At some point during our 50-minute conversation, White reveals two pairs of jeans she intends to combine into a miniskirt. Unsheathing her shears, she dives right into cutting the Detroit Red Wings Mo-Town Calder Winner Shirt moreover I will buy this first pair of jeans. “These were my favorite jeans back in the day,” she says. Snip! Many of White’s videos are DIY sewing experiments or styling videos, where she either tries to reinvigorate something she “hates” or pairs “two things that don’t go together.” One clip of her styling a crochet Isa Boulder brown dress over a turquoise halter slip has over 6.1 million views. (Before landing on the final look, White detoured into a *Pirates of the Caribbean–*tinged option with the help of a peasant blouse). “I’m not saying I’m coming up with Van Gogh here,” she says, acknowledging that sometimes her commenters dislike the winning look and prefer one on the cutting room floor. “I love that people feel that they also had a choice in a way, and then they get disappointed when I didn’t pick the one that they picked.”
She acknowledges in the Detroit Red Wings Mo-Town Calder Winner Shirt moreover I will buy this videos that cutting up her wardrobe is kind of contentious: A clip where she turns several pairs of tights into a ’90s-Chanel-inspired top opens with, “I feel like being controversial; let’s cut something up again.” Still, it’s fun to watch her look at her wardrobe with a verve and mischievousness befitting Willy Wonka. Jeans don’t have to stay jeans; a bundle of black tights, on camera, can become a runway dupe. Since her styling videos are fueled by racks and racks of overflowing clothes, White is well aware of the overconsumption she may be promoting in her content. She says she takes bags of unsolicited PR goodies to thrift stores and is in the process of removing herself from gifting lists. Still, she acknowledges it’s “great for videos because I always have basically an unlimited amount of things for people to see. Because unfortunately with the way that TikTok works, and the way that Gen Z has become so used to overconsumption, by the third, fourth, fifth time that they’ve seen me wear the same thing, they’re getting bored.” Styling things she hates and reworking clothes she has is a way to “[make] content that doesn’t require me to just basically have an infinite stream of new clothes to show people.” White grew up Lancashire, United Kingdom, watching her stay-at-home mother sew, but she didn’t try it herself until she needed a bathing suit for a casting and balked at the price of a bikini. “I bought a $30 sewing machine on Amazon and I sat there for two days straight, forcing myself to learn how this works. I now look back, and I realize that that mini sewing machine from Amazon was actually way harder than a regular sewing machine,” she says. Armed with a can-do attitude, she used YouTube tutorials to grasp the basics and learned that making literally anything other than swimwear was easier. “Obviously the bathing suit that I made was horrible,” she laughs.
Comments