How what you wear reveals your true identity

Leesa Evans has helped film audiences fall in love with film and TV characters from “Zoolander 2” to “Bridesmaids” to “Young Rock.” Through their wardrobes, she helps inform how the actors brought their characters to life and how audiences perceive them. As one of Hollywood’s busiest costume designers and stylists, Evans knows that the future of what people wear in real and virtual life is shifting toward understanding our true selves and comfort over social convention.

Kate MacArthur: You work with fashion and people's images on screen and in real life. Where do you rank fashion in how you present yourself and your identity? 

Leesa Evans: What's most important about how we dress, and our appearance is that we feel in true alignment with who we are internally and who we present to the world externally. Because when we are authentic that way, it puts to bed things like shame and feeling like a fraud or being less than, and all these inner dialogue ideas that we don't need to succeed in whichever thing that truly brings us joy and passion.

MacArthur: That's in how you express your identity, yes?

Evans: Absolutely. This is something I really learned through the process of costume design. You can tell who someone is from the moment you meet them on screen, based on the way they dress. You can evoke certain emotions from the movie-going audience in the way that person is dressed. [The audience interprets] immediately that they're intimidating, or they seem vulnerable or insecure, or if the character is inspiring and kind. But we are subconsciously doing that to one another in so many ways on a daily basis in our real lives.

MacArthur: How is clothing used to set limits and boundaries around our identity?

Evans: Sometimes clothing can help create limitless possibility, and then sometimes clothing can inhibit you from reaching your full potential. Because we've all had this feeling where we have on a good outfit and that equates to a good day, or we have on a bad outfit and that equates to a bad day. That can be not from a fashion perspective, but from a comfort perspective. Or we just felt like we weren't dressed appropriately for a particular meeting or event, or for whatever reason we weren't in our comfort zone.

MacArthur: Can people invent or reinvent an identity purely on clothing?

Evans: It's possible. It's not so much that you're trying to reinvent yourself, but you're trying to present yourself finally and truly authentically. And what I do in my private styling career is help people find out who they know themselves to be and how to then express that through their clothing.

MacArthur: In our survey, 89% of American adults rated how they treat others as most important in how they express themselves. Things they wear was 42%. I was skeptical of that. What do you think?

Evans: First, it gives me faith in humanity that 89% of people said it's how we treat one another because I couldn't agree more. But I think that our ability to be in a good state of mind to truly be kind to one another is based on our own alignment and connection with ourselves, first and foremost. 

To truly get to that place where we can always be kind to one another requires having a certain sense of self. And that is the equation that I find time and time again, which is feeling confident and a sense of well-being on a daily basis. That links to a greater sense of happiness, and that happiness directly relates to kindness. That's where I can see how what we wear gets us to a place where that statement is true.

MacArthur: How might the metaverse change how we express our identity?

Evans: The metaverse just opens all this opportunity to play and to have fun and to create all these different versions of ourselves. But it's important to stay grounded in the true nature of who we are. The playful aspect of it isn't based on perceptions of what size you wear, the length of your hair – things that are judgment-based – but more on what part of your personality can be expressed through [them].

MacArthur: What will we be wearing in the next 10 years?

Evans: I hope that we will have fabrics, and it’s already starting to happen, where the fabric technology, whether it's just flat-out good for the environment, and we are not adding to climate issues, to fabrics that keep us cool when we're hot and keep us warm when we're cold and help us regulate our breathing when we start to feel a bit anxious. This future of fashion and fashion technology is all about the mushrooms that we grow to make our leather goods, and we no longer use leather goods. And the bamboo that we grow to make fabric, and we no longer cut down rainforest for trees and old growth trees for any reason. There are many interesting and new technologies that will bring us into the future in a more conscious way.