“It’s so fun to see kids, adults and people of all ages wearing sportswear. Well, I was involved in that too.“I still wear a lot of my clothes,” Chisholm tells me over Zoom, fresh from a tour in Australia. “I wish I’d kept more of them, but I still wear them and I’ve bought some of my old clothes again.” She begins laughing. “Look, I’m sitting here in my Adidas poppers!” She lifts her leg to show off a pair of classic snap-off pants in a bold red.
“Wannabe”, where it all began.
If you were a teenager watching The Box TV channel in 1997, you’ll remember being mesmerized by the Spice Girls’ debut music video, “Wannabe.” In it, each girl’s personality was quickly established through their highly individual outfits. Geri wore a sequined leotard and black tights (“She always wore weird clothes from thrift stores”); Emma wore a white shift dress with platform sandal mules; Victoria wore a little black bodycon dress with elegant ankle-strap chunky heels; Mel B wore a lime green tank top with black and green shiny pants and steel-toed boots; and Chisholm wore bright blue Adidas track pants with neon green stripes, a shiny orange spandex halter top and sneakers. All of this came from her own closet. “At first, it was all our wardrobe, we didn’t have money to go shopping, we didn’t even have a relationship with a stylist,” she says.
Back then, and even now, the pop group always opted for matching or coordinated outfits, so their looks stood out. “We tried a lot of different things with our first management, but someone always looked uncomfortable,” she recalls. “If I had a nice dress, I would feel really out of place, but if everyone was a bit sporty or casual, Victoria felt like she wasn’t dressed up enough.” It was Geri who suggested the idea of ​​everyone just being themselves. “I vividly remember we were rehearsing in a church hall, when we first got together in 1994, and one day I looked in the mirror and Geri said, ‘Why don’t we just dress like we always do?'” The rest, as they say, is history.
