My Style Has Two Homes
After leaving Colombia, I stopped dressing for other people’s opinions. What I kept, what I let go, and why adapting is not the same as disappearing.
By Laura Vanessa Medina · 4 min read
When we think about immigration, we think about documents, suitcases, goodbyes. Nobody puts a wardrobe on that list. But the clothes come too, and once they land they start a second life.
The clothes travel. The rules around them don’t always make the trip. Stores change, so do the occasions, the weather, the way people show up in public. A garment that felt daring at home turns ordinary here. An outfit you wore without thinking makes you the most visible woman in the room.
Emigrating let me see my own closet from the outside. Before, my choices were shaped by other people’s opinions, by what a woman was expected to look like, and by what I could actually find or afford. My taste lived next to those limits and I never questioned them, because limits you grow up with don’t announce themselves as limits.
After I arrived in the United States, I started buying more of what I actually liked. It wasn’t a transformation and it wasn’t a rejection of anything. It came in slowly, through one plain question: what do I want to wear?
There was never only one way to dress
The first thing I noticed was how many styles shared the same room. Loud clothes next to very plain ones, in the same line at the same store. There seemed to be more space for each woman to decide how she wanted to show up.
That doesn’t mean nobody judges. Expectations exist everywhere. But seeing so many versions of “dressed” made it obvious that the rules I grew up with were local, not universal.
Sometimes we decide a thing “isn’t worn” only because nobody around us wears it. The color is too strong, the silhouette asks for too much attention, the garment doesn’t match the woman we’re supposed to be. Then you go somewhere else and see a woman wearing exactly that, on a Tuesday, without ceremony.
A custom can feel like a law until you meet a different custom.
I bought something here I would never have picked before. What it was mattered less than what it meant: I could decide I liked it before running through the list of everyone who might have an opinion.
Freedom in clothes rarely arrives as a declaration. Sometimes it starts in a fitting room, when the first question stops being what will people think and becomes how do I feel.
The Colombian part
Adapting didn’t take my Colombian relationship with clothes away from me. I still like to look put together. I still reach for the same colors, the same way of combining pieces, my own version of femininity.
That belongs to me. I don’t have to leave it behind to prove I live here now, and I don’t have to keep it frozen to prove I remember where I came from.
Identity is not an object you keep in a box so it stays untouched.
It changes without disappearing. My femininity can hold Colombia and still express itself through clothes I found after I emigrated. One color remembers how I learned to dress; one new combination is the freedom that came later.
When you live between two cultures, style turns into a conversation. One part of you remembers, the other experiments. One keeps the custom, the other asks why. You don’t have to decide which version is the real one. Both are.
Adapting is not disguising
Arriving somewhere new, you want to belong. You watch how people dress for work, for dinner, for an ordinary Saturday. That’s not weakness, that’s reading the room.
The trouble starts when adapting turns into an instruction to erase yourself.
You can buy the same clothes as everyone else and still feel like you’re in costume. You can also hold on to every old choice because letting one go feels like betraying your family. Both are ways of dressing for an audience.
There’s a third option, and it’s the one I learned: take from the culture that received you, keep what you brought, and let them sit in the same closet. I don’t have to dress the way I did in Colombia, and I don’t have to copy what I see here.
The mix actually makes you more deliberate. With more options, you have to decide what’s really yours. You keep the combination you still love. You drop the rule that was never yours to begin with.
Clothes for a life that changed too
Emigrating doesn’t only change taste, it changes the day. New job, new distances, new celebrations, new people. The closet has to keep up with a routine that may look nothing like the old one.
So some wardrobe changes aren’t a loss of identity at all. They’re an answer to the life you’re actually living. A woman starts dressing more simply, or louder, or in colors she’d never worn. None of that means she forgot where she’s from.
You can also stop wearing something that used to represent you. Clothes don’t owe the past a permanent loyalty. You can be fond of the woman who chose them and still need something else today.
What matters is that the change is yours, and not fear of looking foreign, or different, or insufficiently adapted.
A style with two homes
To another woman who has emigrated: don’t give up who you are to fit in. Arriving already asks you to learn so much. It shouldn’t ask you to disappear.
But don’t be afraid of the other version of yourself either. Try the clothes. Change the combinations. Let the place you live now leave a mark. Changing is not always losing.
I can take the best of both. I can keep what makes me feel at home and take what makes me feel freer. My style doesn’t have to pick a nationality or stay frozen at the moment I closed the suitcase.
Today what I wear holds the woman who left Colombia and the woman who learned to choose here. Neither one cancels the other. Together they tell a story that isn’t finished.
My style has two homes.
Laura Vanessa Medina is a Colombian writer based in the United States. She writes about fashion, food and forgotten women.
