Sofia Wylie on How Her 'HSMTMTS' Character Inspired Her Own Style Transformation (Exclusive)

The actress talks with PEOPLE about thrifting on ThredUp, her personal style and her character Gina's transformation on 'HSMTMTS' season 4

Sofia Wylie is ditching fast fashion this fall and is using ThredUp to help her do it.

The High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star is teaming up with the online consignment and thrift store to launch its back-to-school shop, Get Ready With Us: Back-to-School Edition, where fans will have the opportunity to shop outfits similar to ones Wylie thrifted herself.

“I've always been just a really big supporter of secondhand shopping. It's been a part of my life for a really long time,” Wylie tells PEOPLE about her love of thrifting. “It’s just way more sustainable for our world, but it also is a wonderful way to express yourself. I've found through thrifting I've been able to find pieces that are unique and that no one else has.”

When it comes to her personal style, Wylie admits her preferences have changed a lot over the years. “My personal style is very funky,” she says. “A lot of the times when my friends or family get clothes for me, it's usually something almost childish, like a child's top that is big enough to fit me. That's the kind of vibe I go for, very playful and very colorful. Sometimes way more on the hippie side than anything, but I just love color and prints and just feeling like I'm expressing my inner child through my outfits.”

As an avid TikTok user with over 10 million followers on the platform, Wylie loves a good fashion trend too. Between all the trending fashion “cores” lately — from “Mermaidcore” to “Barbiecore” — she says she has really been drawn to “Fairycore.”

“I just love the ethereal hyper-feminine outfits,” she says. “For a long time, I tried to be super grungy and tomboy because I thought that was what I was supposed to be like. And then I realized, ‘Oh, shoot. No, I love pink and I love dresses and I love high heels.’ That's definitely what I gravitate towards. Blumarine has a wonderful collection from, I think, the '90s, that encapsulates that fairy feminine core vibe that everyone's trying to recreate right now.”

Like everyone else, she’s also been jumping on the Y2K trend, however, her favorite item to thrift is a bit controversial.

“I love a good low-rise pant!” she admits. “Low-rise jeans are just so loved by some and so hated by others, but I am a lover of low-rise jeans for sure. Whenever I go to a thrift store, if I can find one, my day is made.”

“I also just love super colorful tops,” she adds. “I feel like color has been stripped of fashion as of late, and usually I find that more in the vintagey sections with a lot of those funky pops of colors or different patterns, so I definitely gravitate towards those.”

As for her style icon, Wylie has been trying to be her own inspiration. “For a while, I was really obsessed with Bella Hadid,” she says. “I had a whole Pinterest board of just inspo picks of her outfits. But now I feel like my style has really evolved and it's become very specific to just me. I just go with how I feel. Some days I'll be very hippie, some days I'll be very tomboy, some days very girly and feminine. I feel like every day it changes.”

She notes that her time on HSMTMTS has also helped her step into her own, fashion-wise, whether that be taking a style note from her costars or her character, Gina.

“I've gone thrifting with my castmates a couple times, like Julia [Lester] and Olivia [Rodrigo], and it's always so much fun,” she says. “We all have really different styles, which I think is so cool. The biggest thing I've learned from them as a whole is being very comfortable in what you like — not going with the trends or listening to what other people think you should wear. That's been a really big inspiration for me to find my own style and not be swayed by societal norms.”

She adds that Gina’s style transformation in season 3 really paralleled her own in many ways. “As I was coming into my own femininity more and growing into a young woman, I think Gina was as well,” she says. “That's why, in season 3 with our camp season, she was definitely way more feminine and the palette was way softer than we've seen in the past.”

She continues, “That was representative of my desire to be a little softer and sweet, but then also it really nicely reflected Gina's journey as she's kind of coming out of that very hardened and competitive character that we saw her as and growing into more of this vulnerable and real teenage girl that we now have come to love and feel connected to rather than intimidated of.”

As HSMTMTS returns for its fourth and final season in August, Wylie says fans will see a return of a more “preppy Gina” as the East High students return to school for their senior year, including “lots of loafers and lots of cute little skirt collar combos.”

As the students put on a production of High School Musical 3: Senior Year and play extras in High School Musical 4: The Reunion, she teases that Gina will have many different looks this season in accordance with the characters she plays in those projects.

“It's almost like Gina is three different characters this season,” she says. ”That's really cool to see the difference between Gina and any other character that she's playing is visually shown through the hair and the makeup and the outfits, which makes it a lot easier, I think, for the audience to also follow along with the storylines.”

Wylie adds that this season, in particular, she got to experiment a lot more with wigs, which she says was both “awesome” and “a little intimidating.”

“I hadn't really done a lot of wigs stuff before,” she says. “Going into season 4, I just played around with wigs that whole intermission from season 3 to season 4 and really tried to get comfortable with that. And then as we got into season 4, I was able to incorporate that very confidently and comfortably into Gina's character."

"I also have my natural hair and I got to straighten my hair a bit, so it felt like we were just able to see a lot of different versions of Gina this season, which I feel is very representative of her growth and how she's continuing to grow and change in season 4,” she adds.

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