Even though this world appears to be strange to her, Estella takes to it instantly. She has no idea why, but this world, the Baroness's world, calls to her.
And then Estella grows up, and her life changes dramatically. Here, on the backdrop of glorious London, begins the battle between two genius women: a current tastemaker and a young revolutionary, between strict conservative geometry and new and exciting cuts… or something like that. The older, conservative Baroness who, it seems, has never done an hour of sewing in her life, is set off against Estella/Cruella, a young trailblazer who knows her way around a sewing machine and designs everything herself. That's what catches the Baroness's eye in the first place: Estellas's unbridled creative potential, and that is the very thing that allowed Estella to become a part of the fashion world, to change it.
Except — neither Estella, nor Cruella want to change the world of fashion. Cruella's (as well as Estella's) punk-ish outfits are not a call to arms to fight against the system — rather, they are a disgruntled cry against her own place in it. Estella constantly feels she deserves better, and that the world of fashion is where she belongs. When she deconstructs Baroness's looks, it happens out of necessity, not to «break» the flawed system. And while the start of the film has her doing everything on her own, by the end of it, she employs a faceless crowd of other workers — just like the Baroness. And the Baroness herself never revolts against her ideas, quite the opposite: after appropriating them as her own, she integrates them into her own clothes' line. In Baroness's eyes, Cruella is neither a disrupter, nor her opposite — she's her descendant. A dangerous descendant who threatens her livelihood, maybe, but definitely not her counterpart.
In the end, the ways in which Estella refashioned her clothes in childhood are the most compelling. They embody of the idea of high-end upcycling with severely limited resources. For little Estella, clothes were her self-expression. As soon as she arrives in London, Estella creates costumes, those that would help her to fool, to pickpocket, in other words, to survive. And that's how adult Estella sees clothes: as a costume; this also determines how she uses costumes to achieve her goals.