STORY BY WILL BJARNAR
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY YEN
Picture this: a beauty pageant queen donning baggy basketball shorts. Or picture her dedicating her Saturday — one of the few she finds herself having off – to a Star Wars marathon, or perhaps Jurassic Park. Gina Mellish, most known around campus as Miss New Jersey USA 2020 — likes it all.
It’s a difficult ask, for the image of a beauty queen has become affixed in the general public’s collective mind. You envision the crown and the perfect dress. Gina traveled to Texas in late January to make her perfect dress selection for Miss USA, where she’ll be the youngest competitor (“I’m like, oh my God,” she said, apprehensive but gleeful.) Maybe you envision superficiality, too, or a general inability to answer the dreaded “How would you make the world a better place?”
Gina adheres to such practices — the cosmetic ones, that is. She has to in order to compete and maintain possession of the crown, which she has held since age 15. Still, she refuses to let others see her as a poster child for this predetermined image. “I don’t like when people think of beauty pageant girls [as] unattainable," she said adamantly, gesturing toward an open space on the table as though there lay an explanation for such assumptions. “That they’re perfect… that they’re Barbie dolls because that’s not true, right?” Even while practicing her wave, she chose basketball shorts as her go-to attire.
The glitz isn’t a defining quality; it’s just a part of her “job” and her routine. She’s not going out on Thursdays, she’s waking up at 5 a.m. on Friday to hit the gym. That’s her free time.
Knowing who Gina Mellish is isn’t hard. She has nearly 18,000 followers on Instagram. She’s tall, beautiful, and her blueish-silver eyes glimmer in the sun like a swimming pool. She’s noticeable by default, with a title like “Miss New Jersey USA.”
Gina can make it tricky, though. Rebecca Brown, her longtime fashion professor, recalled the day when a candidate for the position of Fashion Director came to teach a class. “She had texted me and said, you know… ‘Do I have to dress up?’” Though Brown told her, “come as you are,” Gina grappled with her options. It was an epic crisis.
“[The candidate and I] were talking about the community here,” Brown remembered. “I said, ‘oh, one of our students is Miss New Jersey… actually, she was sitting in the front row.’” The candidate was surprised; that day Gina had arrived in sweatpants and no makeup. Why be anyone but herself?
These kinds of escapes – because skipping a trip to Mahoney’s Irish Pub is considered radical around these parts, especially if you’re someone as familiar as Gina – take away from the idea that pageant queens are just pageant queens. She likes that; naturally, she prefers it.
If she had her way, the world wouldn’t view pageantry as a contest about popularity nor about whose dress sparkles the brightest. “Most of the girls that have a title are using them to bring awareness to things that they care so much about,” she said. Later on, she noted, “At the end of the day, Gina is Miss New Jersey and Miss New Jersey is Gina,” so she’d never do something as Miss New Jersey that she wouldn’t do “as Gina,” and vice versa. “When I won [Miss New Jersey], I again promised myself that I would remain 150 percent myself.”
Conversely, she’s sure of how she became so heavily involved with One Love, an organization that vies to help people distinguish between healthy and unhealthy relationships. She attended one of their workshops because 1) it was mandatory for being a member of Alpha Sigma Tau, her sister, and 2) she had been “in a really bad relationship for a few years… I felt like I didn’t have anyone to go to,” she said. “I felt like I was the only one going through this. I felt like it was all my fault.”
“One Love changed my life,” she said, smiling wide. Not only did the group become a sounding board for Gina, but she worked her way toward serving as an official escalation training facilitator. “I promised myself that when I felt like I was healed,” she said, “and I felt like I was empowered by my situation… that I wanted to host those workshops. And like, I wanted to touch people the way that [it] touched me.”
On top of it all, she’ll continue to dress up and rehearse and work out, all as part of her prep for Miss USA. It’s not an experience defined by the crown, but one where the jewels are ancillary in comparison to its effect. Without it, her reach might not stretch as far.
And without it, she wouldn’t be Gina.
Gina Mellish continues her advocacy during the current COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. She spoke out about personal experiences with relationship abuse and the rising issue of domestic violence on WBNG News 12, citing a “15% to 20% increase” in domestic violence cases in New York State amidst lockdown procedures. To watch the interview, click here.
Gina was also recently written about in the Asbury Park Press. The profile details her various efforts to combat all forms of relationship abuse, including a partnership with clothing brand Angel Energy that donates a quarter of its profits to different domestic violence charities each month. To read the story, click here.
Miss USA will be airing on FOX sometime in May. Follow her journey to the crown on Facebook @MissNewJerseyUSA or on Instagram @missnjusa.
To view the full portrait, click here »
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