Wildcat Style — No Filter

“I’m over city life.” — Serena Lewin

This past August, when Serena Lewin harvested kale, broccoli and leeks on a sustainable farm in Birkerod, Denmark, she realized she wanted to return to Europe after graduation — to eventually tend crops on her own small-scale farm.

“I want to have a full-cycle farm that has its own market that can provide to the whole community,” says Lewin, a sophomore who plans to major in environmental science. “If you can grow food in a sustainable way, you can reduce a lot of environmental degradation.” Farming practices in Denmark and Europe, she says, “are light years ahead of ours.”

On Northwestern soil, she’s the social media maven for Wild Roots, touting the student-run group that cultivates a sustainable garden behind Norris University Center.

Sustainability is a common thread, quite literally, in Lewin’s life. “I never buy anything new,” says the Los Angeles native. “I refuse to buy anything from a commercial store. I can have a lot more clothes for less money. And I know that when I’m walking around, no one is going to have the exact thing that I have, and I pride myself on that.”

She resells all of her clothes via the Depop app. “I never keep anything for too long. I buy it, post it and wear it until it sells,” she says.

Lewin scored her Dr. Martens boots from the Rose Bowl flea market in Pasadena. Her plaid pants are from a vintage store in Amsterdam, purchased with a check from British Airways after they lost her luggage. She found the multicolored necklace at a flea market in Sicily; the chain necklace was Lewin’s mom’s when she was growing up.

Eventually, though, she may be out of range of brick-and-mortar thrift stores. “I’m over city life and want to be somewhere very remote,” Lewin says. “I just want to be in nature.”

“I like to dress a bit more formally.” — Jay Towns

In a campus landscape of T-shirts and jeans, Jay Towns stands out in his cream-colored blazer and floral button-down shirt. “I like to dress a bit more formally for classes, because I feel like it engages my mind better,” says Towns, a freshman theater major. “If I look like I’m supposed to be studying, I’ll be more inclined to focus in class. Formal clothes aren’t usually the most comfortable, so I can’t lean back or hunch over. I have to pay attention.”

Formal doesn’t mean pricey, though. He snagged his jacket from Goodwill for $3!

Thrifting is a recent discovery, and he’s expanded his wardrobe. “My closet has grown immensely, since I’ve been able to get more for my money.” He’s been so successful that he had to send bags of clothes back to Schaumburg, Ill., with his parents.

What’s left he assembles with care. Pin rolling his pant cuffs so they fit more snugly, he demonstrated how he pinches the inside seam before rolling them up. (We’ll try that!) He liked the H&M khaki pants with the cream blazer and chose the print shirt “because the red matches the ring around the white Converse sneakers.”

Towns was accepted into the musical theater program. He already played his dream role — Shrek — during high school for a local theater company. Now he’d like to play Aladdin or the beast in Beauty and the Beast. We can confirm his excellent pipes. When we asked him to sing for us, he belted out a few impressive bars of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“I enjoy buying things people owned once upon a time.” — Elizabeth Zhang

Elizabeth Zhang’s outfit is a happy marriage of frugality and splurge worthy. She thrifted her of-the-moment turquoise corduroy jumpsuit from a secondhand store in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood and received the designer brand Carel short white boots — reminiscent of the Courrèges go-go boots from the ’60s — as a birthday gift from her mom.

Thrifting is her go-to for buying clothes, stalking the curated shop in Pilsen and the bargains at Village Discount, where items go for $1 or $2 during the sales. “When they do sales, it’s absurd,” she says.

“I enjoy buying things people owned once upon a time,” says Zhang, who grew up in Beijing and went to high school in Santa Barbara, Calif. “The process is fun, like a treasure hunt. It’s exciting to have a piece that not a lot of people have. It’s a good way to have an individual style.”

Her ball chain pendant necklace is from the popular thrifting site Depop. We especially love the unusual “color slide” necklace.

“My friend’s dad took these photos in the ’90s, and she made necklaces out of them. It’s such a cute idea.”

 A junior in communications studies and art history, Zhang is pondering a career in graphic design or illustration.