So...how do you teach style?

Or more appropriately, how do you teach the idea of it? Style—and the importance of having it—repeatedly comes up in everything from art to fashion to writing. Icons have dropped quotes which help us rethink our understanding of it, but little guidance exists on how to define it in the first place.

This question has popped up a couple of times for me in Japan. The first was while I was teaching breaking to students. They were learning through emulation so I wanted to emphasize that developing their own style was the never-ending end-goal. The question came up again—this time as a classroom vocabulary word—and though I ultimately taught the dictionary definition, I would have preferred to express it as a concept and not a label.

The notion of individual style has been hard to covey because of the language barrier and cultural differences. How do you elaborate on it when words like “unique”, “character” and “individual” aren’t at your disposal?