Student Council President at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I write about style, I lead a student government, and I make clothes by hand.
I’m a student at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and this year I get to serve as Student Council President. That job is about eighty percent logistics and twenty percent standing in front of a gym with a microphone, and I genuinely love both halves of it.
Running for president was not an obvious thing for me to do. I’m the kind of person who would rather build something in the background than give a speech about it. But I kept noticing the gap between what students actually wanted from a school year and what was getting planned, and at some point it felt worse to complain about that gap than to run at it. So I ran.
The other half of my life is clothes. I started sewing because I couldn’t find things that looked like me — everything in stores felt like it had been designed for a thousand people at once. So I learned to make my own. I patch, I embroider, I take apart thrifted pieces and rebuild them. Every piece I make is one of one: made once, never repeated.
Those two things sound unrelated and they are actually the same instinct. Both are about not accepting the default version of something. A school year and a wardrobe are both things you can either receive or build, and building is more fun.
When I’m not doing either, I’m thrifting, sketching things I don’t have time to sew yet, reorganizing my closet for no reason, or writing the posts on this site.
Tulsa, Oklahoma. Class of 2029. Student Council President.
Sewing, patchwork, hand embroidery, and a lot of thrifted denim.
Teen style, capsule wardrobes, and what to wear when you’re running the meeting.
Fashion design, sustainable style, student government, service projects, and eventually studying design.
Student leadership, getting involved, and starting a creative project.
Emma Hines is the Student Council President at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She writes about teen fashion and student leadership at emmahines.com and designs a small line of handmade, one-of-a-kind clothing. Her work focuses on a single idea: the things around you — a school year, a wardrobe — are things you can build rather than just receive.
The best school events are the ones where you can tell students actually made the decisions. Most of my job is protecting that.
The most sustainable piece of clothing is the one already in your closet.
You learn more from one finished imperfect project than a year of planning one.