Between the Surface and the Soul: A Love Letter to Chic

By Khalifah Ali

Taking us behind the meaning of the THREAD SPRING ‘26 cover shoot, Fashion Editor Khalifah Ali explores what ‘chic’ stands for in modernity.

Chic was never meant to be legible. It was never designed to survive optimization. And yet here we are, living inside a culture that insists on clarity — on naming, tagging, ranking — a world where taste arrives pre-approved, where algorithms decide before desire has time to form, flattening individuality into templates and exporting identity as something easily recognisable, easily replicated, easily corrected.

This is not evolution. It is airbrushing.

And it is within this airbrush, this frictionless surface polished to perfection, that the glitch begins to matter.

The glitch is not chaos, nor rebellion staged for effect. It is a pause inside the system — a quiet refusal — the moment something human interrupts the machine. When the image fails to load correctly. When presence resists compression. When desire misbehaves. And for me, chic has always lived here. 

Before metrics, chic was felt rather than explained. It arrived quietly, without proof, without announcement, never asking to be seen. It moved like light across water — unstable, pearlescent, impossible to replicate — something you could not capture or screenshot, only inhabit. You just had to be there.

Chic lives in the morning hums of a small stuccoed apartment nestled in the heart of Pimlico. Sunlight skims the curve of the balcony rail, spilling softly onto Pantone-painted walls. The air, carrying the trace of perfume from the night before, floral and vanilla, lingering not as intention but as memory. Hair falls softly, unstudied, catching the warmth of the light, while skin glows with the ease of someone entirely at home in herself. A slip dress rests against bare skin, silk moving like a secret — not one to conceal or perform, but one that honours the body it touches and the intimacy of the soul it shelters.

Chic was the aftermath, not the pose.

It did not ask to be consumed. It asked to be encountered.

And yet, somewhere along the way, chic became currency. What was once instinctive and intimate was aestheticised, systematised, sold back to us. Chic became public language rather than private knowing — vitrines of perfection, bodies arranged for display. The paradoxes multiplied. Wanting a Birkin became gauche; owning one became chic; owning too many became vulgar, unless softened by the correct nonchalance. Modesty was chic. “Old money” was chic. Looking rich was not. We learned the choreography quickly — each step rehearsed, refined, increasingly hollow.

What once spoke through intuition now spoke through imitation. Individuality thinned to a surface shimmer — pleasing, reflective, strangely empty.

Beauty breathes.
Perfection suffocates.

Chic once welcomed imperfection: the unfastened button, lipstick softened by time, leather marked by use. Now it insists on polish — tables set without guests, faces perfected past feeling, a monoculture mistaken for refinement. Perfection does not invite touch. It resists it. It quiets the soul.

And the soul, for me, is the definition of chic.

I felt this most sharply when I caught myself editing not just my wardrobe, but my instincts. Like many of us, I slipped into the TikTok pothole — trends becoming rules, silhouettes correcting desire, clothes once loved suddenly recoded as excessive. Not chic, I was told — vulgar. What unsettled me was not the judgement itself, but how easily I accepted it, how quickly I surrendered something intuitive in exchange for legibility.

It was there that I paused.

In that pause — that small #glitch — I stopped long enough to ask the question chic was never meant to answer aloud: what is it, really? How did something once rooted in feeling become so tightly policed, so easily mistranslated?

The answer did not arrive as a definition, but as remembrance.

Chic is not modesty, nor exposure. It is not novelty, nor intention. Chic exists elsewhere — in the stillness of life, in the pause before speech, in a gaze that listens, understands, yearns. It is the atmosphere one lives in when reconnecting with her soul. When understanding replaces performance. When clothing becomes an extension of thought rather than a signal. When illusion dissolves, and only truth remains.

That moment — subtle, self-possessed, unforced — is where chic lives.

Chic is reborn in the body. In the warmth of skin, the glisten of the eye, the movements that cannot be rehearsed. Chic is intimacy, not spectacle. Silk resting on skin in agreement with the person you are becoming. A necklace warmed by a collarbone. Scent clinging to a pulse point. Creases, traces, marks of wear — evidence of living.

To touch fabric that knows your shape. To move and feel it answer. To exist in quiet conversation with your own elegance.

In a culture devoted to performance, embodiment becomes a form of refusal. A lipstick mark left on glass. A mirror reflecting not perfection, but ease. To wear what brings you back to yourself is not indulgence — it is clarity.

There is rebellion in softness. In allowing the body to be felt, not curated. In wearing yourself — your soul — rather than your image.

Chic lives where body and soul meet: in the silence after desire, in the breath before becoming.

Chic is you.

Image Credit: Ollie Turan