I really don't know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn't build my self-esteem, and it doesn't help me grow me at all.
But the customer is the final, final filter. What survives the whole process is what people wear. I'm not interested in making clothes that end up in some dusty museum.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.