Eclectic feel
"The harder the day is going to be, the harder I go on making the outfit spectacular," says María Fernanda Hernéandez Tort, who was on the way to a video-game store, where she planned to drop off a resumé. "I don't have a lot of basics in my wardrobe, so professional moments always scare me a little. I toned down my makeup and colors a bit so that I wouldn't come off as too intense." One of her two majors at the School of the Art Institute is fibers and material studies, which has moved her to consider pattern, color, and texture paramount in her style: "A lot of items I choose for the design, weave, or knit of the textile," she says. That academic sensibility is counterbalanced, she says, by a more childlike sartorial goal: "To always feel like I'm a video-game character."
Originally published in the Chicago Reader.
