Stylist Melissa Levy Opens Up Her Wardrobe Inspired by a Life from Sydney to New York

In this ongoing style series, Vogue gets a closer look into the wardrobes of Filipino creatives. Here, photographer and stylist Melissa Levy advises, that to find and develop your personal style, “Look beyond Instagram.”

As a child, Melissa Levy wore pajamas made out of cotton from rice sacks. In fact, it’s one of the reasons she got into dressing up: “I loved thrifting and going to op shops with my mum in Sydney,” she recalls. “Mum loved making us clothes, and sometimes would make PJs out of cotton from rice sacks, or fabric we would pick out together.”

Years of sifting through racks and selecting which pieces to take home eventually defined a manner of collecting that is guided by intuition. “I don’t hold onto a lot, and cull often,” she explains of her acquisitions, which include special objects like an Alaïa Teckel purse in black and leather-accented gold sunglasses from Loewe.

Looking up to the styles of creative working women in the aughts in New York such as Sofia Coppola and Margaret Howell, Melissa’s own style can lean, in her own words, boyish, incorporating ’90s and ’00s silhouettes while prioritizing comfort and practicality. You might find her on the move in a noir power suit with barely-there kitten heels, out and about in a white tank top with flared floral trousers, or walking her dog in a charcoal sweater and horsebit loafers.

“There is something defined but also very much a disregard to what people think of them; they are dressing for themselves,” she says of her inspirations. What does it take, then, to find and develop one’s personal style? For Melissa, it lies in three simple words: “Look beyond Instagram.”