fashion – Omnibus

UNC-Chapel Hill students stand out as color-coordinated twins

By Chapel Fowler

Under Armour Havocs, with high tops and white laces. Golf caps, bought five years ago when the 2014 U.S Open came to their hometown of Pinehurst, N.C. Google Pixel 2 XL smartphones, with identical plastic cases.

Matthew and Luke Wheeler have fallen into this habit for years. As identical twins, it’s easy for them to buy and wear the same thing. And it makes gift buying a breeze.

But, when it comes to the Wheelers’ accessories, there’s one blatant difference: the color. Everything of Matthew’s is green. Everything of Luke’s is red.

For the past two years, this has turned the Wheelers into campus celebrities of sorts at UNC, where they’re both sophomore computer science majors.

They call it “color coding.” You can call it whatever you want. Just know it’s not for you, or professors, or attention, or anyone or anything else.

“We don’t necessarily do it to help other people,” Matthew said. “I do it because I like green.”

“And I like red,” Luke said.

The contrast is most evident when they’re together, which they almost always are. Matthew in green shoes and his green hat; Luke in red shoes and his red hat.

Color-Coded Beginnings

Their color preferences go back to elementary school, when the Wheelers had a brief and unsuccessful run in a rec basketball league. But ahead of the season, their parents let them pick out shoes. Matthew chose green, and Luke chose red.

They’ve been wearing color-coordinated basketball shoes ever since. The Wheelers were longtime Nike customers, but when they outgrew their last pair, they couldn’t find new ones of their preferred size and color. Thus, the switch to Under Armour.

“In middle school, people started mentioning, ‘Oh, just remember them by their shoes,’” Matthew said. “So it kind of gave us an excuse to say, ‘Hey, I want green shoes.’”

“It was a self-fulfilling system,” Luke said.

At West Pine Middle School, Matthew and Luke took an extracurricular class called Future City. In the program, students work on designing and creating their own miniature city dioramas. Their teacher, Ms. Hippenmeyer, had trouble telling them apart — even with the shoes.

So she came up with nicknames: Mint Matthew and Lava Luke.

The Wheelers still use them to this day. They even have them printed on clothing — thanks to a longtime tradition of their high school speech and debate team.

Every year, juniors at Pinecrest High School are tasked with getting gifts for departing seniors. When Matthew and Luke were seniors in 2017, a junior named Caleb printed their nicknames onto red and green T-shirts for them.

The words are in a collegiate font, white and bold and in the center of the shirts. Matthew and Luke keep them in their closets on the fourth floor of Cobb Residence Hall, where they room together. The shirts have very specific washing instructions, so they don’t get much use — except for special occasions, like the first day of classes.

“It usually spikes during the start of the school year,” Luke said. “People say, ‘Are you doing Mario and Luigi?’ Those kind of things. And then people just get kind of used to it.”

As Matthew is quick to point out, that Mario and Luigi nickname doesn’t even hold up well. Both sets of brothers have the same initials — M and L — but their colors are swapped. Mint Matthew doesn’t line up with the red Mario, and Lava Luke conflicts with the green Luigi. (The Wheelers are also identical twins; Mario and Luigi are just fraternal).

“For people who aren’t going to know us well, it’s fine,” Luke said. “But if you’re going to know us, it probably helps to not think that. If you remember us as ‘Mario and Luigi — but not,’ I guess that works.”

Campus Celebrities

Save for a few recitations, the Wheelers have had near-identical class schedules. Matthew and Luke’s colors usually don’t matter in large, impersonal lecture classes. But they have helped people differentiate between the two in smaller ones — except for a Spanish class last semester, where they think their professor was colorblind.

The coordination extends to basically everything the Wheelers do. Sophomore Casey Quam remembers the twins introducing themselves as Mint Matthew and Lava Luke on the first day of LFIT 110, a beginning swimming course. They wore red and green swim trunks and goggles the entire semester.

“It was definitely something neat to tell friends about, and we never forgot who was who,” Quam said. “It’s been fun to see them walking around campus since then and see that they’ve kept it up.”

Matthew and Luke’s commitment to green and red isn’t hard and fast, though. They only own a few T-shirts in each color and one pair of gym shorts. No pants or socks. Matthew’s been trying to find a green jacket. Luke can’t track down a red Yankees hat for the life of him.

Their usual coordination — just hats and shoes — pales in comparison to sophomore Benjamin Davis, who has dressed head to toe in yellow since the first day of his freshman year.

Ironically, Matthew and Luke lived just one floor under Davis last year at Graham Residence Hall. They’ve never met, but Davis(known as the Yellow Guy) said the Wheelers’ color choice is “amazing.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love that we have this culture where everyone can just have their own individual thing and somehow get recognized for it.”

Colors aside, the Wheelers are huge fans of video games. Luke plays “Overwatch” on UNC’s official team within Tespa, a college esports organization. Matthew is a bit more casual, sticking to some “Super Smash Bros” or “Dungeons & Dragons” on the side.

Looking (and Color-Coordinating) Ahead

Ideally, they’d work within North Carolina and in the same area after graduation. Both aspire for a job in programming, like their older brother John, or even better, in video game design.

If their offices have a formal dress code, Matthew and Luke have a solution: green and red ties, just like they wore in speech and debate tournaments. Even if they don’t live or work near each other, they still think the coordination can live on.

“It’s just our favorite color,” Luke said. “So it’s technically independent of the other one.”

Until then, they plan on rooming together and wearing their respective colors for the rest of college. They’ll keep walking around campus, almost step for step, and eating similar food in Lenoir Dining Hall: burgers, chicken nuggets and especially fries.

Matthew and Luke haven’t heard any negative comments yet. More frequently, a student will approach them and admit: “Hey, I’ve got to at least talk to you once.” Some will swear they’ve seen the Wheelers, who are sophomores, around campus for the last three years.

Matthew and Luke both find that claim hilarious. As they laugh and smile, they reveal the braces they wear. When those braces were put on about two years ago, each twin was offered a selection of rubber band colors.

You’ll never guess what Mint Matthew and Lava Luke chose.

Edited by Johnny Sobczak

‘Spreading a social venture for the campus’: Vintage Blue proves it’s more than just a company

By Mimi Tomei

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Two hundred forty-seven dollars is a lot of money to spend on one piece of clothing – especially for a college student.

It’s an even more staggering figure when it’s spent on an old windbreaker, even if that windbreaker is Carolina blue and has the UNC-Chapel Hill logo on the flap of the pocket. But that’s exactly what one customer paid after an intense bidding war unfolded on Vintage Blue’s Instagram page.

By giving the customer who lost the bidding war a free piece of gear, they built a relationship.

Vintage Blue is a purveyor of vintage Carolina paraphernalia from area thrift stores and various online sources. The group connects with its audience through Instagram, their main business platform. Other students model for photo shoots around campus and surrounding areas, fostering relationships. The photos serve as advertisements on the company’s Instagram feed.

Vintage Blue’s crew and models arrived with hangers of clothing at 1789 Venture Lab. Among the clothing was a blue windbreaker featuring the UNC-CH mascot Rameses outlined in yellow. But one item didn’t fit on a hanger: a pair of worn, white basketball shoes.

Marketing director Jessi Zhou springs into action, putting the sneakers on model Katy Dettmer, coming up with a way to lace the shoes so the laces can remain loose a la Jay-Z but will still stay on Dettmer’s feet.

As Zhou works, Dettmer and Connor Von Steen, also modeling for the day’s shoot, chat with the team..

Once the shoes are on, content and creative director Rodrigo Bustamante takes over.

Bustamante and Zhou set up on the steep stairs that lead into the entrepreneurship space from Franklin Street a level down. As Zhou styles Dettmer, Bustamante furiously clicks his shutter.

The whole operation has to pause occasionally when someone needs to walk up or down the creaky, paint-chipped stairs.

Nearby, technology and analytics director Kenny Barone sits at a folding table with his MacBook open, perusing Instagram. Barone calls his business partners over, consulting them about which athletes the group’s feed should follow.

Of course, all the basketball players are a given.

The company is run entirely on Instagram, a choice that was made due to the popularity of social media in the venture’s target customer base: college students.

“If it’s in front of your face, you’re going to click on it,” Zhou said.

Convenience is a big draw for Vintage Blue’s customers. The team scopes out and acquires items online and in local thrift stores, saving their customers the effort of having to traverse greater Chapel Hill area to find the perfect piece of gear.

During this time of year when much of UNC-CH is focused on basketball, it comes as no surprise that Vintage Blue is focusing on athletic wear.

“We definitely try to match the energy of the school,” Jemal Abdulhadi, finance and strategy director, said.

The entrepreneurs give the garments they sell creative names. Some of them coincide with upcoming games, such as a basketball warm-up shirt dubbed “Juice ‘cuse” in reference to the then-upcoming game against Syracuse.

Others include a sweatshirt featuring the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Toons dunking a basketball clad in a UNC-CH jersey entitled “Tazzz,” which Von Steen modeled in front of an old PacMan video game machine.

Why do they do it?

They all get real-world experience in fields they hope to pursue after graduation in a profitable business. They’re a part of the vintage fashion scene in Chapel Hill. They express their creativity by telling multimedia stories. They get to work with items so unique they sometimes struggle to let them go when they’re sold.

And they get to learn more about the people they go to school with.

“I like the idea of spreading a social venture for the campus,” Zhou said. “I like how we’re venturing out and doing the stories, because I think it’s very important whatever you do to have a social impact in some way, and selling vintage clothes isn’t a social impact. But by connecting people in the community – I would really love to learn more about my peers that I can’t reach out to.”

The company uses “originals,” which are journalistic profiles written by Bustamante and Barone, to promote their products on their website. So far, Bustamante and Barone have published three “originals,” accompanied by photos of the subject in the clothing.

“We’ve been working on how we can bridge this gap – like how are we going to make stories and vintage clothing work?” Bustamante said. “But we just realized that we can use the model, or the person that we’re doing the story on, to model the clothing. We do the story one day and then the next day drop the item that is associated with their story.”

So far, juniors Psalms White and Scott Diekema and senior Aaron Epps are all profiled on the originals page.

The company came together quickly at the beginning of the spring 2018 semester. The first profile appeared online February 6 – less than three weeks after the group’s first photoshoot.

Where did it come from and where is it going?

Originally conceived as In With the Old in fall 2016, the startup rebranded to Vintage Blue shortly before the semester began under the guidance of Bustamante and Abdulhadi. Two weeks in, the business began turning a profit.

Photos of the items, shot by Bustamante, are posted on the feed, along with a starting bid and an ending time for bidding on items. From there, customers place bids through the comments section. Each bid must be at least $2 higher than the last. Customers pay through PayPal or Venmo and then arrange a time to meet with a Vintage Blue team member to pick up their item.

“In the first few weeks, we definitely were careful of what and how we spent money on because we weren’t (generating) significant revenue,” Abdulhadi said. “Since then, we’ve primarily been reinvesting profit in the website, gear and future offerings.”

The group has goals for the future, including an official launch party slated for next month. But these new developments come with logistical challenges the company will have to face, like delivery methods.

Vintage Blue hand delivers all their items to help continue connections with its customers beyond the sale. It helps the customer incur less cost, too, since they don’t have to pay for shipping – but that might not always be the case.

“I think we’re going to have to change our model towards shipping and e-commerce,” Abdulhadi said.

“I think as we grow our following nationally, since there are a lot of Carolina fans nationally, it’ll expand to a ton of people who want to buy stuff.”

Edited by Ana Irizarry

A new norm of perfection: Women find meaning in makeup

By Cinnamon Moore

Opening the door of a Sephora store is like opening Pandora’s box.

Normally built within its partner store, J.C. Penney, the cosmetic giant stands in sharp contrast to the relatively relaxed and neutral-colored department store.

Bright, white lights draw the eye’s attention to a space filled with a kaleidoscope of colors. Black and white-striped walls lend a Mad Hatter feeling to the space, beckoning those passing by to drop in just to have a look at the creatively controlled chaos. As planned, many women succumb to the not-so-quiet calling.

After taking the necessary seconds to adjust to the sheer magnanimity of a cosmetic store, one can marvel at just how many products are actually sold in this one relatively small space.

At least 50 mini-aisles fill the store, with a cosmetic company claiming either a side or a whole aisle. In these islands of small, packaged products, one can find every shade of matte, gloss or colored lipstick (there’s a huge difference between the three), makeup primer — a foundation that meets your skin tone and chemical preference — concealer, about a hundred different shades of brown eyeshadow, lip liner… The list goes on.

Urban Decay, first mini-aisle to the right, has a hundred different shades just in its Vice Lipstick line.

With each row of products color-coded and spotlighted, the effect of the cosmetic store can be dizzying. Mirrors adorn every possible surface so there’s never an excuse not to try on that shade of Nighthawk matte lipstick.

All of these products cater to the new, makeup-savvy woman of 2017.

With the growth of the cosmetic industry as proof of the world’s obsession with makeup, any curious person may wonder at the reason behind the boom in beauty products.

A survey funded by Renfrew Center Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to the education and prevention of eating disorders, found that 44 percent of women experienced negative feelings when not wearing makeup. That means nearly half of women in America feel uncomfortable in their bare skin and pressured to put on a mask.

Many have begun questioning the world’s reliance on makeup. A movement was even started by singer Alicia Keys promoting #NoMakeup and encouraging women to feel comfortable in their own skin — no makeup necessary.

Yet, in the midst of two warring sides telling ladies what to do with their face, a group of women journalists, bloggers and social media users have voiced their disregard for the opinions of others. Instead of a social obligation, these women emphasize that wearing makeup is fun and an expression of personality.

An artist with a new, blank canvas every morning.

With all these voices showering women with opinions, it begs the question of why the average young woman wears makeup: for men, for her peers or simply for herself?

“I’m drawn to stylish, classy, sophisticated women. How they carry themselves, the clothing they wear…and I think makeup is definitely a part of that. It adds a bit of mystery to who they are.” – Amiel Elbitar, 24

Using makeup is not a novel concept. Throughout history, women of all eras have applied makeup to conform to the flitting trends of the time. From the infamous dark kohl lining in ancient Egypt to the shaved eyebrows and ghostly pale powdered faces of the Elizabethan era, women have been altering the look of their faces for centuries. But while cosmetics were previously used as an aspect to make women stand out, now it helps women blend in.

“I feel like everyone is staring at me if I go out barefaced,” said Nicole Gonzalez, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In today’s culture, blemishes should be quickly hidden and the natural attractive aspects of the face enhanced. We live in a society of perfection.

A 2013 study by financial website Mint.com revealed that the average woman spends $15,000 on makeup in her lifetime.

Gonzalez admitted that she spends around $100 a month on cosmetics and watches various YouTube tutorials on how to use them. Her cache includes an array of eyeliners to make her deep brown eyes pop, highlighters and contour powder to make her face more angular and her cheekbones more pronounced, and a dizzying array of lipsticks to reflect whatever mood she’s in that day.

Alyssa Lashway, a recent UNC-Charlotte graduate, said as an individual with naturally oily skin, she often feels self-conscious about her face looking shiny.

“I don’t mind going out without makeup,” Lashway said, “but I do find myself thinking about how shiny my skin is probably looking.”

Because first impressions are very visual, Lashway said, she often feels pressured to make sure her face is powdered and absent of its natural shine.

“It’s definitely on a case-by-case basis, but I usually prefer women with makeup. It enhances beauty to a certain extend.” – Matthew McDonough, senior at St. Lawrence University

As a society frequently reprimanded for its obsession with perfection, it’s not surprising that a flawless face would be added to the laundry list of considerations toward the ideal individual.

“I wear makeup because if I don’t, I feel like I have no life in my face … and lots of imperfections,” Gonzalez said.

“Society has stigmatized women who don’t wear makeup,” said Amiel Elbitar, 24. “Women want to look good and have others see them as put together. Makeup is now a nuance of what and who they are.”

The United States is now the biggest cosmetic market in the world, with just above $60 billion in cosmetic revenue. From highlighters to mascara, the average woman is building up an impressive collection of beauty products. Essentially, makeup has become the norm of our society, a fact that cosmetic companies are both profiting from and exploiting.

In 2015, L’Oréal spent $2.2 billion in advertising and was rewarded with a $3.5 billion net profit. While not inherently mandatory, makeup products are simply seen as a way of life now, even bleeding into the professional realm.

“I feel like if I don’t have makeup on then I am not professionally presentable,” said MaryKate Frisch, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill.

A study funded by Procter & Gamble in 2011 found that when given a choice between women with and without makeup, a majority of participants, both men and women, judged women with makeup as more competent.

Like a pair of pressed slacks or a button-down blazer, cosmetics have become a way for women to look simply more put together and qualified.

“Makeup is sort of expected,” said Phillip Love, a 22-year-old student at Palmer University. “It’s become part of a woman’s outfit.”

Cosmetics to a woman are equitable to a haircut on a man — just a bit more expensive. And like a great haircut, women who have mastered the art of makeup, more often than not, receive high commendation.

“I think women without makeup are more easily approachable, absolutely. But I still find myself drawn to women who are wearing it, even if it’s just a little bit of makeup.” – Phillip Love, 22, student at Palmer University

Over the last few years, women and feminists have begun embracing the idea of makeup as both a creative outlet and a tool, instead of a necessity.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, if you got dressed up, it was simply to please men, or it was something you were doing because society demands it,” Nancy Etcoff, a psychology professor at Harvard University, told the New York Times in an interview. “Women and feminists today see this as their own choice, and it may be an effective tool.”

Matthew McDonough, a student at St. Lawrence University, said makeup can make women look either professional or sexy depending on the situation or their mood.

“On an active basis, I find the women in my life wear makeup more for themselves than for others,” he said.

Makeup makes them feel not only more attractive, but also more in control.

Essentially, many women are embracing makeup as an avenue to curtail how the world sees them. They’re taking something that the world deems mandatory and using it as a tool in their arsenal.

Makeup is now, whether we like it or not, an integral part of our society. While strongly dependent on it, women have the choice to use it as a crutch or use it as a means of personal expression. From eyeshadow colors to choice of lipstick, makeup can be a fun and creative way to add dimensions to one’s image and a flare of personality— like choosing an outfit for the day.

But, with this creativity comes an underlying understanding that makeup shouldn’t be determinant of self-worth. This means that while it may be more expected in certain circumstances, like business casual attire, it isn’t needed for every endeavor out of the house.

“I feel like people expect you to be looking fresh-faced all the time, which is not always the case,” Lashway said.

With a busy life, she said, there are simply things that are more important than a perfectly put-on face.

While it’s easy to get lost in the endless aisles of a Sephora store, it’s equally easy to get lost in the need for makeup. The key is to remember that everyone is trying to be a perfect human in an imperfect society.

Edited by Sara Salinas