Chicago-based content creator Atiya Walcott starts every one of her daily outfit posts to TikTok with the same statement: “My name is Atiya Walcott, and I’m incredibly fashionable.”
Posing in front of her now-signature sage green wall, Walcott has been sharing her personal style journey as a person who “wasn’t that fashionable” but wanted to be in fashion since 2020. Since then, she’s steadily built an audience of over 100,000 followers across platforms.
She says her viral series “started as a joke but became very serious.” Walcott, who had gone to grad school for acting, was searching for a way to expend her creative energy during the pandemic. “I started thinking, What do I do every day that I could put online?” she says. While most of us were spending our days in sweats, Walcott was still putting together outfits — “I enjoy styling my outfits just to walk around the house all day,” she explains — and her OOTD series was born.
After posting her first look (a cropped Aritzia tee and Hanes boy briefs), she continued sharing outfits she’d wear around the house and on Target runs. Her platform grew, her looks and locations became more experimental, and both her silhouettes and her catchphrase became bolder. “I’m incredibly fucking fashionable,” she began to say in her introduction.
We chatted with Walcott about the emotional power of style and why even going “hate” viral can be a good thing..
What was it like going viral? One of your earlier videos got over 200,000 views.
It was incredibly exciting. I had posted other stuff and I would’ve loved for that to go viral, and I had been posting YouTube videos here and there for two years before that in a less serious capacity, so when it finally struck with fashion it felt really good.
It was nerve-racking, but going viral is an addictive feeling. It’s a heightened emotional experience, and I don’t know if it’s good for the brain. I think every content creator can relate to going viral, and then you post your next outfit and it flops.
Sharing those kinds of experimentations with your style can be so personal. How did your posts resonate with people?
People on TikTok said it was so creative or so artistic. I always posted with classical music, because I had a whole folder from attempting to be a YouTuber of free-domain classical music. Between the music and the styling, it really resonated with people on TikTok, which motivated me to get more experimental and feel more confident.
Then I started posting the same content on Instagram, where I got a very different reaction. I used to tell people that on Instagram my content grew because it went “hate” viral. I was getting comments saying it was the ugliest outfit they had ever seen, just really nasty comments that made you turn off the comment section on videos that were getting a million views. Those videos are what made my Instagram really grow. For every million hate comments, you’re going to get 100,000 people who like you, so that worked out really well.
The audiences on TikTok and Instagram are so different. People say that no one has personal style anymore — is that something you’ve noticed?
People still have personal style. If I’m walking out in Chicago, I can see an older woman who has personal style, but I know she is not taking pictures and posting them on TikTok. As someone who is online a lot, I had a period in 2021, 2022 when I felt like my personal style was gone because I wasn’t out in the real world or because it wasn’t being shaped and informed by what I do every day.
I went to USC to get my MFA in acting, and when I was in acting school, I had a set of classes and things I had to do with my body each day, which really informed what I wore and how I wore it. I loved my theater-school aesthetic: I had to wear leggings or a long skirt every day, but I really had a strong sense of personal style at the time because it was shaped by what I was doing in my day-to-day.
Now I have to almost fight to stay authentic as an influencer. Personal style is there, but if you spend too much time consuming outfits that are exclusively online and not enough time seeing how people dress in your town, it’s easy to lose your sense of self and personal style.
You see a lot of outfits online that couldn’t necessarily transfer to real life where you have to ride the subway or it’s hot outside.
I once styled an outfit that was just a pair of red tights and pants as a top. I loved the photo, it’s art — but it wasn’t wearable.
You’ve built a following, so you’re online a lot more. How has that impacted your posts?
Even though I’m more online now, my clothes are more wearable. I do see value in those outfits that you can’t wear outside; I love an editorial shoot. I love art for the sake of art communicated through the language of fashion. I’m doing more wearable clothing because it’s a job, but I think if it wasn’t a full-time job, I’d definitely spend my day making more creative, avant garde pieces.
I saw a video or a comment — I think it was Brooke DeVard — and she said, “Where are these people wearing these outfits?” That was the first time I thought about how I can communicate my personal style through wearable clothing. I’m on that journey. Now that I do things like brand deals, I’m styling outfits that are expressive and also wearable so people can find inspiration and ideas.
Do you feel like you’ve figured out your personal style, or is this something you’re still developing?
It’s definitely growing, evolving. I just turned 30, and it’s my whole personality. I am really embracing the idea of dressing differently now that I’m in this new season of life, and I embrace a style change all the time. Having a signature is super valid — like Steve Jobs, the uniform type — but I think my style is forever changing.
I do have favorite garments. I’ll always be a girl who likes to wear a long skirt. I know I like big shoulders, and I don’t like to wear many tight pieces of clothing, and that’s consistent in my brand identity. I know what silhouettes I like, but colors, fabrics, textures … those change.
Now that you have a consistent brand and have built a following, what’s the communication like between you and your audience?
I love my community. They’re so smart and awesome. I think a lot of them get the same thing out of my content: a dose of joy. I don’t feel like it’s about the clothes; it’s about joy and positive energy. I’m not a gatekeeper. If someone comments asking where something is from, I say, “It’s from here; it’s from there.” I feel grateful because people are very kind and supportive. They embrace that it’s art, and that it’s going to be fun and experimental.
Since you experiment a lot, do you have outfits you think just flop?
All the time. Sometimes I’ll shoot a brand deal and submit it, and then when I post three weeks later I hate the outfit. But there are looks that I really love too. I have great pieces, and you really can’t go wrong.
Sometimes you reflect on an outfit and find you want to wear it again, and sometimes you’re just like, I will never wear this again in my life.
I think you have to live with a garment for six months before you know if you like it or reach for it. That’s the beauty of posting online all the time, because you get to be experimental. Maybe 75 percent of the outfits I never wear again, but 25 percent of them are amazing.
Since your clothes are so well documented, are you able to reference your own posts for ideas?
I remember on a brand trip with Eileen Fisher I looked back on TikTok for my recent outfits. I scroll through my own channel to see what I felt the best in, the most confident, happy, comfortable. That’s how I tend to get dressed too. How do I feel emotionally in this outfit?
You’re really able to capture your emotions about the look in the video as well.
My mom always sends me pictures of her outfits, and she’s always smiling really big in one of the photos and then in the other she looks upset. I always pick the photo where she looks the happiest because she felt good taking that selfie.
Do you think you’d still document your outfits if you had never gone viral?
Yes. I recently got a new phone, and all my 2018 and 2019 photos showed up. It was nice to see my personal style before I joined TikTok because it was similar. It was avant garde and out there. I would take thousands of these photos and they never left the phone. So I would document it, but it would be personal.
