I’ve been thinking a lot about Willow and costumes. It’s an idea that the show returns to repeatedly. It is how Buffy herself is introduced to Willow - through Cordelia mocking her choice of outfit. Or rather, someone else’s choice of outfit. Willow notes that her mother picked this outfit out for her. Because of her lack of confidence or self-identity, she has allowed somebody else to construct her image. It may not truly be who she is. But it is how her peers define her. They see a frumpy, nerdy girl, and so that external performance becomes part of her identity. She struggles against that image of herself going forward.
“It’s just… you’re never gonna get noticed if you keep hiding.”
- Buffy, 2x06 Halloween
Halloween obviously plays very heavily with themes of identity, costume, and duality, being a story where everyone is literally turned into their costume (or in the case of Giles, has their costume removed). In this episode, Willow has two costumes - the full-body ghost costume and the “generically sexy” costume. Both are very much performances in their own way. Buffy suggests that the ghost costume is a method of hiding in the above quote, and Willow states that the other costume “isn’t very [her]”. It’s fitting that the spell affects her by turning her into both costumes simultaneously - a ghost, dressed in that “sexy 90s” look (which I have to put in quotes, because it’s extremely unsexy, but that’s what the intention was). Her arc in this episode is all about her facing her fears, taking both these performances and incorporating them into her identity.
It’s also interesting that this episode marks the second instance of Oz noticing Willow while she’s in a costume - the other being her adorable but slightly cultural appropriate-y “Inuit” costume in Inca Mummy Girl. I’m just going to put a pin in that for later.
Doppelgangland is another Willow-centric episode with a heavy emphasis on clothing. Much care is taken to constrast Willow’s fluffy, pink-and-daisies look with vampire!Willow’s leather corset. Xander refers to the latter as a “new look”. We get a great look at both of them, very obviously extreme opposites. They are specifically presented as not just styles but as costumes, as both Willows towards the episode cosplay and pretend to be each other. In both cases, they succeed in fooling the person they’re speaking to initially, but eventually their innate nature peeks out, and they reveal themselves.
“How come you didn’t tell me I look like a crazy birthday cake in this shirt?”
- Willow, 4x06 Wild at Heart
Going into S4, Willow makes an effort to edit her look to be more “grown-up” and confident. This is a concious effort, and she is still insecure about her apperance, which is linked to her fears about Oz and Veruca (see above quote). Her dream in Restless centers around this fear that people will be able to “see through” this “costume”, and reveal the person she fears she is - the shy, lonely nerd, dressed as she was in Welcome to the Hellmouth. But as we established in the first paragraph, that look was not authentically hers. It is as much an artifical performance as the clothes she wears now. They are all a constructed image, and all a real and tangible part of who Willow Rosenberg is.
This sequence also implicitly links her “cool girl” S4 look with her relationship with Tara and newly discovered sexuality, with the repeated mislead about people “finding out about [her]”. This is a line called back to in Buffy .vs. Dracula (”News flash, Will. Everybody knows.” / “No, thi-this isn’t about me and Tara.”). Taking the pin out of the third paragraph, we could link Oz to the fancy dress costumes of S2, and Tara to her later season look. We could consider her fears about being “found out” to be related to her struggling with compulsory heterosexuality, and the internalised fear that she’s “just faking” her own sexuality.
“I can hardly do a locator spell without getting dark roots.”
- Willow, 7x21 End of Days
As we see move into S5/6 and start to see more of Willow’s dark side, we start to see more of this dualistic, yin/yang styling, with a lot of pure whites and full blacks representing her dark side. I find the way this is used in Bargaining most interesting. Willow goes through a few costume changes in this episode, but most significant are the two dresses involved while preparing and casting the ressurection spell. She wears this all-white disney princess look, a picture of purity and innocence, to go slaughter a deer, and later smears its blood on her face while wearing a full gothic black dress. The outfits here are polar opposite, but the actions remain constant. Either way, she is skirting the laws of nature. In both cases, she literally has the blood of the innocent on her hands.
This is a season in which Willow claims that she is “not a bad guy”, and her costume choices reflect that. She sees herself as a god guy, but the blood on her hands reveal that kind of irrelevant. Regardless of what costume she is wearing, it is her actions that matter. And on the flip side, Dark Willow wears a very agressive, full-on villain costume in all black. Consumed with rage and vengance, Willow has chosen to become a villain, and so is living up to the part - dressing in all black and forcing Buffy to banter with her like she’s a monster of the week. In many ways it’s identical to Willow dressing up and claiming that she is a “bloodsucking fiend” by virtue of her outfit back in Doppelgangland. In this instance, the day is saved when Xander unifies the two competing images of herself - crayon-breaky Willow and scary-veiny Willow - into one whole complete person.
In the final seson, Willow has to deal with the fact that she is both of these people, capable of both good and evil. And so the outfit she wears becomes not a constructed image, but an uncontrolled discharge of her internal self. If she taps into the darker side of herself, it will externalise itself and make her style literally darker. Part of her arc is learning to accept that, own it, and allow herself to risk again. Once she does, she opens herself up to the positive flip-side - that by tapping into the part of herself that is brave, kind, and revolutionary, by casting this spell of empowerment, that good part of herself is externalised, as she becomes ‘Willow the White’. Both the dark roots of Villains and the bright white hair of Chosen are the involuntary response to channeling powerful magic, and they both express a part of Willow’s psyche. Just as both Willow’s S1 and S4 styles are equally inauthentic and authentic, these two visions of Willow are both equally her. It is only by accepting this that she becomes a complete person. The costume Willow wears always has an impact on who she is and how she is perceived, but regardless, she is always inescapably Willow.
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