Euphoria Fashion
Exploring "costume-as-character", an inspo template, + we're doing a Cassie Howard makeover!
Welcome to the cultured version of quickie: a book club but make it snappy. Perfect for the literary non-committal, ADHDers, or the just plain too busy. With a flurry of rabbit-holes to dive into, let’s get into this recommended title along with annotated-by-me passages and exercises to put the vibes into action.
Euphoria Fashion by Heidi Bivens
From publisher, A24:
“As early as I can remember, I have understood the concept that clothing can be a conduit for communicating one’s personality and tastes.” — Heidi Bivens
Strip down and slip into Euphoria Fashion, Heidi Bivens’ encyclopedia of fabricated fantasy. From the micro mini-skirts worn in the halls of Euphoria High to the maximalist theater of house party outfits, Euphoria Fashion is about more than just costumes – it’s a guide in understanding that clothes are the conduit.
Euphoria Fashion explores how style acts as an extension of character and storytelling. Its distinct looks show up like a fourth-dimension, breaking a fourth-wall of sorts between viewer and show.
It has a power. It isolates and convenes in the same outfit. As was pointed out in one of the many essays in the book.
Knowing where the clothes come from makes the characters feel less realistic, reinforcing what we already know—that teenagers usually don’t loiter in front of their lockers in designer clothes. But it also makes the characters feel more real, because you’ve seen these clothes somewhere in your own world, on your Instagram feed or on the cover of a magazine.
—”Memes, Moods, and Miu Miu Eras” by Biz Sherbert
Why fashion?
When examining the psyche of the show’s style, you can find tricks to apply to your own creative medium(s). Because fashion appears in many different, often not-so-obvious, applications.
Words wrap fashion around characters in a book or evoke vivid imagery via the lyrics of a song, it floats across a movie screen, transitions from panel to panel in a comic book, stuns in a static illustration, photo, or flows on a model down the runway.
Fashion is with us every day—whether we consider ourselves fashionable or not. Unless we all stop wearing clothes, it’s a part, a slice albeit, of our humanity.
To be creative is to know fashion. Fashion is a two-lane bridge to other creative forms, calling inspiration from the unexpected. It does not exist independently. Take W Magazine’s old The Inspiration Equation, once found at the back page of the issues. The most seemingly unrelated field(s) now acts as a source of inspiration.
Fashion is aesthetics. And great creativity excels at capturing aesthetics in a way that represents a visual signature of the creator. Whether you’ve found your signature and want to refine it, are almost there, or are ready to discover it… Let’s dive deeper and study how fashion extends itself to the world through the lens of Euphoria*
*If Euphoria evokes the vibes of a Petra Collins photo, you’re right. Petra was first touted to direct the show by creator Sam Levinson, who was “inspired” by her work. But after working with the show for a matter of months, she was let go. However, her distinct style stayed in production. The artistic morality of that is for another dispatch, but it’s important to give credit and a digital hat tip to those who deserve it—so here’s to you, Petra. We see you. More can be read in this Daily Beast article.
In the portion that follows, you’ll find annotated passages from the book, an exercise to restyle the character Cassie (along with one of my favorite app recs), and an inspiration template you can download.
These excerpts are selected paragraphs from two essays—and are shared for educational purposes.
The footnotes within the text below mark the comments and/or resources I’ve added. *If your email cuts off this post, you can read it in its entirety via the Substack app or a web browser.
IT'S MY EUPHORIA PARTY, AND I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO
by Mitchell Kuga
Euphoria's visual identity has always existed in that liminal space1, both in reality and fantastically beyond its bounds, and the show's costuming is no exception. Take the second season's breakout meme, in which students wearing frumpy school outfits supercut to outrageously skimpy ensembles once they remember they attend "Euphoria High."2 The punchline: Who really dresses like that? Much less in the light of day? Micro mini skirts. Peekaboo halters. Sparkling rhinestone eye makeup and shiny fetishwear. These were looks made for the night—for dimly lit spaces where transgressing sartorial norms isn't tolerated so much as encouraged. The fact that these nightlife looks were of a kind with so many of the ones paraded under the fluorescent-lit hallways of East Highland High School underscored one of the show's central features: its propensity for bringing dark subjects into the light.3 If those subjects were Euphoria's medicine, then fashion was the sugar helping it all go down, costuming being just one of many stylistic devices the show uses to remind us that we are living in, if not quite a nightclub, then a fantastical simulation of reality resembling nightlife's liberatory effects.4
Who really dresses like that in the light of day? The fearless—and seemingly unsupervised—young women of Euphoria. On the dance floor, Jules, Maddy, Cassie, Lexie, Kat, and Rue have provided young people with a new set of nightlife avatars, ways of embodying heightened versions of themselves—like, on Halloween, when you're Catwoman, not just a sexually liberated drunk wearing cat ears. Collectively, they offer cover for exploration: are you an aspiring "It girl" à la Maddy? Or do you sway more toward the pensively deconstructed layering of Jules? Throughout the show, we glimpse fashion as pure id5, signaling how each character sees themself at their most libidinal. Cassie's cleavage-baring tops in various shades of bubblegum pink and baby blue reveal her shaky identification with innocence6, the damsel angling perennially towards the male gaze. Rue, on the other hand, is the embodiment of stoned insouciance, slouching around in whatever she found on her bedroom floor.
HIGH CAMP AT "EUPHORIA HIGH"
by José Criales-Unzueta
To talk about Camp is to betray it, Susan Sontag declared in her seminal essay "Notes on "Camp!"7 That was in 1964, and now, nearly five decades later, millennials and the core of Gen Z are engaged in an endless stream of conversations and (mis)definitions around the elusive sensibility of Camp, often equating it to kitsch or queer flamboyance. Most of these conversations happen URL (TikTok, Twitter), where fashion and costume serve as aesthetic codes and subcultural identifiers. With its rich variety of queer-coded characters, storylines, and cultural references, HBO's Euphoria has, perhaps inadvertently, found itself as a prominent exemplar of Camp in the mainstream. More than anything, it's in the costumes that the show strikes the Camp chord, where Euphoria has both transformed and become a mirror for youth culture.
With endless strains of hyper-micro microtrends8, Gen Z finds the self through performing a subculture, through style as costume. Euphoria's characters, too, craft their identities through play and performance of the self, via their clothing. The same way Cassie fashions herself as Maddy in order to channel her confidence, a teenager on TikTok looks to cottagecore or gorpcore as guideposts for attaining some semblance of self-actualization9.
Euphoria itself is not Camp—far from it—but many of its moving parts stem from Camp culture. Camp is joyous and humorous, often ridiculous.10 Euphoria is not quite comedic, but it's queer-coded in its sensibility. There's a dichotomy that rests in a balance between the darkness and intensity of its subject matter and the playfulness of its characters. If Camp in Sontag's time was an underground queer code (i.e. if you know you know), what Euphoria underscores is that Camp today is not a sensibility, but an open-ended aesthetic tool for self-discovery.
While the tone of the show isn't capital-C Camp, this is precisely what the conversation around Euphoria unlocks. As a new episode rolls out, a heated Twitter debate or a new TikTok trend emerges. The best example is Maddy, whose sartorial aesthetic and one-liners have become instant icons of the URL canon. While viral moments, like her delivery of "Bitch, you better be joking," or "This bitch needs to be put down," are now integral parts of internet lingo, her aesthetic is the most notable example of Euphoria's role as a sub-cultural barometer11.
Last year, an image of Maddy in the hallways of the internet-dubbed "Euphoria High" started a viral online debate over what exactly students were doing there, all based on her ensemble (more "going out" than "ready for math class"). It quickly evolved into a viral fashion meme, with people dressing up in their skimpiest Maddy-esque outfits on their way to "Euphoria High." Often, the meme was propelled by queer masc folks, and as they continued to dress up for "class," the conversation around identity and queerness on and off the show gained traction. It became clear that Euphoria's unique aesthetic serves as a trigger for playful self exploration. The look itself is not the point, but the way it's used to build a character—to create a "self"—is.
Take Cassie's fantasy-driven cosplay12. She rises early each morning to maniacally perfect her costume (and role) for the day with increasingly flamboyant looks. From her inadvertent "auditioning for Oklahoma!" moment to dressing up as her best frenemy, Maddy, there's a consistent exploration of self and identity through her playful forays into costume-as-character. Cassie leans fully into artifice and into the Sontagian concept of Being-as-Playing-a-Role13, which is not only the core of performance, but a queer act of play—and high Camp by definition. In the online conversation surrounding her character, viewers question both her actions and her motives. We have all fashioned ourselves as others in order to find confidence or truer senses of ourselves. The phrase "Dress for the life you want" is a cliché, but like all clichés it’s rooted in a deeper truth.14
Discussion time
You’ll notice the sections above in bold. Each about Cassie. That’s because Cassie is the queen of “fashion = identity” in Euphoria.
Yet she’s the one character who has the least defined sense style.
From the beginning, Cassie’s style was the least original out of any of the female characters on the show. Her style was made up of a cross section of references from social media “It girls” who are focused on looking attractive.
—”Cassie” by Heidi Bivens
Her search shows us how it can’t always be from the outside in. It’s about starting from the inside out. Let’s play with that if it were true for Cassie…
Defining Cassie’s style
Starting with a list of words that come to mind:
Desire
Fairytale
Follower
Sensitive
Guy’s girl
Daddy’s girl
Abandonment issues
Fragile
Vindictive
Figure skating
Cars
Wounded
Now how do they connect?
Tonya Harding comes to mind as a perfect mashup of Cassie’s interests and her dark side which came to a peak in the second season. I’m also intrigued how Cassie’s “loss” of her father might bridge her style more toward Rue’s oversized layers but with pops of brighter hues.
How would this look?
I imagine bodysuits, rhinestones, candy colors, 90’s mom jeans, Canadian tuxedo, kistchy sweatshirts, jerseys, leggings, scrunchies, bad bangs, french braids, half-up/half-down hair. This feels like the real Cassie Howard to me.
Back in A/W 2021, Juicy Couture’s collection cited Tonya as an influence. Its looks pull in a lot of the existing Euphoria vibes too.
Download your inspo equation template:
The looks
When brainstorming looks for fiction characters, illustrations, or for styling my own designs, I love using the app Whearing. They allow you to pull images from Google in the app, store the images in your “wardrobe”, and style them into outfits. It also comes with a handy Chrome extension if desktop’s your thing.
Try this out for yourself with Cassie (or another character if you’re more familiar). Make a list of words, connect them to fit a narrative, figure out how it would look, then start putting together outfits. Experiment. Have fun. There are no bad ideas. Every iteration helps you refine your taste—regardless of what you do with this, it’s worth it for that and that alone.
Someone on a subreddit nailed it: “In Internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition, pertaining to the concept of liminality.”
Its history on Know Your Meme
Paste Magazine’s feature on the grimdark leanings of teen TV.
The part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest.
Color symbolism resources: Canva, Academy of Animated Art, and Smashing Magazine.
On the overwhelm and overconsumption of micro trends
Strike Magazine article on “-core” aesthetics and Glamour Magazine on the shift to identity aesthetics.
An example of the joy of camp: Bravo’s The Real Housewives franchise.
A social media/branding take on the cultural influence of the show.
The idea of moodboards as a form of everyday cosplay in an archived Wired feature from 2012 on the now-shuttered site Polyvore (which was acquired in 2018 by Ssense).
“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” ― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’
