Dressing for a stage versus dressing for a life
Teddy Bear Glam by Maggie Berry (@maggieberryfashion)
I have two sets of wardrobes and they have nothing to do with each other.
PERFORMANCE PIECES: WHAT THEY’RE FOR
People assume outfits for my videos or the stage are just louder versions of regular clothes.
But they're not. They're equipment.
A performance piece has a job list. It has to shine from forty feet back to somebody who can't see my face. It has to survive choreography, which means it moves exactly the way I'm about to move and not impinge my movement. It has to work under lights that flatten everything and on a camera that exaggerates everything… which are opposite problems. And it has to do all of that for the length of a song or video shoot, over and over, without me thinking about it once while I'm out there.
The BEST OF ALL TIME video has several wardrobe changes in it. It's the biggest Fashion Statement that I've made and the pieces worn there are built to feel like a live show. Every one of those looks punches that checklist. While beautiful, they were produced with the intention of surviving scrutiny by a camera and a room full of people.
And at that level, wardrobing is closer to instrument design than to shopping.
WHAT THE OTHER WARDROBE IS FOR
Then I go home to Dallas, where I have a family and a house and kids and dogs for a completely normal Tuesday.
What I wear at home has exactly one job: let me forget I'm wearing it. That's the whole spec. I've spent enough of my life being visually dissected that not being scrutinized while homebound is no loss. It's an escape.
I raise these thoughts because the version of an artist you meet online is always in the first wardrobe, and it's easy to assume the second one doesn't exist.
But it does. And it's most of my days.
ONE SUITCASE, WHICH IS WHERE ALL OF THIS STARTS
I left Iran at eight with almost nothing. The only luggage I had when leaving Germany was the same model suitcase as you see on the cover of my 2025 double album, ONE SUITCASE: and it contained everything that I then owned, mostly clothing.
The album was called ONE SUITCASE because that's the literal inventory, not just because it made a good title. And when you leave everything that you know with a single suitcase, you learn fast what clothing actually is.
Clothing is not solely expression. And it isn't identity. You are not your Louboutin pumps.
You homewear is what you happen to be wearing when everything else is gone -- and you'd better be able to move in it.
I don't think I've ever fully unlearned that lesson, not have I ever wanted to do so. It's why I don't trust a beautiful piece if you can't live in it. It's also why I take the stage wardrobe so seriously. Clothes are for doing something in that outfit.
WHY I KEEP THEM SEPARATE ON PURPOSE
Here's where I part ways with a lot of this industry.
There's enormous pressure on any woman with a public life to collapse the two wardrobes into one. Be Camera Ready all of the time. Turn the Tuesday version of yourself into content so even the ordinary hours are working for you.
I'm not doing it, ever: and it isn't modesty. It's math. If I turn the quiet wardrobe into a performance, I've got nowhere left to put the person who writes the songs. As an artist, I need an offstage.
And there's no version of this job where I write anything honest from a life that's entirely on camera.
WHAT FREEDOM ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN A CLOSET
The idea I keep circling back to is beauty as functional freedom, and I want to explain fully what I mean by that phrase instead of leaving it as a tagline.
I don't mean the freedom to wear anything. Everybody reading this can already wear anything.
I mean the freedom to be more than one person. To be extremely visible on a Friday and completely unbothered on a Sunday, and have neither look be a lie.
I didn't always have that. There were long stretches of my life where I got exactly one version of myself, and I wasn't the one who picked it.
So when you see me in something enormous this month and then in almost nothing the next day, that's not inconsistency. Indeed: that's the entire point.
Both looks are mine now, and it took me a long time to get here.
FOR FASHION MONTH
All month I'm going to show you clothes and tell you from the outset who made them, not down in the tags. Every piece will have a name on it, or a maker, or a reason.
If it could belong to anybody, it doesn't belong here. That's the only rule I have for September and it's the one I actually care about.
Xoxo SHAB