Deconstructing beauty standards through cake

Looking around, everyone seemed like competition rather than a girl. Sophie Chai grew up feeling that she wasn’t feminine enough. She wore baggy pants and long shirts, which contrasted the dresses of her classmates. “I always thought that I kind of looked like a little boy and I wasn’t dressing the way a girl should be dressing.”

The Union City teen always tried to fit herself into the mold that society had made; however, once she realized this, she rejected it, choosing to be the person she wanted to be. When she got the chance to express her femininity through a scholarship, where participants had to make dresses out of duct tape, her artistic representation of the structures that constrain women was awarded first place and a $10,000 prize.

Sponsored and held by Duck Brand, the 20-year-old competition enlists competitors to craft and wear prom attire made from only Duck Brand’s duct or crafting tape. After the outfit is finished, they ask participants to market their creations on social media to get people to vote for the outfit they deem the best.

The James Logan High student first came across this competition while searching for scholarships as a way to offset some of the costs of college tuition.

“This scholarship just caught my eye because it was different from other scholarships where you have to write essays or fill out all your extracurriculars,” said Chai. “For this one, you could just make something out of duct tape.”

Chai didn’t have any history in fashion apart from a love for the arts and crafts, but she didn’t let it limit her. Chai first sketched out the dress on a piece of paper, visualizing the design and decorations. 

Challenges came early on. The base brace for her dress was made from metal wire. However, as she tried to attach tape to it, she found that it couldn’t support the design she envisioned. The folds fell flat and lacked dimensionality. However, through design iterations and stronger wire, the dress began coming together.

For Chai, the final strawberry cake silhouette represented how society expects women to be, sweet and pretty and decorated, and how they try to fit this expectation in this cake mold of what they’re supposed to be like.

Decorating the dress layers were red strips, pink and white pieces of icing, red bowties and red hearts, mimicking the look of strawberries, with the back of the dress featuring a giant plaid bowtie. These features showed how women in society are expected to look and act polished and perfect. 

“The icing pieces and the bows were very time-consuming to create. For every single piece of icing I had to cover like a sheet of paper fully in duct tape, and then I had to fold them, and then glue them together, and then cut them out,” she said. “I think I had more than 100 pieces of icing for the dress, and 70-something bows.”

In addition to the dress, Chai also created shortcake shoes, an icing headband mixing duct tape-covered paper and origami and a fork, representing how all-consuming expectations for women can feel.

“It can be very draining for you to be like, ‘Oh, I have to be skinnier. I have to curl my hair. I have to do very heavy makeup. Or I don’t look good enough in this part, or this part of me isn’t perfect enough,” she said.

After she completed her outfit, she publicized her work on social media, creating informative videos. 

Her reels today have garnered over 6,000 followers and 1.3 million likes on TikTok alone, helping her win the competition in the dress category. “I’ve received comments on my TikTok and on my Instagram, and they’re like, ‘The dress is so cute, but I read the meaning, and I love the meaning so much,’” she said.

Chai says that she still feels the pressures today. “I can still feel the pressure to be skinnier, but I feel like I should improve how I look just for myself and not for how other people view me,” Chai said.

“I’m doing it for myself rather than doing it for other people to accept me.”