When I was little, one of my favourite pastimes was raiding my mum's closet. I loved playing with her clothes, mixing skirts with dresses, colourful and patterned t-shirts, creating costumes, and imagining myself wearing each one for specific situations that might never actually happen.

As I grew up, I realised I never lost that habit: I began to approach my daily life—my outfits, my clothes, and every occasion—as if it were a style challenge on America’s Next Top Model. And although I had grown up and was no longer a child, I saw fashion as a game where I could be myself and express what was inside me: How did I feel? How did I want to be seen? What did I want to be?

However, the first time I truly fell in love with fashion, and started to see it as more than just a game I enjoyed as a child, was the first time I watched Gossip Girl in its entirety. I remember as if it were today the moment Blair Waldorf ran out of her dream wedding dressed in a Vera Wang gown and ended up changing into a pink T-shirt that said I <3 New York.

I think right there, in that moment, I understood that fashion was not just an expression of how we felt. It was a game we all played: celebrities, everyday people, politicians, fictional characters, and so on.

I believe we don’t dress to look nice; although there is a false conception that this is the case, we dress because every item is a statement: this is how I think, this is how I dream, and this is how I see myself. And we do it so unconsciously that we end up saying a lot without using more words than necessary. Sometimes, we don’t even realise it.

As a self-proclaimed drama queen, I live life as if it were a movie. And living life as if it were a movie means planning each of my outfits with such meticulousness that—I can say this with knowledge of the facts—I end up focusing more on these details than on choosing my university major.

To be honest, as difficult as it may be, for many years I thought it was superficial to care so much about my clothes. What value could a girl who thought more about the colour of her jeans than about her criminal law exam have?

Soon after, I replayed Gossip Girl, and once again Blair Waldorf rescued me from my own prejudices with one of the best lines ever said on television: “Fashion is the most powerful kind of art that exists. It is movement, design, and architecture all in one. It shows the world who we are and who we want to be.”

And suddenly, just like in Bogotá in May, the sky opened up again, and I understood: that loving fashion is not a sin. Playing with outfits is not a guilty pleasure I should hide in my mum's closet, and creating countless Pinterest boards for inspiration doesn’t make me a superficial person. Loving fashion is loving my essence, showing it without speaking—because I’ve always been terrible with words—and it’s also my way of changing. Don’t we all change our way of dressing after an inner transformation?

Fashion is, in reality, the purest way to express who we are. It allows us to be ourselves without judgement, to take risks and to lose that irrational fear of ‘looking too extra’ because life is too short not to have fun and proclaim to the world how we want to do it.

That is fashion, as Blair Waldorf defines it: an art, a game, another way to show our power.