Breaking Up With a Clothing Brand Anne Slowey, Elle's fashion news director, changed her look when she had a baby. CATHY BEGIEN estimates she has purchased 50 shirts from Steven Alan, the house brand of the independent-design hub based in downtown Manhattan. "I loved their washed-out, wrinkly, comfy preppiness," said Ms. Begien, 36, a brand manager for a designer, who lives in the West Village. I loved having a brand-new one because it smelled a certain way. But at a certain point, she began to feel as if she and the line no longer quite matched up. "The personality was a little off," she said. It felt contrived. So, Ms. Begien "broke up" with Steven Alan. She gave away some shirts, sold others and stopped walking by the store. And she started buying other brands, like Opening Ceremony and Freemans Sporting Club. In a retail climate overrun by new labels, with design teams frequently changing direction to remain competitive, the days when a customer would stick to, say, Brooks Brothers or Talbots for life might be over. And severing ties with a brand, for whatever reason, can come at an emotional cost. Ms. Begien's breakup was relatively easy, she said, but Audrey Brashich's with J. Crew not so much. Ms. Brashich's high school job was at the company's first store, at the South Street Seaport. "I was in love with the clothes and became a devotee," said Ms. Brashich, 41, a writer who now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. I considered myself a J. Crew person. But over the years, she said, she found the clothes became "too refined" for her lifestyle. It was as devastating as a romantic breakup, she said, only half in jest. First, she felt anger. "I would go into the stores and tell the manager, "I'm your target customer; you're losing me." " Then she felt depressed. "I don't have my brand anymore," she said. I don't know where to shop. If I need new, hip khakis, I don't know where to go. Penny Lovell, a stylist for Rose Byrne and Ginnifer Goodwin, was not surprised at the intensity of such reactions. "Clothes are so psychological, they're like a second skin," Ms. Lovell said. But "some seasons just don't work, they'll be too avant-garde or just not your personal style, and you'll want to go explore something different." Not without occasionally clinging to the old, though. Meredith Baughman, 18, a student at Barnard who lives on the Upper West Side, can't bring herself to get rid of Juicy Couture sweatsuits in five colors. "They are something I wore for a long time," she said. It's kind of like hanging on to photos or mementos of an old relationship. True, some designer breakups end with nothing but a sense of relief. Sabrina Soto, 36, an HGTV host who lives on the Upper West Side, recently ended a long affair with lines like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch. "It was all this stuff I should not have been wearing in the first place," Ms. Soto said. Low-rise jeans? They're not meant for my body. My 16-year-old niece took it all, and I was so glad. It was like a mini-intervention for me. Indeed, aging out of a brand is common. Elisabeth Donnelly started shopping at Anthropologie in high school, and her habit of "dressing Zooey Deschanel-ish," she said, reached its peak when she worked a few blocks from the SoHo location. When Ms. Donnelly, a 30-year-old development assistant, moved to Albany, she had a realization. "These are art-teacher clothes," Ms. Donnelly said. Who is this version of me, the slightly awkward ingénue trying really hard to be cool? That's when I started figuring out how to dress like a woman and not a girl. Thanks to a new baby, Anne Slowey, fashion news director at Elle Magazine, has gone through a few recent designer breakups herself, with both the towering stiletto-based silhouette she formerly favored from Balenciaga or Yves Saint Laurent and fashion-forward Japanese designers like Junya Watanabe and Comme des Garçons. "Now I barely have time to take showers, let alone figure out how to wear a third sleeve," Ms. Slowey said.