This post was updated Feb. 17 at 7:41 p.m.

Michelle Liu Carriger, who has a doctorate in theater arts and performance studies, is encouraging others to embrace the complexity of their clothing.

Carriger, UCLA’s Theater Department Chair, researches historical dialogues surrounding fashion, and her findings are illuminating modern discussions. Carriger said she has a particular interest in how styles of dress may garner controversy, as well as their capacity to formulate social structures. Recently, her book, “Theatricality of the Closet,” won the 2024 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.

Carriger sat down with the Daily Bruin’s Warren Riley to discuss her academic pursuits while also touching on her own personal style.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: If a complete stranger were to ask who you are or what you do for work, what would be the most important elements for you to include?

Michelle Liu Carriger: If they asked me about me, for some reason, I usually can’t go more than two minutes without telling people that I’m from Kansas. I don’t know why that comes up so often. I actually went to undergrad in Southern California, so I’ve lived in California for a long time, but somehow, I end up telling people that I’m from Kansas. For my work? When people ask about my work, I end up usually saying that I study theater and performance, but especially for my research, I look at performance and how people perform identity in everyday life.

DB: What were some of your earliest fascinations with fashion?

MLC: I definitely cared a lot about clothing from a very young age. I had this one dress that my grandmother made for me that had many, many, many layers of skirts, so it was fun to spin around. I also really hated jeans at a young age, so around the age of four or five, I was like, “These are horrible, and I will not wear these.” Weirdly, I went through a period where I wore nothing but sweatpants that my mom made. My mom sews really well. She was like, “Well, we don’t have to buy those.” I wore nothing but sweatpants every day of third grade and every day of fourth grade or something. Bespoke, couture sweatpants. And then, some kid was like, “Your sweatpants are so baggy on the bottom, they’re like bell bottoms.” Everyone knew the that bell bottoms were the ugliest thing in fourth grade. I suppose that’s where I probably had to start wearing dresses and skirts and Brownie uniforms and other things – because I was running out of pants.

DB: As a theatermaker and theatergoer, what are some of your most prominent influences?

MLC: At some point, I realized I don’t care that much about realism anymore. I’m watching people act out a thing that’s supposed to feel like reality. I’m surrounded by reality every day. What I really love and what really makes my day is seeing something that is trying to think beyond a replication of reality. Years and years ago, I saw a mime/clown show by a company called Derevo. It’s surreal, bizarre, kind of funny, but sometimes super sad. There’s no words. It’s sort of internationalized past any one language. You have no idea what the plot is or what’s going on, but just beautiful stage images, strange and unusual things that you weren’t expecting.

DB: Your first book project, “Theatricality of the Closet,” recently won the Barnard Hewitt Award. What are some of the concepts presented in the work?

MLC: Specifically, I looked at two British case studies. In 1868, there was “Girl of the Period.” It was this anonymous newspaper article that girls today are so out of control. Why do they dress like this? Why are they talking like boys? You know, girls shouldn’t be like that. This term “girl of the period” became kind of like a catchphrase that people would throw around.

And, in 1870, there were two fabulously dressed girls of the period. They were in the audience of the theater, and they were a total nuisance. They were doing horseplay, they were apparently lighting cigarettes off the gas lamps. That’s my favorite detail. They were also talking to gentlemen. They (the girls) were arrested when they left the theater that night and tried to get into a cab to go home, and they were accused of being men in women’s dresses. They were men in women’s dresses. So what’s really interesting and weird about this is that this is a place where theater, everyday life and fashion get really confused. That night in the theater, on the stage, there were a minimum of seven people in drag performing a musical revue, and there were two people in drag in the audience. And so those seven got paid, and they got applauded, and everybody loved it, and the two who were in the audience got arrested and put on a felony trial.

DB: If a reader could take away anything from your work, what would you want that to be?

MLC: My real goal, what I really want people to take away from these things, is to be more open, more questioning, more complex in their thinking about identity. To me, identity is always interestingly open, strange, in discussion and unsettled. So where I really see where case study people in my book get into trouble is when people try to make a hard-and-fast and simple rule – that doesn’t serve the wide variety of humans and complicated identities in the world. I think we do that to each other too on Instagram or Twitter or whatever. We think identity should fit into 140 characters. How it feels to be a person with a race and a gender and a sexuality and a class and an age are way more than one picture or one sentence. So I guess what I would like people to take away is to be more, be too complicated, and don’t make other people be simple.