A friend from Los Angeles told me, "You just have no sense of style. It's not your fault; you're from Santa Fe. People in New Mexico think that Chanel is a television station and Valentino is the dude Valentine's Day is named after."

I take offense to that, my dear Santa Feans.

Here is my rebuttal: I travel a lot. Like, last week I was in New Orleans and next week I’ll be in Minneapolis.

The style of clothing I wore in NOLA is going to be different from the style I am going to wear in the Twin Cities. Point being: where you live impacts how you dress.

Take the television show Portlandia: Whether the stereotyping hilarity is accurate or not, it depicts Portland to be a place of hipster madness. Here is a comic panel by The Oatmeal:

It’s true; I have never seen my LA friend wear a suit the entire time I’ve known him.

When someone wants to criticize the very place where I developed my style, they have a blogging force to reckon with. Where and how you were raised has a huge impact on how you dress. Actually, location, culture and a plethora of other things factor into your style.

Forgive me, but I’m not going to go digging around the internet to find a study by some college somewhere; it’s not rocket science, it’s logic.

In response to my friend: No, we don’t live three minutes away from the shops on Rodeo Drive; no, we don’t want to buy toy dogs; and no, we don’t like spending our money on over-priced “high-fashion” products. We don’t push our toes around in the sand; we shove them into our hiking boots and saunter around Hyde Park.

That’s how we roll.

As Santa Feans, we’ve got style. We’re a herd of wild… Santa Feans! I can’t objectively label what that is yet, but there’s something good going on here.