. My first post was a digital album cover I edited on PicsArt with three headless figures of me, positioned in front of a bright red screen. Very grunge, I know. Alongside the occasional edit, I would document my daily looks and how I put them together.
Somewhere along the line, the inner-editor in me began crafting ways for people to understand and grow their style with polls and Buzzfeed-esque questionnaires. If you took my 4-type “style quiz” in 2020, you’re a reallll one.
During COVID quarantine, I experimented a lot with video editing, going viral on fashion TikTok a few times. My TikTok era did not last long though. Instant virality got to me! I started creating for engagement and feeling ultimately empty when the algorithm did not work in my favor. I think this a moment every creative person in my generation has had to reconcile with, often forcing us to remember our creative “why”. I came to the conclusion that my art belonged to me, and I took a break from algorithm-based creating to return to myself.
So, I pivoted. When I started my undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 2021, I returned to simply documenting my daily looks. No pressure, just style. It was extremely freeing, and I felt like I had a creative outlet that I could invite people into.
As a tall darkskin babe who worked almost everywhere on campus and was always throwing a fit, I was extremely visible. I came to be known for my style, and @fitsbyt was my avenue to digitally archive it. I can look back and see how my style evolved throughout my four years at Barnard—-the pieces I held on to and those that faded. The new methods I created to adorn my body, face, and hair. You can visibly see me grow, and I am grateful I kept up with it.
Style is an archive of personal and communal history. Black Style at Barnard began my freshman year of college. Spring 2022. There was already an account at the time that was documenting outfits at Barnard, but they barely posted Black students at the time. This was to my utter surprise, because how I saw it, Black students on campus were the flyest people there! So, I set out to make a space for us. I would post the outfits of my Black peers with cheeky captions. The Instagram account received a few submissions, but most of the time it was just me walking around campus, noticing a student with a fire look, and stopping them for a quick flick. I would also do retrospectives of campus-wide events, from Homecoming and Halloween to first day of classes and Blacchanal (which I am taking full credit in coining until proven otherwise….check the date!).
I did not know it at the time, but now I realize that I was doing the work of recording how Black Barnard/Columbia students were fashioning themselves in this period of time. I was just doing something I loved, and felt most natural to me.
This is why I believe style is the central medium of my creativity. Style comes most naturally to me, and it often reveals things about myself that I come to fully understand later on.
And that leads me to the title of this post. “Style from within” began with a collage, and continued as a motif I revisited as my style practice blossomed.
It was 2023—the summer after my sophomore year—and I had been selected to be a part of a student arts cohort at Barnard that offered free housing in the city and a stipend to intern at an arts organization. I worked as an assistant to multi-media artist Yetunde Sapp. I learned a lot from Ye about pursuing art as one’s primary work, with the beauty and chaos enmeshed in it all.
As her assistant, I would go wherever she went. In June 2023, Adidas invited Ye to a workshop with designer Rich Mnisi, where we crafted collages and ironed patches on his jersey collab with the brand. He was fire, and I remember how supportive he was of our creative vision. The image above was my collage—mainly using images from ELLE Magazine featuring the formidable Jodie Turner-Smith on its cover.
“Style from Within”. 2023. Magazine, marker, and pen.
It was one of my first experiments with collage. With style as my central practice, my approach to collage is that I am “styling” print material. I brought together pieces of prints and fabrics with cutouts of Black-centric phrases to craft this piece. I was and still am extremely proud of it. I don’t remember why I first wrote down “Style From Within”. I’d like to believe it was something the Spirit gave me to hold. I am glad that I held it before I even knew why.
In the spring of 2024, I was approached by the Morningside Art Exchange, a student-run collective for artists at Columbia University, for a collaboration with Black Style at Barnard. We decided that Black Style at Barnard would design a collection to sell at the upcoming exchange. It was my first time designing a screen print, and I had no idea what I wanted to create. I started where I often begin design-wise: with an eye. I learned how to draw an eye in middle school art class and never looked back (allow me lol). I drew eyes in journals, class notes, on the side of receipts. In my budding collage practice, I began to enlarge or dramatize the eye in an almost Bearden-ist way. So, I figured I’d start there.
Style is the outward expression of your inner essence. Knowingly and unknowingly, the “style from within” collage has been my north star. Designed on the Design Center iPad, I settled on three eyes vertically stacked, with the words “style” “from” and “within” in a separate cornea. Jude and I went thrifting for pieces, and myself and a few other members of the MAE team got to screen printing!
To promote the collection, I called some friends to model, and enlisted the help of Anaïs to assist. The shoot was located in a classroom, which honestly made me start to think of “style from within” as the frameworks of an ideology. My very own school of thought!
Now, “style from within” informs both my writing and style practice. In a future post, I will dive more deeply into my trajectory as a stylist. For now, know that I approach style as an archive of taste, layered histories, and expressions of the soul. I style from the archive within.
While I work now as a stylist, I would most accurately refer to myself as a style archivist because my archive is inextricably linked to how I understand and express my style. I think my first official crack at styling was the Afropolitan 2023 fashion show, where I styled models in eras of African fashion throughout history. Since then, I have been blessed to style my close friends at pivotal moments in their journey, from artist commissions and exhibition openings to live music performances, fashioning them as the woman they are becoming. I just recently styled my first brand shoot, and that was so rewarding. This is just the beginning. Tomisin Archived Style to the worldddd.
Tomisin's Initial Notes on Style
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Tomisin's Initial Notes on Style 〰️
Style moves inter-generationally.
Style is informed by trust and your relationship to your own choices.
Style is shaped by our physical and digital environments.
Style is an archive of personal and communal history.
Style comes most naturally to me, and it often reveals things about myself that I come to fully understand later on.
Style is the outward expression of your inner essence.