Sandra Gil
Prof. Ellis
Eng 1101
My name is Sandra and I was born and raised in Queens, New York. I attended school all my life in Queens and I am 18 years old. When it comes to what my interest are, a variety of thoughts either come up or I’m completely blank. For a person like me, it takes a lot of self evaluation to realize what I do or don’t enjoy. I am into art, photography, writing, travelling and cooking, but what has the most meaning to me is fashion. Fashion can be a broad topic, but for me it has much more meaning than just putting on clothes or trying to put fabrics together. For me, fashion is how you show your clothes to express who you are as a person as well as be creative with what you own.
Growing up as a middle child with 4 other siblings, money has become a major milestone in our lives. Although my mother makes enough money to buy what we want, there was always a saying she used that I still follow up to this day. She would say:
“ I only buy you things you NEED, not things you WANT”
By that she meant that if you want something that was used for entertainment or was unnecessary such as electronics, toys and accessories, we had to either earn the things we wanted or save up and buy it ourselves. Now most of us remember that time when our parents or guardians took us back to school shopping as a kid and forced us to try on clothes from department stores. My mom took me to this store called ‘Kid City’ and I wouldn’t really understand what suited me. I think as kids we don’t really care how we looked or whatever we wore would have a meaning behind it later on in life. Usually once you hit puberty and all the kids around you start to change, its when you start to realize not everyone is going to stay the same. I started to find myself through clothes and also YouTube; there were many YouTubers who had their own videos on how to create either a shirt or a hat and change it into something else. For someone who is finding themselves at a very young age, seeing other people take a simple piece of clothing that anyone could own and changing it into something new was mind blowing. I got inspired and it was hard for me to experiment new ways of wearing clothes since I had to wear uniform to school. One day I saw my mother sewing my dad’s shirt and I asked her to teach me so I could fix my baggy uniform pants. There were times when I failed, but to be honest, I wasn’t upset because most of things we want to do has to fail first in order to motivate us to get better.
My aunt also showed me how she knits, but I didn’t own any knitting equipment to follow her steps. She came over for christmas and stayed the night; when I woke up the next morning I saw her knitting and she saw that I was interested. She gave me one of her red yarns and she also gave me the sewing stick that only required one because I just started. After she left, I honestly had no idea what to make, but then I thought of a sweater. Looking back, I don’t know why I thought it was possible for me to make a sweater because I didn’t have that much yarn. The yarn was probably the size of an apple. I remembered the technique was really quick and then realized I was going nowhere with this because I ran out of yarn. Then I just eventually gave up because my mother wouldn’t buy more for me.
After knitting didn’t work out for me, I went back online a year later (I was just beginning high school) to search up what I can do with sewing. What I got out of it was recycling old material and reusing it to create something new. I realized that I had a lot of old clothes I could use to do all that. I would start with something I definitely didn’t need to use and used my old uniform since I went to a uniform free school. I took some fabrics such as cutting an old pink shirt into any shaped I liked and sewed it onto my old white uniform shirt. I took my uniform pants and transformed them into shorts. I always watched Youtube videos in order to help me get the gist of how to cut lines on the pants or where to draw lines in order to cut the legs of the pants. I had to put the pants inside out and fold the cutted parts then sew all around the folded parts. The left overs from the pants I would cut them to sew onto a hat or something, I honestly can’t remember.
Since I was just a freshman, I started to become interested in shopping for my own clothing. It was nice creating my own clothes for a while, but I started to run out of unwanted clothes and didn’t want to use the clothes I already used to go to school with. I was already getting paid to babysit my sisters and saved enough money to go to the mall with my cousin. We honestly had no idea how to control our spendings and bought a lot of expensive items such as shoes, shirts, pants, jewelry and food of course. I would end up saving money just to buy clothes, which isn’t a good idea, and then I got interested with buying band merchandise. I use to be into bands a lot that I would save money to buy their magazines, bracelets, CDs and mostly their shirts. After I realize I was spending too much money, I started to budget on how to spend and made sure I was really going to wear whatever I bought. When I was younger, sometimes I would buy clothes just because I thought it would look cool. When I got older, I realized that I should start buying what I liked and what made me happy, not what type of brand a clothing was.
As the years went by, there was a time where name brands became everything. I think up to this day, name brands still and will always seem important to usually teenagers. Kids in high school are still trying to find themselves and even when we grow up, I still believe everyone tries to understand who they want to be or what they want to be. It becomes difficult for most teens who want to experiment with what they wear because of the fear of getting judged or picked on. I didn’t realize the way someone dressed could play a big role until high school almost ended for me. There was a debate in my senior year of high school on whether we bought necessities just based off of name brands or the quality of the item, Many said yes to brands and a few said that it was based off of quality. The way I saw it, many of the students were just following what their friends were saying because in society, we are shown that if you wear brands, you are presented as a well dressed person. It took me until that year to realize that we should be able to wear whatever we want whether it was an outfit to express our cultures or expensive clothes from a high quality store. Culture also plays another role when it comes to expressing your rights as a person to wear what makes you happy and also shows that you could be proud of where your family is originated from.
My father came from Mexico and my mother was born in Brooklyn but is Mexican and Puerto Rican. Clothing in my culture are generally hand made. I do tend to wear mainly the mexican clothing out in public sometimes because I love expressing who I am and where my family came from. When I was younger, I would visit Mexico with my family for the summer, there would be flea markets and would have handmade bracelets, bags, hats, clothes and necklaces. I was taught how to make most of the items I’ve listed by the workers who were selling them. Growing up in an environment like New York City where people are exposed to other cultures besides their own, many of the kids in school would show me or teach me a thing or two about where their families came from. I would question why most of the people in my school would have common clothing and I learned that it was also based off religion.
As we grow older, life just becomes harder trying to find where our places should be whether at the workplace or still in school. With fashion, I hope in the further future that I could be able to create more clothings and learn new skills. Also I could learn a way to teach younger kids how to knit or sew simple items and help expand other minds into finding themselves.
