Well hello there, funny you should stop by. My name is Filip Åsberg Montgomery and I am currently a sophomore at Brown University, concentrating in social analysis and research which is Brown’s pretentious name for sociology and statistics.
I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, which is also the birthplace of fashion-powerhouses such as Acne, J.Lindeberg and H&M (technically H&M was founded in Västerås, but the headquarters are located in Stockholm, so we take credit for it). For this reason, everyone in Stockholm dresses really well. However, not in the same way that Italians dress well, because there is a Scandinavian-minimalism twist to most of the popular styles. In fact, people just wear a lot of black. Despite this, I really did not have much of a fashion sense growing up, as I spent most of my free time skiing. The fashion scene in those circles is not flourishing, to say the least. My appreciation for fashion did not develop until I moved to Switzerland at 15-years-old.
Actually that’s a lie, it still took me a couple of years to nurture this interest. While I was in Switzerland, I was surrounded by arguably some of the best dressed high school students in the world. As a result, I slowly began paying attention to what was tasteful and what was not. For instance, I now know purple shorts should never be paired with a yellow T-shirt. I became better by the time I graduated, but there was still a lot of work to be done.
I took a gap-year before coming to college. During this year, I moved back to Sweden and worked for six months before embarking on a backpacking trip. Backpacking did not do much for my fashion sense, since I only brought five different garments. But during my time in Sweden, I launched the very ambitious and still ongoing project of overhauling my closet. I decided to renounce my European boy style, and signed up for a GQ subscription and followed some men’s fashion blogs. It took me while but now I liked to consider myself somewhat presentable.
It was very exciting for me to come to the US last fall, because suddenly I was considered fashionable. It’s amazing how far you can get with a pair of dress pants and a sweater in the land of opportunity. I have also received a lot of praise for my “groutfits,” but little do people know that most of them are unintentional…I just have a lot of gray clothing so there’s a roughly 70 percent chance I accidentally put on an all-gray outfit. I also have an unhealthy obsession with scarves. I will find a way to incorporate them into my outfits regardless of practicality, the time of the day or the season.
This was my attempt to give you the very clichéd “if I can do it, you can do it!” spiel, but check out my posts in the next few months and I’ll help you give your friends the impression that you know what you’re doing.
