Schools

180 Days Around the Closet

Walnut Creek teen takes on fashion challenge on her blog.

By Dave Allred

Did you ever see that movie Julie and Julia staring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams? 

The movie is quite inspiring: a young woman, Julie Powell, in an unpleasant job motivates herself by taking on an extreme challenge doing something she loves, namely cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Childs’s cookbook in 365 days. 

Sixteen-year-old Maddy Galindo of Walnut Creek has created a challenge for herself that rivals what Julie Powell did a decade ago — only, instead of cooking, she is using fashion as her form of expression. 

No, Maddy is not in an unpleasant job. But she is in high school, which for many teens amounts to the same thing. So when school started in late August of this year, Maddy decided that in order to keep herself motivated to look presentable every day she would start a blog, complete with pictures and comments about what she was wearing each day for all 180 days of the school year. 

That’s right — 180 days, 180 different outfits (or combination of outfits), 180 postings, without missing a single day. Impressive, to say the least. I sat down with Miss Galindo to find out what would possess a teenager to tackle such a project while juggling friends, family, swimming and five hours of homework each night.

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Tall, pretty and charismatic, the Monte Vista High junior is on day 50 of her blogging adventure as of this interview.

Dave:  What motivated you to start the blog?
Maddy:  I needed a reason to get up in the morning and put on makeup and a cute outfit, and having followers who expected me to do just that seemed to be a good way to keep up.
Dave:  Has it been hard to keep it going?
Maddy:  Not really. I’m a writer first, and I love to sit down and do this every day. I write however much is in me, and if I don’t have anything to write about, I flat out say, "I just can’t write today." I feel like if I just wrote about something that I wasn’t passionate about in the moment, I would be lying to my readers.
Dave:  How do you find a different outfit for 180 days?
Maddy:  I think I’ll run out of clothes eventually, but me and my little sister share every piece of clothing we own, we share a closet, so I have double the clothes. I also mix and match to sneak in some “new” outfits. And, of course, I can always shop.
Dave:  What has been your parents’ reaction?
Maddy:  My parents are super proud of me that I finally have an outlet for the things that are on my mind in such a creative way. Whenever I mention them on my blog I call them Susan and Gary. They don’t think it’s as funny as I do.
Dave:  What about your friends? What do they think of the blog?
Maddy:  My friends are super supportive of the blog. They all read it and tweet about it to try and get me more readers.  They all ask me to be in the pictures every day, too. It makes me feel popular.
Dave:  Do you have much of a following?
Maddy:  I’ve had an amazing following. Not that many people have Blogspot accounts, but I tweet the web address and put the page up on Facebook, and to my surprise, people started to click on it and read it and before I knew it I had people coming up to me asking about it. I feel famous sometimes.
Dave:  What do you hope to accomplish from the blog?
Maddy:  I hope that people will respect me for my writing after all of this is over, but I also hope that people see the world a little bit differently, or at least the way I see it. What started out as a fashion blog has turned into a way for me to speak my mind.
Dave:  So for you, is it about the fashion or the writing?
Maddy: I love fashion, but writing is my true passion. I love writing more then anything and I used to never do it enough up until now. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but fashion will definitely be a part of it.

If you would like to follow Maddy and her amazing 180-day fashion challenge, you can go to her blog at Maddy180days.BlogSpot.com, or on Twitter at @Maddy180Days.

Keep in mind that Julie Powell’s blog ended up being featured in the New York Times, after which her project began to receive the attention of journalists, literary agents and publishers, so who knows what might come from 180 days, a blog and a girl with a passion for expressing herself.


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