19-year-old EvCC student, Nelda Angulo, believes that fashion is empowering. “ Since I usually can’t talk in front of people I’ll kind of let my clothes speak for me” she said.

Her mom serves as one of her inspirations. She likes to ask her mom to give her the clothes she doesn’t want so that she can add them to her closet. She has a few satin shirts that she wears that her mom previously owned.

“My family grew up kind of without means and they found pride in how they dressed and their clothing,” said Angulo, “and that’s kind of where I take a lot of my inspiration from.”

Angulo says that whenever her family members plan on giving away their clothes or donating them, she goes through them first and chooses the pieces she likes.

“I have a lot of my grandma’s shoes. I have a couple of my aunt’s pieces that are really nice,” Angulo said. “I steal from my grandpa too.”

The clothing items her grandfather has are what would be considered edgy and when she’s looking for something with “edge,” like flannels, she says she’ll go into his closet and take an item from there.

Because Angulo prefers her clothing items to be different from others, she likes to add her own touch to some of the clothing items she buys to make them more personal. “I don’t make my own clothes but I do like to breathe new life into them by adding [or] taking away things.”

Angulo likes to keep an inspiration board in her room where she has pictures of her friends and family, some art and a few lyrics she wrote.

Recently, Angulo bought a red dress from Urban Outfitters that she wore to Coachella. She ended up buying “warm toned flowers to hand sew onto it” and made a few more alterations to it. Making this dress her own “took a lot of late nights and multiple seasons of project runway” to get her through it, she said.

“A lot of fashion is just kind of trying things out on you and seeing if you like it and kind of learning things along the way,” Angulo said.

“I definitely don’t wear things now that I use to wear,” said Angulo, “It’s all about practice and finding what looks good on your body and learning the things about yourself that you like to accentuate.”

“I kind of stopped caring what everyone else is wearing and just wanted to wear something that was different,” Angulo said.