35 Rolls
250 Hours
Inspiration
My dress was inspired by my experience growing up as a girl and struggling with beauty standards and expectations of femininity. For a long time, I felt pressured to be pretty, sweet, polished, and admired. The strawberry cake theme came from the expectation for women to be beautiful and decorated, almost like a dessert made for others to look at and enjoy. The giant fork attached to the outfit represents how draining and consuming those expectations felt to me. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time comparing myself to others and worrying about whether I was "pretty" enough. In a way, I was trying to fit that "cake mold" image of a perfect woman, and it was slowly eating away at my confidence. The fork symbolizes that feeling of being consumed by society's idea of what a girl should be. As I grew older, I became more comfortable with myself, learning fashion, makeup, and self-expression. I realized that femininity could be something I enjoyed and defined for myself rather than something forced or performative. In the process, I learned that my worth isn’t determined by how closely I fit an ideal.