Jarelle sews music onto her trousers

The campus can sometimes feel like a catwalk. Students talk about what they wear and why. This time: Jarelle’s life and style revolve around punk and rock.

“Everybody wants to change the world, no one wants to die.” The lyric from My Chemical Romance is written on Jarelle’s (19) trousers. She painted it on herself. They are patch trousers: tight jeans onto which she has hand-sewn dozens of pieces of fabric. They feature logos of bands she loves and phrases that inspire her. Some of the texts are positive – ‘Smile’ or ‘Stay Alive’ – while others are political – ‘No Kings’ is written on her thigh. The My Chemical Romance lyric is important to her because she ‘can’t really deal with hypocritical people and a lot of people are hypocritical’. Many people love to talk about their lofty ideals, but don’t have the courage to put them into practice. Jarelle is not afraid to do so.

The psychology student is very into (pop) punk and rock. “My life revolves around music.” She constantly listens to bands such as Green Day and Rancid and also releases her own songs under the name Lilly-Rose Black. The music is dark and loud, but Jarelle talks about it cheerfully.

Everything she wears is linked to a subculture: “My trousers are punk, but my belts are more emo.” She wears three studded belts and one striped hand warmer. Her red canvas trainers ‘from a fake brand’ are also covered in song lyrics. She is wearing an Ed Hardy T-shirt with a large skull on it and necklaces around her neck featuring a padlock and a razor blade. Her make-up is black and actually very simple: “I pull my eyes tight and then run eyeliner across my waterline above and below in one go. After that, I just rub my eyes. I’m lazy so I usually leave it on for a few days.”

Jarelle started listening to more alternative music and dressing accordingly during the coronavirus pandemic. She dyed her dark blonde hair purple, started writing songs and learned to sew. “When we were slowly allowed to go outside again, it was kind of like exposure therapy”, she says. “I could slowly get used to other people’s reactions and learned that you can basically get away with anything if you do not care yourself.”

Back home in Ridderkerk, people sometimes look at Jarelle strangely, but she has become used to that by now. “The only people whose opinion about my style matters to me are other alternative people.” Jarelle sees them on campus: people dressed in punk style, although she does not know many of them. “I find it difficult to start conversations, but actually I would really like to become friends with them.”