Strings senior Natalia Sanchez remembers watching her older sister go through Spirit Week. Sanchez went into her freshman year “hyped” thinking her outfits were just as “over the top” as her sisters were, but looking back, she thinks they were “a bit weak.” She was content with her sophomore year outfits, and junior year, she picked the perfect dress to fit Valentine’s Day and curated an outfit for her favorite decade: the ‘70s. Due to COVID-19, she never got the chance to wear them out and is now determined “to try even harder senior year.”

“I remembered wishing I could go back in person just for Spirit Week so I could actually dress up,” Sanchez said. “It’s not the same because the fun of it all is being all dressed up and playing around with your friends. That’s all the hype and the spirit.”

When tackling her outfits, Natalia’s first step is to “think of an icon of that genre.” For early 2000s music, she plans to model her look after Britney Spears. 

“I love her and her clothes in the 2000s,” Sanchez said. “They were a lot of Juicy Couture velour tracksuits, so I got a pink tracksuit. They also wore butterfly clips, so I got those too. So hopefully that looks enough like Britney.”

For decades day, Sanchez searched up “#80s” on Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok to find the exact neon workout outfit that she wanted. She saw that most people wore pink and blue together, but Sanchez didn’t want to follow the trend because she said she had no interest in looking like “cotton candy” even though she enjoyed the look on other people.

“I didn’t want to just wear something just because that’s what everybody else wears,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez spent hours finding the perfect pair of blue leggings across different websites because her go-to site, Amazon, did not have any suitable shades. Even though she feels out of character in her Spirit Week outfits, she still wants to be confident and comfortable. 

“I feel I am putting on a show. I’m behaving like someone else,” Sanchez said. “It changes the way I think. It gives you confidence a little bit when you’re dressed in a way that you really like, and it doesn’t look out of place because everybody’s dressed the same way. At least for me, it makes me just happier in general. It brightens the whole mood.”