If all the world’s a stage, and we are merely players, what are we performing through our costume? Is it our gender, sexuality, class, a mixture of all three? None of those at all?

I set about my interview with the intention of letting two people from different backgrounds explain what their “costume”—their wardrobe, their uniform, whatever they chose to call it—was designed to perform. My first interviewee is Maria, an 18-year-old pansexual Hispanic woman from Southern California. Stylish and full of attitude, she exudes an unmistakably Californian vibe that, if gone unnoticed by a particularly inept observer, would be noticed around the fifth time she muttered, “It’s f*cking cold as balls here.” Her bright clothes create a stark contrast against the wardrobe of my second interviewee, Ally, an 18-year old white woman from Salt Lake City. Ally’s wardrobe, which she describes as “sensible and convenient,” consists of various jackets, sweaters, and thick fabric items that prioritize warmth first and style second. Don’t get me wrong, though, both of these women are undoubtedly well-dressed. I’d know—they’re two of my closest friends at Wellesley.

MARIA

“I shop sporadically,” Maria says, and on the recorded file of our interview, I bark out a laugh so loud that it hurts my ears when I have my headphones in. By that, she means she shops compulsively.

“It’s not that I shop compulsively,” she explains defensively, “it’s just that when there’s a store with a good sale, I capitalize on it.”

Maria loves clothes and fashion, and above all, she loves self-expression, especially with her newfound collegiate independence. This independence provides her with the ability to experiment with clothes away from the watchful eye of her mother. Maria, a pansexual who has always dressed “girly,” is now expanding her wardrobe and adding darker, more butch pieces. She describes her style as “Coming out of the closet with my closet.”

“I bought some more flannel recently,” she explains. “I’ll wear it with combat boots or whatever, but I’ll accessorize and wear makeup so I look cute. I like to look cute, but I also like to look queer.”

I ask her what she means by “look queer.”

“I guess on first glance a straight person might assume I’m straight, since I have long hair and wear makeup and don’t really meet the definition of a butch girl or whatever. I own a lot of butch clothes, though, like that jeans vest I bought at the Fall Out Boy concert. I can put that on and look butch. It varies from day to day what I wear.”

“I mostly got these ideas of dressing queer from stereotypes, you know, like how lesbians wear dark and baggy clothes. I never knew about the flannel stereotype until I was in my junior year of high school.”

Maria claims that when she dresses to attract others romantically, she doesn’t differentiate what she wears based on whether she’s attracting men or women: “Mostly, I just like looking good for the sake of looking good. For me. I like to feel confident, which is important when you’re trying to get people to like you.”

With gender and sexuality out of the way, we tackle class: Maria’s the daughter of a maid and, as such, doesn’t have the budget to buy brand names. She says she draws the line for an article of clothing at $30. “It has to be really cute if I go over $30,” she says. “I buy most of my clothes at Ross. Well, I did when I lived in California. Now I mostly shop at Burlington.”

As if gender, sexuality, and budget weren’t enough obstacles to tackle in the wardrobe relay, Maria deals with one other prime issue: her size, which usually runs around an XXL in women’s sizes. “I have a lot of people I look up to whose fashion I would emulate if I could,” she says when I ask her who her fashion icon is. “But, like, just because I look up to Nicki Minaj doesn’t mean I can pull off the tight clothes she wears. When I put on clothes, I try hard not to wear things that are too tight around my stomach, but that gets hard with pants. Like, I want them to be loose around my stomach, but tight around my booty. I’m all about making my booty look good.”

ALLY

Ally, a self-described 2 on the Kinsey Scale, doesn’t worry as much as Maria about expressing her sexuality. “I don’t want to go into my self-pitying monologue about how boys don’t like me—or anyone of any gender, really,” she says with a laugh, “But I gave up on dressing for others a long time ago.”

On first glance, her solid-color, comfortable wardrobe might sound average, but it’s most certainly not: where she’s from, she’s a rebel. Since Salt Lake City has such a large conservative Mormon population, people—women especially—can incur lots of judgment going outside of their homes wearing immodest or irregular clothing. This standard has created what Ally refers to as a “counter-culture” wherein non-Mormons, or even rebellious members of Mormon families, dress in ways that do not meet Mormon modesty standards as a method of displaying their secularity or rebellion. Ally loves short skirts, short shorts, tank tops, vests, and feminine versions of traditionally masculine items, such as leather jackets. In fact, she says her leather jacket is “the lynchpin” of her typical outfit.

I pose a question: when she does choose to dress to attract someone else, like at an Olin party, what would she wear?

“For context,” she says into the microphone, “I have the body shape of a plank. Like, same width up and down. I don’t really have curves to accentuate, so I try to fabricate some of those when I go to parties. I’ll wear cinch belts or something. I also try to play up non-body-related things, like my eye color. I care a lot about eyes. I like pretty eyes. I think my eyes are one of my redeeming features, so I make sure I wear colors that make them pop.”

Ally’s referring to her blue-green eyes, which she accentuates with grays, soft blues, greens, and light browns. It’s certainly not the yellows, pinks, and sky blues of Maria’s wardrobe, but it’s just as stylish.

Style isn’t the biggest goal Ally has when she gets dressed, though: keeping warm is imperative. A ski enthusiast, Ally refuses to spend any more than $15 on a t-shirt but would willingly drop over $100 on a quality ski jacket. She comes from an upper-class background—both of her parents are doctors—and she can definitely afford nice ski clothes, but her parents have had her working for and buying her own clothes for two years now, meaning her designer items are few and far between and almost exclusively for weather-related purposes. “The warmest clothes are also the most expensive,” she admits. “But even if my family has money, I don’t personally. I haven’t bought a new piece of clothing since I got here.”

CONCLUSION

One pair of friends, two completely different worlds. A Hispanic woman from California, a white woman from Utah. The daughter of a maid, the daughter of doctors. A pansexual, a 2 on the Kinsey scale. An emphasis on style, an emphasis on utility.

Yet in spite of their differences, Maria and Ally share common threads: They don’t like to dress for others. They dress how they want to and assume the people they attract will be the kind of people they like. They buy on a budget. They shop for what they like, but work within various parameters, be it their non-traditional body shape, their climate, or their shared top priority of how a piece of clothing makes them feel. When asked if they’d rather be underdressed or overdressed, they both gave the exact same answer: “Overdressed. Definitely.” The mid-section of the Venn diagram made by their interview points shows that their goals in getting dressed are the same, even if their ways of achieving this goal are vastly different. At the end of the day, they are both Wellesley women with an emphasis on finding their own identity and expressing it through their clothes. Ally put it best, and when I read the quote aloud to Maria, she agreed: “It’s about looking good and it’s about feeling good. That’s it.”

PICTURES GOOGLE DOC:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LhV1heKgMBmVhhBfzatpVha1AIw0UUbqZxhEw5n9bA8/pub