select fashion essays / sydney nicole sweeney

HelloGiggles • 29th June 2021

After Being Bullied As a Kid, Here's How I Came to Love My Beautiful Dark Lips

Growing up, I always told people my favorite color was purple, although it was really pink. Ten-year-old me, undeniably girly but reluctant to identify as a girly-girl, likely saw purple as girly lite, feminine sans its stereotypes. Hence, I embraced...

FLARE • 21st September 2020

I Lost My Job to COVID—But Found My Personal Style Again

Scrolling through an iPhone camera roll is the 21st century version of flipping through the pages of a metal ring-bound photo album and romanticizing times that felt much simpler. In 2020, a miserable year that feels more and more like a literal...

Medium • 3rd August 2020

How Bratz became the cool-girl blueprint

Looking back, I recall the first wave of Bratz content trickling onto social media as if it were just yesterday, although it was actually mid-2018, when FILA Disruptor IIs weren’t yet stale, and every art show I stumbled into was an unspoken...

i-D • 30th July 2018

how anime inspired a generation of misfit fashion

At the turn of the millennium, Japanese artist Ai Yazawa introduced the original goth girlfriend: 21-year-old punk Nana Osaki graced the pages of serialized shōjo and josei manga magazines (young female-aimed publications) as the protagonist of Nana....

Sophomore Mag • 3rd August 2017

Preserve Your Ethics, Preserve Your Style

For a long time, my parents’ front porch was regularly bombarded with bright yellow, plastic packages stuffed with the latest bits of my teenage fantasy: a heap of on-sale merchandise purchased via yet another online Forever 21 escapade. I was frugal...