Perhaps because of his time spent performing, Erik was always hyper-conscious of how people presented themselves to the world. He firmly believed that you could find out who someone was by analyzing what they choose to display through their clothes.
Christine Daaé, for example. When he'd first met her, the girl dwarfed herself in giant sweaters and loose jeans, and let long hanks of blonde hair fall in front of her face. She kept her head down during her first days at the Populaire, both metaphorically and literally. The only thing she couldn't camouflage was her voice, which rang out across the main stage during auditions with a ferocity that made her blush. That was when Erik had first been drawn to this girl, who sang as though she couldn't stop herself. It had been fascinating, in a tragic way, to see this little slip of a woman who might have evaporated into thin air if music would stop pouring from her lips like a compulsion.
Recently though, she had changed. New color flowed into her cheeks, and her quiet eyes had started to seem less shy, and more thoughtful. She wore her hair away from her face now. Her clothes had changed too. It had started simply enough. Erik remembered how she had arrived at a lesson one day with a large bracelet sparkling on her wrist. He asked about it, and she told him that they'd been cleaning out the vaults, and some of the costume jewelry had been deemed unneeded. She shrugged, blushing. "They said we could keep whatever we wanted from the throwaway pile."
"It suits you." He answered, and she nodded. Something hung in the air between them for a moment, and they quickly moved on to the lesson. At that point they weren't yet used to discussing anything with each other besides music.
It had started with the bracelet, but it hadn't ended there. Gradually, new items of clothing started to appear. A graphic tee shirt displaying angel wings (the irony was not lost), satin headbands, faux-velvet leggings, a pair of combat boots. Erik watched without comment as, over the course of a few months, his student changed. In the way she moved, spoke, acted, and dressed, a new Christine Daaé began to appear. And this Christine Daaé wanted to be noticed. When Erik first met her, she had been so quiet and unwilling to express any opinions, he'd assumed she didn't have much in the way of a personality. He had been wrong. She was a complicated girl.
Her fashion aesthetic was complicated too, not really fitting into any clear genre. The best way to describe it, Erik fancied, was to say that her clothes reflected her: delicate and pretty and a little tough, kind of sad, kind of angry, and more than a little strange. But soft, at the same time. Cream-colored blouses, pink lace, and sparkling jewelry in between the dark eyeliner and black lipstick- even though Christine was still grieving like an open wound, she never felt the need to look like something love couldn't touch.
Erik admired her for that. He was starting to admire her for a lot of things, this strange little angel of his.
AN: I have a LOT of headcanons about modern!Christine and her style. Can you tell? I also have a lot of emotions about clothing symbolism in general, so I might continue this, writing some similar little drabbles focusing on other POTO characters. Let me know if anyone would be interested in that?