Ever stand in front of your jam-packed closet, staring at more than enough clothing options, and think: I have nothing to wear? Same. But perhaps the issue isn’t that you’re out of viable outfit choices. You just need a fresh dose of inspiration — say: Valentine’s Day outfit ideas — to help you see your wardrobe in a new way. That’s where Outfit Dump comes in. On the first of the month, every month, we supply you with enough ideas to fuel your style until the next drop comes along.
Maybe you’re going out for a candle-lit dinner with your best friends or staying in for a rom-com marathon or checking into a hotel for a steamy staycation with your boo — whatever your plans, we’ve got just the Valentine’s Day outfit for you.
From dreamy dresses to matching sets, we’ve rounded up 22 outfits to serve as your inspiration for the holiday — and the rest of the month.
When your date (or the art) matches your ‘fit.Pink and red do go together.See?Let’s be real, V-day is on Monday this year, and that means business.
Outfit sisters, not twins.This is what cotton candy dreams are made of.
The coat that cuddles you back.
The look to pick up your V-day takeout.
Dopamine dressing because it’s still winter.
Layers to dress up your go-to UGGs.
Wear your heart on your sleeve.
Tell me your favorite holiday is Valentine’s Day without telling me Valentine’s Day is your favorite holiday.
Switch out the home sweats for jeans to feel like you tried.
Or don’t.
Get yourself some flowers.
Babydoll meets cowboy.
Mandatory Ben & Jerry’s run.
Your undies, accessorized.
Who said you had to wear red on Valentine’s anyways?Getting boba is a date. Smell the roses.Saucy cut-outs for a saucy dinner.
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Since its debut in 2019, the HBO series Euphoria has cemented its pop-culture domination with costumes and makeup that tell a story of today’s youth culture as much as the plot. The show’s ‘90s and Y2K style references earned costume designer Heidi Bivens two Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Contemporary Costumes. For season 2, Bivens — whose past work includes other teen-centric projects like Mid90s and Spring Breakers — says she wanted to take the costuming even further.
“I tried to have more fun with the costumes and just push things visually a bit more than I did for the first season because I realized how much of an audience there was for the show,” she tells Refinery29. “People were excited about the costumes, and that was surprising and inspiring for me.”
Despite a two-year gap between the releases, the story in the second season (streaming now with new episodes dropping on Sundays) begins just a couple of weeks after the first one ended. With this in mind, Bivens says that staying consistent with the timeline and characters’ styles was a priority — and a challenge. She continued to mix thrifted pieces with designer clothes and further evolved dress codes for each personality. But while last season Bivens was concerned with the idea that “most young people in high school don’t have a ton of money to spend on clothes,” this time around, she was less realistic about the budget.
Take, for example, the popular cheerleader Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and good girl playwright Lexi Howard (Maude Apatow) — two sisters with opposite personalities — whom Bivens dressed up in Prada and Miu Miu, respectively. “I just decided that whatever I felt could help tell a story visually that even if it was an item of clothing that realistically the character wouldn’t be able to afford, I still went for it,” Bivens says. That also included a vintage Jean Paul Gaultier vest, seen on Rue (Zendaya), and a 2018 Blumarine green robe and slip dress worn by Maddy (Alexa Demie).
While Bivens allowed herself to work with designer archives and high-fashion collections this season for the fantasy factor — see: the fashion montage in Episode 2 when Maddy sneaks into the closet of the woman she nannies for, slipping into vintage Dior, Mugler, Valentino, and Chanel pieces — she says that most of the pieces came from thrifting, ordering custom-made clothing that would fit a character’s personality, and using designs by independent designers she found on Instagram. “It’s very exciting for me to be able to help brands get that kind of exposure on the show. I think more people are aware of what they’re doing and hopefully, it could change their year,” she says.
Bivens tapped emerging designers like Mimi Wade, Jerome Peels of Peels, and Aidan Euan of Akna. For the season’s opening scene, Bivens opted to dress Marie O’Neill (Fezco’s drug-selling, violence prone-grandmother, played by Kathrine Narducci) in custom-made suiting by New York-based bespoke tailor Amber Doyle: In the flashback scene, we see her stepping out of the car in a royal blue suit with the words “God’s Word, God’s Will” embroidered on the back. “We discussed the personality of the character and kind of the certain attitude that she had,” Doyle says. “I feel like a suit, in general, is for somebody who’s extremely confident, really has a great sense of self, and you can really see that comes through in this character.”
For up-and-coming designers, being featured on a critically-acclaimed, award-winning show like Euphoria can become a lifeline at a time when many brands are turning off their lights amid the pandemic. That was the case for Jerome Peel’s namesake brand Peels, which he launched in 2016 and that almost didn’t survive the recent economic downturn. “Coming back to this right after, we’re kind of coming out of it. It was one of the reasons why we exist,” says Peels. “She [Bivens] is helping small brands make it one by one.”
While Peels, a brand focused on utilitarian, genderless clothing, had been featured in the first season — with a navy blue embroidered short-sleeve shirt worn by Rue — the designer says that, this time around, the excitement feels even bigger. In the two years since the show has been on pause, Zendaya has become a major force in fashion with the help of her stylist Law Roach, even receiving the CFDA Fashion Icon Award in 2021. “I think that no matter how many pieces I sell or how long I’m in the show, none of that matters when you have that validation from Zendaya and Heidi,” he says. “That means you’re on the right path.”
Much like Peels, designer Mimi Wade says that Biven’s stamp of approval is a brand-defining moment. “She is a real inspiration,” Wade says. For this season, Bivens used Wade’s designs for Kat (Barbie Ferreira), who wore a babydoll dress with puff sleeves in the first episode. “Kat has a strong sense of what she thinks is cool and isn’t really swayed by trends or what her peers are wearing.”
For the rest of the cast, Bivens tapped into trends from the ‘90s and early ‘00s — see: cut-outs, opera gloves, mini skirts, and wide-leg jeans — that have become the defining styles of Gen Z in the 2020s. For Bivens, it’s also a way to look at her own generation’s past: “It’s just this idea of like everything sort of comes back again, and for me, it’s nostalgic.”
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R29Unbotheredcontinues its look at Black culture’s tangled history of Black identity, style, and contributions to the culture withROOTS, our annual Black History Month series. In 2022, we’re redefining Black excellence while celebrating where our past, present, and future meet.
As much as we celebrate Black Excellence in art, fashion, film, and TV, we don’t talk enough about the important figures behind the TV shows and movies that are also cultural moments. One woman who deserves all her flowers is Ruth E. Carter, the Oscar-winning costume designer who has been part of the television and film industry for 40 years. “This has been a long time coming,” Carter said when she finally won the costume design, Oscar for Black Panther in 2019. Long before the Academy caught up to her greatness, Carter was instrumental in bringing Black culture to the forefront of entertainment.
Many of the projects Carter has worked on are rooted in Blackness and in Black history, including classics like Malcolm X and What’s Love Got To Do With It and more recent projects like Coming 2 America. With Crooklyn, for example, the costume designer had to get personal in order to capture the essence of a particularly Black moment in New York City history authentically, so she relentlessly sourced clothes from that era. “Costume designing is a storytelling medium, and the making of Crooklyn was a little autobiographical,” she shares with R29 Unbothered in a Zoom interview. “It was Spike’s family story, so I really wanted to evoke the time and also get all of the particulars about his special family together. We had all the kids wear vintage mismatched pajama pieces that I found in an old store in Brooklyn on Flatbush that had closed down,” Carter says. “That’s part of the magic of storytelling: to be able to find vintage pieces and put them into the story to create this world that really did exist.”
As a veteran in the industry, Carter has experienced firsthand how costume designing has evolved over time. From the early years of working with Spike Lee to now, she has mastered the skill of sourcing items for a particular time period. One skill Carter still stands by is research — knowing what people were wearing, what they were like, and what was going on in the world at the time. “I really do direct my focus towards the people and the culture,” Carter explains. “We went through several eras in Malcolm X, and the further back you go, for example into the 1920s, the more difficult it is to hone in because pieces from that time get more and more scarce. However, in films such as Tina Turner’s life story and Coming 2 America, you saw more Afro-futurism through the lens of what Black people were doing back then. In the 70s, the blaxploitation era looked different from the hippy era.”
“That’s part of the magic of storytelling: to be able to find vintage pieces and put them into the story to create this world that really did exist.”
Ruth E. Carter
When asked about how the industry could do a better job highlighting the Black women in costume designing today, Carter proudly shouts out the aesthetics of Shiona Turini, (Insecure), Marci Rodgers (Passing), and Antoinette Messam (The Harder They Fall), expressing pride in their amazing work. Her profession isn’t always front-facing and not many people know all that it entails, so it’s refreshing to see our community witness the success of young Black women working their way up in costume design. “As a costume designer, I hold them up and toot their horn,” Carter says of the next generation. “It’s up to us to make sure that they are seen and celebrated.”
“I represent 35 plus years of working hard,” she continued. “And when I received the Oscar, I felt like I enlightened the world to [see] us as storytellers, as Black women, as costume designers. It meant a lot to me. It meant so much to the culture. It meant a lot to the film industry.”
Costume designing is now being more appreciated in various ways; social media is populated with accounts dedicated to a show or specific character’s style, and TV shows and movies are sharing more behind-the-scenes footage talking to costume designers about storytelling through wardrobing. For Carter, it’s important that Black people hoping to break into the costume design industry not only see what she’s been able to do, but also have accessibility to get started on their own. That’s why she’s partnered with Thrilling, a Black and woman-owned online vintage marketplace. Together, they’ve announced their Vintage Studio Service program, which aims to connect costume designers and production companies to secondhand and vintage boutiques across the country for TV and film projects.
Her profession isn’t always front-facing and not many people know all that it entails, so it’s refreshing to see our community witness the success of young Black women working their way up in costume design.
While shopping continues to shift to virtual spaces during the pandemic, Carter’s partnership with Thrilling couldn’t have come at a better time for upcoming costume designers and vintage boutiques that solely depend on foot traffic for sales. “Thrilling gives us an opportunity to do what we love and what we know so well by collecting for us and putting it in one space, especially in the climate that we’re in,” says Carter.
Founder and CEO Shilla Kim-Parker couldn’t think of a better person to partner with — after all, Carter is a legend. “The fact that we’re casually sitting around and having a conversation with the Ruth E. Carter is insane to me,” Kim-Parker gushed during the Zoom conversation. “She has led the way for decades. She’s an innovator and master storyteller, [which is] seen in her ability to create impactful storytelling with her clothes and costume design for her film and television projects. That’s why the best directors and producers in the history of cinema call on Ruth to help them tell rich and complex stories.”
As we celebrate our culture and history this month, it’s important that we honor the past. But let’s also celebrate the present by giving flowers to Ruth E. Carter and other trailblazers who are still moving our culture forward through their work. With an expert eye for style and a thumb on the heartbeat of Black culture, Carter’s passion for costuming has elevated some of the most important stories of our time.
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