← Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Episode 253: How (and why) I worked in fast fashion, part 1
01:49:40
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Before we jump into this week's episode, I just wanted to take a couple minutes to talk to you about something that is kind of unrelated to the episode, but also really important. So last Saturday, I was sitting at the kitchen table with Dustin. We were just drinking coffee and getting ready to go out to run a ton of pre winter storm errands because we were about to get a. About a foot and a half of snow. So we had to go get propane in case the power went out and salt to melt the ice and groceries and cat food and batteries and all these things we were gonna need in case the power went out or we were stuck at home for a while, which we were in fact stuck at home for a week. But we did keep our power. Anyway. We were sitting there, we had finished our list, and we were just sort of taking a few moments to finish our coffee before we took off. And I watched the video of Alex Preddy being murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis. It's the video that many of you have probably seen by now, or at least heard about, which was filmed by the. At that point known to us as the Woman in the Pink Jacket. And as I watched it, I. I just started sobbing uncontrollably. This proceeded to happen to me over and over again for the next few days. It was like I could no longer hold in the sheer level of grief, rage, and terror that I have been feeling consistently for more than a year. The next day was Sunday. It was snowing and snowing, and I was supposed to be working on an episode of Clothes Horse. Now, generally, I find work as an amazing escape for whatever is on my mind, but I just could not do it. I could not stop crying at random intervals. And I knew that anything I put out into the world at that moment was. Would not be beneficial to anyone. I take my platform, my responsibility as clothes whores very seriously. And so I want to be strong and hopeful for all of you and not sobbing uncontrollably. I'm still working on coping with everything around me, but I have had a week to think about what do we do next? How do we stay okay, whatever that means in the face of all of this. And I want you to know that if you're feeling this sense of overwhelming doom right now, you are not alone. I am struggling with it too. The thing is leaning into doom and just giving up it feels easy in a strange way because we don't need to take any action and we can carry on as usual until the end. And if we assume the Worst outcome. For every situation, we save ourselves from disappointment. I definitely do this. My motto has always been assume the worst, be pleasantly surprised. When the outcome is slightly better, it feels safe. It protects me from the agony of disappointment. And the thing is, as we've talked about here in the past on the podcast, we are hardwired to default to doomerism. Seriously, it's part of our evolutionary psychology. If we believe that there will always be five saber toothed tigers outside our cave, no matter what we do, we're more likely to survive because we will adapt to never leaving the cave. It gives us a sense of predictability and in an unpredictable world. But right now, where we are right now, there is no cozy cave for us. We have to work together to chase those predators away. I work hard to stave off the doomerism because I know that we need to take action if anything will change. And these days, staying hopeful requires a lot of effort. But I also know that when we give up, the worst case scenario becomes a reality. And we normalize the worst things by discussing them as an unavoidable fate. As I mentioned, last week we received more than a foot of snow at my home in Lancaster County. Our house, which does not have central heat, is cold and drafty, but I suppose in comparison, cozier than the sub freezing temperatures outside. Like as I record this, I believe the last time I checked it was 7 degrees in my yard. It's been hard to be in the house for a week straight. I've been feeling trapped, I've been feeling claustrophobic. And one day this week I was staring out the window being like, oh, remember, Remember going outside? Wow, what a time to be alive that was. I noticed how my raised garden beds had disappeared. They were buried in ice and snow. They still are. Right now. I do feel like it's going to be quite a while until I see them again. But standing there staring out the window at just this expanse of white, a wave of melancholy swept over me. It felt like it would always be winter, that there would always be snow covering everything, and that it would never again be warm enough to spend the afternoon outside. You know, harvesting vegetables, filling the bird feeders, just being out in the fresh air. I would have to accept this grim fate that I had to stay in the house for the rest of time. But then I shook myself out of it because for one, yes, winter is long, but not endless. Spring is just a few months away, followed by summer. The snow will melt. It might be a while, but it will. The leaves will return to the trees. New birds will arrive in the yard. I will be able to spend the afternoon outside doing any number of chores. And like winter, the bad times never last forever. Good times follow. But unlike winter, how long the bad times last depends on us. The longevity and goodness of the good times requires work from us. Because while the snow will melt and the barn swallows will return to my yard in spring, seriously, these little tiny barn swallows, they fly all the way to, like, South America for the winter, and they're just. They're just so tiny. Like, how do they do that? Why? And how is our planet just, like, so magical? So, yes, the barn swallows, they will fly thousands of miles back to my yard in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Spring will return. But whether or not I have vegetables to harvest, that depends on me. I have to do the work of composting and raking and planting and weeding and watering all of that to make the garden grow. The end result of the garden is directly related to the care and work I put into cultivating it. What happens next in this world in this cold winter of doom is dependent on all of us. We can do the work, you know, we can protect our neighbors. We can fight the systems and people that seek to destroy and doom us. We can connect with and care for our communities. We can call our senators. We can speak out loudly and proudly to anyone who will listen. We are the warm light of hope in a cold winter of doom. Foreign. Welcome to Close Horse, the podcast that has been listening to a lot more riot grrrl music lately. And I highly recommend that you do the same. I'm your host, Amanda, and This is episode 253. And my guest this week is me. One of the questions I get most often is, why did you work in fast fashion if it's so bad? Yes, I think sometimes people ask this to discredit me, to paint me as a hypocrite. But I also think people are curious. Why would someone choose to work in such a messed up industry? Why would they stick around? Well, the answer is survival. Ironically, Fast Fashion never really gave me financial security, but it at least tamped down my fears of living on the streets with my kid or having to move back into my mom's abusive home. And that was enough to keep me in it, even when it was toxic and miserable. That said, I am an existentialist, which means that I think it is my job to find my own purpose and meaning in this very silly, very complicated and often unfair world. And in a weird way, working in fast fashion helped me Start figuring that out. But spoiler, it took a long time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've actually been sharing this story in installments on social media, on Instagram, Facebook, and on Substack. But on both channels, people have reached out to me and said they would love for me to record this story. So in this episode, I'm gonna share the first half of my working in fast fashion story, with the second half coming next week. And even if you have read those posts on those platforms, there is actually a lot more stuff in this because I don't have to cram it into an email or 10 tiny squares. So it'll probably still be worth a listen, I think. Thank you in advance for giving me a safe space to be vulnerable. It's still really difficult for me to talk about myself as the main character. And at the same time, writing this, I think, has been really good for me. So even if none of you listen to this, it's probably, you know, sort of like I was giving myself therapy here. Now, I do want to just give you one small trigger warning before we jump into the story, and that is this. I've been struggling with an eating disorder for as long as I can remember, and fashion is incredibly fat, phobic. And in fashion, the size of your body is very, very closely related to how successful you will be in that industry and how people will treat you at work. So naturally, my eating disorder has had some really, really bad times during my career in fashion. So I'm not gonna be giving you, like, weird thinspiration play by play of how my eating disorder played out while I was working in fast fashion. But it will come up from time to time as, hey, it got really bad at this time because I was trying to control something in my life. So I just want you to know that I will be mentioning that I will not be great gory detail about it, but that alone can be upsetting enough. And if it is, I think you should skip this. And there are plenty of other episodes of Closed Horse that you can go listen to right now. Or maybe you could go read about the migratory patterns of the barn swallow, which would be so fascinating and probably really inspiring. All right, well, let's jump into it. Part one. Mountains, big trees, and no money. It was 2002. Social media didn't exist yet, but Friendster was just around the corner. George W. Bush was President of the United States. The Internet was out there, but Internet access was pretty expensive, and I only had it sometimes. I was about to get my first Cell phone, a flip phone. And my favorite musicians at that moment were Elliot Smith, Bell and Sebastian and Mos Def. Portland, Oregon seemed like the right place to start over. There was something about the snow capped mountains and the trees. Bigger than any I had ever seen before. Even the way the air smelled. All of that made me feel like this was a place that was alive with possibility. It was so different from any place I had ever experienced. Like lava was churning under Mount Hood. Mount St. Helens occasionally filled the sky with steam. The forests felt prehistoric, with enormous ferns and constant mist. Everything was living and growing. It seemed like just existing in that environment would make me feel alive again. This was the place where I could get better. My heart and brain would heal. I would recover from the events of the last year and a half when I every vision of my future had been turned upside down and then shattered. I didn't believe in love at first sight until I met Ryan. I was dating his friend Andy, but it was just a fun thing that I did not think would last very long. I mean, Andy was really cute. He looked just like Beck and he wore really cute clothes, like velvet suits. And he was into all the same music as me. But something was just, just not, not meshing. But we kept hanging out. When he told me he had invited a friend out with us one night, I really didn't think anything about it. In fact, I invited my roommate along as a weird kind of double date. But when I opened the door to my apartment to let Ryan in, well, I, I can't explain what happened, but I was struck with this sense of like heat and dizziness that I still cannot explain. There was just something about him that set off explosions in my brain. I loved Ryan in a way that you could only love someone when you were very young. When every feeling is so huge, you only have the space to feel one thing at a time. And when things were good between us, I was the happiest I have ever been. But when things were bad, I wondered how I could continue living in such pain. And then, and then I was pregnant. I mean, this was, I don't know, a year and a half into this really intense, really complicated, really chaotic relationship with Ryan. And when I discovered I was pregnant, it felt like a sign that he was really the one and only for me. My whole life I'd been told I would never give birth to a child because cancer had rendered me infertile. And I was okay with that. I didn't see that as my future. Having kids never felt like a dream to Me. And I reasoned that I would adopt children if I changed my mind. But being pregnant was shocking, but also amazing. Like, here I was, I was going to have a child with the most magical and brilliant person I had ever met. But if there's one thing that life has continued to teach me over and over again, the good times always end. Unfortunately, the bad times always end too. And with me and Ryan and our impending mini family, the magic ended very, very abruptly. And decades later, I still struggle to share that experience with words. So I'll just say this. Ryan died just a few months before our child was born. And everything, everything was gone all at once. I felt as if I could not see or hear or think anything beyond this raw sense of pain. I couldn't eat or sleep. I couldn't listen to music or watch movies or read books. I didn't know what to do next. So I left my life behind to move home with my abusive and manipulative mother. While I tried to figure out what would happen next, I knew that staying in Pennsylvania with my mom was not a good long term solution. It was terrible for my mental health. I knew there would be no opportunities for me. And I knew being a good parent meant taking my child somewhere where we could thrive together. And I'm going to tell you, by the time I stepped off that plane from Baltimore to Portland, I could only think of two decisions I had ever fully made on my becoming a parent and moving to Portland. Just about every other change in my life had been a matter of survival, not choice. I grew up poor, in a very chaotic and abusive home. I changed schools constantly. There were always new stepfathers, new houses, really apartments and trailers. There were always new arrangements, and obviously these were not my decisions. I longed to be a grown up when all of the choices would be mine. But I reached adulthood only to find that options are few and far between. When you come from nothing, the world chooses for you. That made moving to Portland a big deal for me. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but it was my move to make. When there's no safety net, no safe place to call home, relocating thousands of miles to a place where you barely know anyone feels no less risky than moving one town over. We moved to Portland, my toddler and I, with a few hundred dollars. It was beautiful and amazingly cheap for living in a city. And I didn't mind the months of rain because the air felt so lush and verdant even in the winter. We spent our days walking around the city, visiting the library to check out more and more books, and I applied for job after job. But eight months later, I still didn't have a job. Everyone had the same experience as me, but I had no connections. Baristas and retail associates watched me turn in my application with a toddler in my backpack, and I could see already that their minds were made up. Why would they hire someone with a kid? They wouldn't be available all the time. Surely there would be complications or missed shifts because the kid was sick. And I could see. See what they were thinking and assuming about me long before I had actually given birth, months before that, before I actually had a child that I was carrying around with me. I learned really, really fast that people assumed a lot of really bad things about me just because I had a child and I wasn't married. And saying that out loud, it's like, oh, what was this, like, the 1950s or something? But no, this was this century where I learned really fast that in many cultures, in many cities, in many social groups, the person at the bottom of the barrel is the single mother. Because everybody judges you. Clearly. You must be a slut, right? You must sleep around. You must be someone that no one wanted. Or maybe you tried to trap with the baby. Or at the very least, you were too stupid to figure out birth control. No matter what, you were damaged goods, and that meant you deserved a lot of mistreatment, right? And I saw pretty early on that people felt one that I wasn't worth being friends with, I wasn't worth hiring, but I was worth abusing in romantic relationships. I was worth judging in every possible way, like how I was as a mother, which, of course, no matter what, I was never going to be good enough because I wasn't married, because of how I looked, because. Just because. Because I was born with the ability to birth children and then had one. And I knew this even before I moved to Portland, that the odds were stacked against me. But I think I thought. No, I know. I thought that this was a more liberal place. The west coast people would be like, wow, look at that badass person who has taken autonomy of their body and made this decision to have a child and have that experience and be a parent even when things were really hard. And yet, no, that was not what happened. I mean, I'll just tell you. For years, in addition to especially men feeling that they could treat me quite abusively, I also got to experience how women judged me. You know, like, what was wrong with me that I had a kid and I was unmarried, and surely I was a really bad Mother. And people would start weird rumors about me that, like, I was a teenage mother or that I had murdered my daughter's father. Like, just ugly, ugly stuff. And in those first months in Portland, while I was going around applying for jobs, I knew why no one wanted to hire me. I had the right work experience, I had the right skills. I was going to be the best employee ever. But I was damaged goods to anyone who saw me walk in with a kid. And I'm going to tell you, as we walk through the years of my career in fast fashion, that a lot of times I never even told my co workers or my boss that I had a child because I could feel their judgment. And even my last fashion job from 2019 and 2020, I never told my boss that I had a kid because I could feel her judgment and I knew how she was going to be about it. And it wasn't going to be good. It's funny to 20 years later, to still hide some really important truth from my life, from people I worked with every day. But I learned early on, way back when I was applying jobs in Portland, no, even before that, even when I went to get an ultrasound and the doctor said to me, exactly where is your baby's father today? And I said, he's dead. Which is. Make it awkward. Make it awkward when people are shitty to you. But I'd known all the way back then that people wanted me to be ashamed and people judged me. And of course I look back now and that's like, ridiculous. But to think that for 20 years I hid that. It's a really sad commentary on the world that we live in and how we treat people who have been assigned female at birth, people who birth children, people who are parents. And I hope you're listening to me talking about this and maybe you're going to start unpacking some preconceived notions you've had about people who have children. But back in Portland, in the early aughts, I didn't have. I didn't have the confidence, the wherewithal, the faith in myself to, I don't know, tell people to dismantle their beliefs. And so instead, I applied for job after job like it was a full time job, just walking around the city with my child in a stroller, in a backpack, filling out application after application after application and hearing, honestly, I was more likely to hear the rustle of them crinkling up my application and putting it in the trash than I was gonna hear the sound of my phone ringing with someone asking me to come in for an interview. And I knew that. I knew that after a while. And so I was selling my books and clothes to pay rent and buy groceries. I found myself for a while in an abusive relationship with a man who provided some financial assistance. He likened me to a pair of slightly irregular designer pants at Ross Dress for Less like like the unflawed pants. He couldn't afford me until I was damaged, AKA a single parent. He once did not speak to me for a week because I had gotten bangs. Yeah, that seems normal and healthy, right? Well, things took a positive turn when I got a part time seasonal sales associate job at Urban Outfitters. I swear, the day I got the call offering me the job, part time, temporary and minimum wage, I felt as if the clouds had finally parted and the sun was shining just for me. We were going to survive. On my first day, which was also my birthday, the manager parked me at a cart in the fitting rooms where I helped customers try on clothing all day, count the items in and out of the rooms, check the rooms for tags, rehang and fold items on repeat. And I did this for 12 hours under a freezing air conditioning vent because the managers forgot I was there. And when they finally sent me home apologizing for forgetting about me, I was ecstatic. I had just made about $90, which was the most money I had seen in years. This job would not have been my first choice, but it's not like there were any other options on the list. I showed up for work every day. I worked hard, I took every shift that no one wanted and I tried to forget that the company made us feel like thieves, searching our bags and pockets every time we left the store. We had to ask a manager to let us in and out of the bathroom just in case our plans to steal involved the toilet. This is a nightmare scenario for me and a person with ibs. It was so stressful, but I was like, it's money, it's money. I unpacked plastic shoes wrapped in plastic that smelled like cancer. The fragrance I folded and hung and straightened and worked so hard every day for just over a minimum wage. Eventually I became a manager and while the insurance and consistent paycheck were great, the hours were horrible. As a salaried employee, I was expected to be at the store as long as necessary, usually nine to 10 hours each day, but often more like 12. And I was paying for childcare for those hours. So I was kinda just as broke as I was before I was a manager. I couldn't afford the I Couldn't afford the bus, much less a car. So I was transporting my kid and our groceries around town on my bike. Seriously, I would get up at like 4:30 in the morning, okay. I would get myself dressed and ready. Then I would go get Dylan up, get Dylan dressed and ready, pack Dylan and all of Dylan's stuff on the back of my bike and, you know, or in my backpack, put Dylan in the seat, and then we would ride to daycare, which was a couple miles away, drop Dylan off, then get back on my bike, then ride a few more miles across the river, up the hill to Urban Outfitters. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Eventually, I got a trailer for my bike for Dylan. And it was, in some ways, it was an upgrade because there was enough room in there for groceries too. But on the other hand, every sort of, like, few feet that I would pedal forward with the trailer, the trailer would pull me back like another foot. So it was really, really hard. You had to like, really pedal, pedal so much to keep up the momentum with that thing. And we used that for years. But things were hard. I was writing checks, what I would call creatively. Imagine writing a check. But yes, I was writing out checks to pay for groceries so that I could get diapers and food before payday because inevitably my account was empty by then. I was absolutely paying rent on the last possible day that I could. Same thing with all of my utilities. We did not have Internet. We did not have a television. Things were hard. I couldn't afford heat in my room. I mean, it was. It was a hard time. You know, everything felt so tenuous. We were only one stroke of bad luck away from homelessness. That said, I also consider this one of the happiest times of my life. I had great friends and I did cool, creative things. I loved living in Portland. And for a person who has spent most of my life feeling lonely, it was the first time I felt like I wasn't completely, completely on my own in the world. I had people who cared about me, who would show up when needed. It was my chosen family. So one week, the store had a very important visit from executives from the home office. And this was a rarity in the Pacific Northwest because we were so far away from the headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We spent weeks cleaning and organizing and dressing and redressing the mannequins. And when the day arrived, I gave a walkthrough of the women's department to these executives. As was expected, everyone did this, right? You spent the week leading up cramming all the sales data you could. And writing an outline. I had little index cards that I used. As I walked them through, I planned out the route and what I was going to say at each point in the department. Not because I expected anything to come from it. I just am. I'm just an overachiever, you know? And on this walkthrough, I talked about what customers requested most often and where I thought we had an opportunity to expand on certain ideas and how we could merchandise those ideas. Like I said, just doing my job. But at the end of the walkthrough, one of the executives asked me, how would you like to move to Philadelphia to be a buyer? Well, I laughed because it seemed unlikely. And also, what was a buyer? But a week later, I was flying across the country for an interview. And for that interview, I wore a thrifted Boy Scout shirt, a brown corduroy jumper from the sales section at Urban Outfitters, and the green cowboy boots that I had worn every single day for years. I was interviewed by at least half a dozen people that day. I can't even remember them all. I know I knew nothing about fashion, but I knew that I loved clothes and style. And when someone asked me my favorite designer, I said Marc Jacobs, because that was the only name that came to mind. And one of my friends back in Portland had a Marc Jacobs purse. And we were always like, oh, she's rich. You know? It was the first thing that I could think of because luxury brands and high fashion were not part of my life. My friends and I were all super stylish, but our inspiration came from thrifting and vintage and old movies and magazines and our favorite bands. The clothes we wore were a creative expression, not a commodity. I also just want to take a moment here to talk about the world. At the time I had this interview, MySpace was the most prevalent social media platform. Facebook existed, but I didn't know a thing about was too new. I generally only had access to the Internet if I took my laptop, one of the old white plastic MacBooks, to the coffee shop or the library. I. I did that primarily for checking email or ebay. I read a lot of books and magazines from the library, and I wasn't getting my inspiration or information from the Internet. I did have a phone that took photos at this point, but you still couldn't really send photos to someone, so it was kind of silly. I had, like, one photo on my phone, and it was me and my best friend Raina at a bar. Like, that was all I had on there. And sometimes I would look at it and be like, oh, we're really cute in this tiny, highly pixelated photo. I did, however, carry a little Canon digital camera with me everywhere I went. It was like my prized possession. And I also finally had an ipod, thanks to my dad, by the way. My favorite bands and musicians at that point, as I'm going to this interview in Philadelphia, were J. Dilla and Holly Golightly. Like, for me, I didn't have a television. I never really got to see movies. Cause, you know, I had a kid, I just read a lot of books and I listened to a ton of music all the time. And my friends and I were so into music that we would, like, buy used CDs and rip them into MP3 files and share them with one another. So I have this massive library of music. And I listened to music every minute of my day, even when I was riding my bike, not with Dylan on the back, but when I was riding my bike alone, definitely listening to music, which is so dangerous and you should not do. But you know, when you're in your 20s, you think you're going to live forever. And so I didn't really think about fashion as like an industry. I didn't think about trends at all. I didn't think about like, celebrities. I didn't even know a lot of celebrities unless people talked about them a lot. I did watch a lot of ice skating with my friend Alana. So maybe I had some like, ice skating celebrities. But that was about it. Like, it just was like a very, very not fashion oriented life. Even though, you know, this is the beginning of like the New York Times starting to write about poor Portland as this like, really uber cool place and that. Like, I think just from being there, people assumed I must be just like, so super cool. And I think that is part of the reason I got the job because I did not think I was going to get it. I wasn't fashion enough. But then I received an offer. I took the job because it felt like a chance to reach some level of financial security and give my child a nice life. My first choice would have been to stay in Portland, but once again, survival was the priority. And I learned a lot pretty much immediately. Well, for one, what a buyer does. Because I didn't know that when I asked the person, one of the people who interviewed me, who ended up buying being my boss, what a buyer did, she said, well, you know, we like answer a lot of emails and sometimes we talk on the phone. Sometimes you just send faxes. Oh, when you go through the mail and I was like, okay, I could definitely do all of those things. It sounds really boring, but I am qualified for this. I am Mandalay McCarty, have opened mail in my life. I have sent an email. I guess I've talked on the phone. I can remember filing for my grandma when I was a kid. I'm up for it. I am very overqualified for this. But what a buyer actually does is a lot of spreadsheets and applied mathematics, critical thinking presentations, creative problem solving. Turned out I was really good at all of those things, too. But I did also open a lot of mail and file things. Most of my coworkers came from highly privileged backgrounds and definitely thought that some store employees, including me, were kind of stupid and unimportant. And I'm going to tell you that the odds were stacked against me. People in sort of the more managerial space at that time expected that I was going to fail. And basically, that one executive, his name is Kelly Walker, he was so insistent that I get hired. Like, he just had been so impressed by that walkthrough I gave back in Portland that he kept insisting they would be so glad that they hired me. And I think he said it so much that they begrudgingly gave me the job because they needed someone to do it. But everyone assumed that I was going to be too dumb or too feral, I guess, to handle it. And I'll tell you, over the years, every time I would do something really good or succeed, get a promotion, give a great presentation or whatever, Kelly Walker, he would just, like, suddenly appear. He would materialize right there and be like, see? I told them to hire you. You're the best. And I just. I'm really grateful for him, actually, for opening that door for me. I think now he works for Altered State, which is sort of like the Christian anthropology. And everybody who gets to work with him is really lucky because he's a guy who really cared about developing talent and people being smart. And he wasn't, like, shallow in the way that a lot of other leadership was. So, anyway, thank you, Kelly Walker, for giving me that opportunity. The other thing about buying is that it did not and still does not pay well. My first job paid $4,000 a year more than I was being paid in Portland, which meant I moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a place that was way more expensive than Portland. And I was paid $32,000 a year. This meant things were very rough. For the first few years, I was eating a lot of canned food from the Dollar Tree, and over time, I made more money. But I Wasn't paid a living wage for someone with a child until I became a senior buyer years later at Nasty Gal. So knowing all of this that people thought I might be stupid and feral and that I wasn't being paid very well, and this was a big life change, did I like my job? Well, yes and no. By then I had come to accept that work was something we did to survive, not something we did for pleasure. I didn't mind the actual work part of it. I love a calculator and some data to dissect. Seriously, work, what a good time. But the social aspects of it were very difficult. I felt like an outsider. As a low income single parent. I'd never been skiing or on a family vacation to Europe. I'd never even been to Disney World. Still haven't. Which by the way, to me growing up always seemed like the vacation for happy middle class families. I couldn't afford the clothes, clothes my company sold. So I was usually thrifting or going to Forever 21. I had imperfect teeth and my mom lived in a trailer park. I was never going to be thin or pretty enough to truly get ahead. And that part gave me a lot of anxiety. I told myself that my work would stand for itself because my work was good. And I am, I will say this, very good at being a buyer. But I know, I knew then and I know now that my work, like the actual work I did, was only part of the formula for success in fashion. How I looked, what I wore, where I lived, who I knew, even the car I drove to work. Which, spoiler, I didn't have a car for a really long time. And when I finally did it, it was a Ford Escort station wagon from the 90s, maybe from the 80s even. It was a very old car. And I knew, I knew that even though I was really good at this, there were all these other things that almost negated my skills and I had little to no control over them. I was permanently anxious. And so my eating disorder spiraled for years as I created more and more rules about when and how I could eat in an effort to feel like I had control over something in my life. And yeah, I worked with some really horrible people who seem to have watched the Devil Wears Prada and thought it was an educational HR video on how to behave in the workplace. I mean, I saw women making other women cry in meetings just about every day for from literally my first day at the office. But at the same time, I also worked with some cool, smart and hyper talented people who are still my Friends to this day, and over the years of my career in fast fashion, I continued to meet more amazing and brilliant people. But that took time. For the first six months at my job, no one talked to me, not even my boss. She just emailed me all day from 10ft away. I ate lunch alone, reading a book in the big urban cafeteria. Slowly, friendships formed, mostly with the guys who worked in the mailroom. And through them, I met cool people who worked for other brands on the campus. And things got better. They got less lonely. But I still pined away from my friends and my life in Portland. It hurt a little bit less each day. I would end up working in Philly for about five years before returning to Portland, continuing to work for Urban Outfitters in a different capacity. Ultimately, I worked for urban for 10 years, the longest I have worked anywhere in my adult life. And 10 years is a rarity in fashion because you have to jump around from company to company if you want to be promoted and make more money. And I think that's honestly the case for just about any industry at this point. If I could travel back in time and tell my young self that you gotta go work somewhere else, I absolutely would. Although I would have a lot of other stuff to tell myself too. Like, oh, I don't know, don't date someone who gives you the silent treatment over a hairstyle. And don't ride your bike while you're listening to music. Good Lord. So why did I stay at Urban for so long? Fear? Low self esteem? Both, I guess. I was working as a buyer for Urban Outfitters when the recession began. And they pulled us into a meeting where they were basically like, listen, we're not going to lay anyone off. You're really lucky because of that. But we're not going to give anybody raises. There's going to be a freeze on promotions. You need to bring your own office supplies. We're canceling the holiday party. We're going to increase the cost of your health insurance. It was all kinds of stuff, right? But it was like, at least you still have a job. And I think that anyone who was in the early part of their career, who at that point in time, a lot of millennials were, probably remembers a similar kind of situation at their. At their workplace. And what it really meant is that a lot of us, our careers were sort of like, suppressed by that. Like, I think if I had started my career as a buyer five years before I did, I probably would have ended up being like a president of a brand somewhere. You know, maybe even like, A CEO if that's what I wanted. Which I might be too much of a rabble rouser and have too much of a conscience for that, but that's really how this trajectory kind of works. And if I had really wanted to stick it out, I would have been, I mean, ultimately I ended up reaching the executive level, but it was a very different path. And also just tell you, reaching the executive level doesn't make the job any better. So yeah, I was scared to leave. You know, here it was, it was the recession and the years after the recession, even a year later, my, my peers were going to other companies and instantly getting a $20,000 raise. It just, it felt, it felt reckless to me. Too many people relied on me, you know. But also when you work in fashion and I'm sure other industries too, but this is where my experience lies, there is always this undercurrent of, you're so lucky to be here because there are thousands of girls lined up waiting to take your place. It's something that has been said to me by executives throughout my career. Sometimes as a warning to me and sometimes as motivation to manage out someone who wasn't performing because they could be easily replaced. The number of times someone has said to me, this is someone's dream job, wow. No one was luckier than me to be there. Remember, this story started with me as a seasonal part time sales associate. I was from the trailer park with a teen mom. I didn't have connections, I hadn't gone to fashion school. I was a single parent who did most of my household shopping at thrift stores and dollar stores. Also, I was kind of funny looking. And no matter how much I starved myself, I was never going to be beautiful and thin. And sadly, in fashion jobs, your skills and work ethic are always secondary to your appearance. So who else would have wanted to hire me? You know, I was lucky that someone did. It just felt safer to stay at Urban Outfitters, even if being there felt increasingly destructive. It's interesting to look back and see how much the world changed in the time that I was working for one company. By the time I left Urban Outfitters, I had an iPhone and an Instagram account, Spotify, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn. I had Netflix. But I'm pretty sure it was still only DVDs in the mail at that point. I didn't have a television, so I watched them on my laptop. None of these things existed when I started. The world had changed so much. How we connected with the outside world and how we got information was rapidly evolving. I want you to put a pin in that because we're going to talk about that a lot more in the second half of this next week. And through that decade, and once again a significant chunk of my adult life, I saw so much weird, bad, possibly illegal stuff happen that it could fill books and books. There was the Glitter gun, Christmas ornament scandal, Ghetto Opoly. Don't get me started that blog Urban Counterfeiters. So many artists and brands knocked off over and over again. And by the way, it's always the executive's idea. I swear to God, no one who's a buyer or a designer wants to go out there and steal stuff. But executives, I guess that's how they got there. They just don't care. I saw a buyer pushed into quitting because she had just been diagnosed with cancer and the company just I didn't want the liability of it all. I saw an entire War and Peace sized volume of employee abuses. Just a reminder that Urban did not have an HR department until just a few years ago. If you feel like I'm missing things from this list, well, I'm sure I am. It was like that time went so fast it's difficult to slow it down so I can remember it all. Let's take a moment to thank some of the incredible small businesses who keep clotheshorse going via their generous Patreon support. Slow Fashion Academy is a size inclusive sewing and pattern making studio based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Designer and fashion professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and assist aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills of making, mending and altering their own clothes several times per year. Ruby offers her flagship Sloper Workshop, an in person two day pattern making retreat where you will learn how to drape a set of basic block patterns that capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block or sloper patterns as a foundation for infinite styles of garments that are customized, custom made to your body's one of a kind contours or compare your slipper to commercial patterns to see where you might need to alter the shape. No more guessing at full bust, flat seam or sway back adjustments. Start with a foundation that fits. Ruby also provides professional design and pattern making services to emerging slow fashion brands and occasionally takes commissions for custom garments and costume pieces. She has also released several PDF sewing patterns for original designs under her brands Spokes and Stitches and Starling Petite Plus. I just want to also add here on a personal note that right now Ruby is actually working with me to create a one of a kind unique to me special dress that I will be wearing for all future clothes horse events including live episodes later this year in the Pacific Northwest. I am so excited to work with Ruby because she is so so talented and so knowledgeable about all things clothing creation. Check out the schedule for upcoming workshops, download PDF Sewing Patterns and learn about additional sewing and design services at www.slowfashion academy. And it's important for me to tell you that that's SlowFashion Academy Selena Sanders A social impact brand that specializes in upcycle clothing using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum style Minimal carbon footprint Republica Unicornia Yarns Handmade yarn and notions for the color obsessed. Made with love and some swearing in fabulous Atlanta, Georgia by head yarn wench Kathleen get ready for Rainbows with a side of Giving a damn. Republica Unicornia is all about making your own magic using small batch, responsibly sourced, hand dyed yarns and thoughtfully made notions. Slow fashion all the way down and discover the joy of creating your very own beautiful hand knit, crocheted or or woven pieces. Find us on Instagram @republicaunicorniarns and at www.republicaunicornia.com. cute little ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl and home items in a wide range of styles and price points. If it's ethical and legal, we try to find a home for it. Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram. Utelittleruin Deco Denim is a startup based out of San Francisco and it sells clothing and accessories that are sustainable, gender fluid, size inclusive and high quality. Made to last for years to come. Deco Denim is trying to change the way you think about buying clothes. Founder Sarah Mattis wants to empower people to ask important questions like where was the this made? Was this garment made ethically? Is this fabric made of plastic? Can this garment be upcycled and if not, can it be recycled? Sign up@decodenim.com to receive $20 off your first purchase. They promise not to spam you and send out no more than three emails a month with two of them surrounding education or a personal note from the founder. Again, that's Deco Denim. Part two. Girl Bosses, Peter Pan Callers and faux Feminists let's get this section started by answering some questions I get quite often. The first one is Did I know that I was working in fast fashion. Well, when I started my career in buying, I'm not sure if Urban Outfitters was exactly fast fashion yet. Yes, we delivered new items to stores every month, but it was a reasonable number. Things stayed at full price for months, usually three to six months before going on sale. And this was before the recession made every brand adopt the fast fashion model. Now, as I mentioned at the top of this episode, this episode was born from a series I've been doing on social media, breaking down my experiences working in fast fashion, how I got into it, and what I did and did not learn along the way. And in the section of this story where I talked about, like, did I know I was working in fast fashion when I was at Urban Outfitters, I said exactly what I just said to you. No, at the time, I definitely did not think that. And I would go as far as saying it wasn't exactly fast fashion yet. It was in some liminal space of, like, low quality and high prices. But compared to how fast the entire industry would become in the next five years, it wasn't fast fashion. It was just, I don't know, kind of scammy maybe. So, you know, I talked about that on social media. Well, perhaps in not as much detail because, you know, I'm limited to the space there. And someone sent me a DM that was like, you're fucking Delulu if you think that Urban Outfitters isn't fast fashion. And, you know, I. One, why do we send messages like that? Why would we talk to someone like that? I don't know. I think it's interesting to me. I was thinking about this a lot over the weekend because I've been just feeling sort of this, like, emotional burnout this year. Last year, too. It's just been like, building and building. And, you know, Dustin was like, well, I think part of it is that unfortunately, like, every day you are confronted by some of the worst parts of humanity via your work on Clotheshores. I was like, I do think that is part of it. It's just like, yes, I get horrible messages from terrible MAGA people all the time who call me a groomer and threaten to take my child away. Which is the joke's on them because they are an adult now and who tell me how ugly I am and, you know, just horrible stuff all the time. And, yeah, I don't like that. It's not good for anyone's brain to receive messages like that. But I also think that I expect it from those people. Like, they have A very limited playbook that they can play from. And we disagree on everything. And, you know, honestly, I. I think that they are terrible people. So what. What else would I expect from them? But what does actually hurt me and like, chip away at me emotionally over time is people who, I feel like we're on the same side of things. Right? We are in the same larger community, we care about the same things, and we should be working together and lifting one another up. And when those people show up and are mean to me on the Internet, it's extremely hurtful. And it really chips away at my optimism or my ability to have optimism about what happens next. If we're fighting about whether or not Urban Outfitters is fast fashion in 2007 on the Internet in 2026, when we could be, you know, working together to, I don't know, abolish ice, that'd be pretty sick, right? Why aren't. Why are we fighting about this instead of, like, working together? Right. And so I would just like to say that first off, we need to stop being that way. We need to stop being harder on ourselves and one another than we are on the actual fascists. And that means, like, showing up with compassion and respect for people who are fighting the same fight alongside us, even if we don't always agree with everything they say and think. Even if it's something as silly as Was Urban Outfitters fast fashion in 2007? Once again, I will say, is Urban Outfitters fast fashion now in 2026? Absolutely. Was it in 2020? Yes. Was it in 2016? Definitely. Was it in 2007 and even 2008? Not quite. And I think that sometimes when we have conversations with strangers on the Internet, regardless of the subject matter, it is on us before we jump in to start the debate, to think about the full context of the situation. Right. This is like a silly example in the grand scheme of things. Because who really cares who thinks Urban Outfitters was fast fashion in the two 2000s or not? Like, it's such a non issue at this point, but I think it's a great example of like, hey, get the full context. It lean into the nuance. And then if you're still like, you're wrong, approach that person with grace and kindness. Anyway, just. Just me venting about what it is to exist as a human on the Internet in 2026. And I'm sure you have similar stories where you're like, whoa, that went awry. Really, really fast. But yes, I will maintain once again, that Urban Outfitters was not fast fashion yet then. And it was wildly different than the original fast fashion brands of that moment. Like Forever 21, like H& M, where we didn't have as many locations. We were selling at a much higher price point. Point. We really did try to do cool stuff. And most importantly, the number of styles we were launching every week and every month was just like a fraction of what it would be in a few years. And the length of time that these items would stay at full price before being marked down was substantially long, longer. In general, most of what we sold most of the time before the recession was at full price. It was just a completely different time. It didn't mean, like I said, that we weren't selling crappy clothes. It's just we were doing a lot more slowly in that way. Urban Outfitters is also like an interesting outlier in that, like, the quality, it did decline as we got into the fast fashion era, but it was already bad before it. Whereas other brands, they actually started in a much better place. And I will tell you, I also worked at Urban Outfitters in college, which is how I ended up getting that job in Portland. And even back then, the clothes were also horrible quality. And people would return things that had just like, I was breathing too hard and all the buttons fell off. You know, like, the quality was always really bad for the price, but somehow we just kept it around and sold it at full price. It's a really interesting case study in branding. And as I progressed through the next parts of my career, I saw all of that pick up the pace substantially. And when I came back, spoiler. This will be in the next episode. When I came back to that campus in 2018 to work for Nuuly, that was when I saw, like, holy shit, all of this is like, super fast fashion now. Like, things have gone so fast and gotten so cheap and so just like, gross in every way. But we weren't there yet. When I started my career as a buyer also, I was surrounded by this sort of, like, corporate hype that we. What we were doing at Urban Outfitters was cooler and more. More important than any other big chain or brand out there. And while I'm pretty resistant to that kind of corporate culture, I definitely did think Urban Outfitters was different from Forever 21. And at least for a while, it was. By now, you have seen many people use the analogy of the frog in a boiling pot of water to describe many different scenarios, including climate change and the rise of fascism. Basically, the water gets warm so slowly that the frog doesn't notice. And then boils to death. It turns out that's actually an urban myth. But to use that analogy anyway, the fast fashionization of an entire industry didn't happen overnight. It happened so gradually that I could only see that I was a buyer in fast fashion. In hindsight, the real change began in 2008 with the global financial crisis that spurred a recession. Urban Outfitters anticipated decreasing sales, but the executives felt we could protect stock prices and keep shareholders happy by increasing the profitability of the things we sold. So we were required to reach out to every vendor and ask for a blanket 15% discount on our orders. This was a really fun day. Yes. So fun. First off, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I have, like, extreme anxiety about calling a stranger on a phone. Like, calling to order food is like, my palms are sweating. Okay, now imagine you're calling people to ask them. Well, not really ask them. Tell them that they're giving you a 15% discount on things you ordered months ago. Imagine knowing that while you're doing that, lots of people aren't going to get paid and lots of people are going to struggle, whether it's the vendors, the factories, or the people making the stuff. But imagine while you're doing all that, your own personal nightmare, a miserable errand, for sure. You happen to sit outside the office of the gmm, which means he is the head of all buying and product for the whole brand. And he is an incredibly volatile person who likes to scream and humiliate people. And imagine he is walking around screaming at people who aren't actively on the phone, telling them if they don't get on the phone soon, they're not going to have a job. And he came over to my desk to yell at me because I wasn't on the phone anymore. And I was like, actually, it's all done. Here's the list. I've already updated all the POs. And then he was, like, yelling to everyone about how they should be more like me, which is also not the attention I wanted. I just didn't want to get yelled at. Anyway. Yeah, that was. That was a really great day. I wish I could say it's the only time I didn't feel like I was going to barf at work. But it's a memorable one. But also, as I mentioned earlier, you know, here we are. It's the recession. The company wants to be more profitable while doing less sales. So they also cut costs by putting a freeze on raises and promotions. Our benefits were cut. They got more Expensive. And you know what? The company did all that and had a year of record profit. Like the entire industry was like, how did you do that? How did you put everything on sale, have slowing sales in general and still come out with a record level of profit? Well, off the backs of all the people who worked for the company and who made the clothes and sold the clothes and shipped the clothes and all of that. Yes, that is how they made that profit. And this was my first real serious brush with this. Like, I had always been aware that the quality of life for at least employees in the stores and in the corporate office was directly impacted by the company, company's drive for profits. But this was the first time I saw, you know, because of my position and where I was, how it was spreading outward to all these other people around the world. And it wouldn't be the last time, not even the last time working for this company where I would see how that, that greed would eclipse humanity. And then, you know how fast fashion goes, right? The workload increased. We bought more and more different styles and jammed the stores and our website with more and more new products. I was given more categories to manage, sold to me as a great opportunity without a raise or a change in my title. And when coworkers left, our replacement was not hired. Rather, their work was given to the rest of the team once again without any raises. One day a co worker whispered to me, do you ever stay awake at night thinking about how all of the stuff that we buy is just going to end up in the landfill? We locked eyes, sharing our sadness. And then I nervously laughed. We can never talk about this in the office ever again. By the way, that person, she went on many years later to be an executive at madewell. Anyway, the fact was, more and more often I found myself struggling with the suspicion that we were doing something bad. All of that waste would clog the landfills. All of the resources were being used to create near future waste. And what about the way the company treated all of the people who made and sold that near future waste? I had to jam those thoughts to the back corner of my brain in order to get up and work another day. Without this job, I had nothing. I would end up in the trailer park with my mom, growing more bitter and hateful with each passing day. I had to stay. Now is a good time to address another question I receive quite frequently, which is why didn't I go work for a while? Nicer clothing company, maybe something more high end and in theory more ethical. Well, that's just Never how it works in this industry. You could maybe go from Chanel to Urban Outfitters, but you will never go from Urban Outfitters to Chanel. There is a high level of classism within the industry. So if you're working at a brand with less prestige, you are unlikely to be considered for a job at a company with more prestige. And of course, now I think that's all so laughable because even luxury brands have adopted the fast fashion model. But that is just how this industry works. So eventually I did move on to other companies. My first foray out of the Urban Outfitters bubble was modcloth. There we launched new items every day. Our catalog of styles was virtually infinite. So we went to see vendors every week in order to find more and more styles to sell. Yes, this was fast fashion for sure. But even still, I guarantee no one who worked at Modcloth would have been like, this is fast fashion. Because we would have been thinking of Forever 21. And yeah, we were different than Forever Forever 21, at least in some ways, you know. That said, fast fashion or not, ModCloth was without a doubt the best employer I have ever had. We had great benefits and the culture was kind and supportive. I was actually excited to go to work every day. On a personal level, my relationship with my family back home in Pennsylvania was weirder than ever. They seemed to think that I was rich. So suddenly I was paying my whole extended family's phone bill. I want to say it was about five to six hundred dollars a month. No one would pick me up at the airport when I came home to visit unless I paid them to do so. And meanwhile, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I lived in LA but could not afford a car. Fortunately. I have always been a big fan of public transportation, but things still felt so tenuous. Like I wasn't saving any money. I had no safety net. How bad was it? Well, modcloth didn't provide company credit cards to buyers. Rather we were supposed to use our own credit cards and get reimbursed. And they, to be fair, they usually did it pretty fast. It would be like the next paycheck. The problem is that during trade show season, which happened twice a year, mostly February and August, during those time periods, I traveled non stop to New York, Vegas and London. And this meant I needed to pay for airline tickets, hotel rooms, meals, any other travel stuff out of my pocket, like even just getting to the airport in LA as a whole thing. And I couldn't afford an Uber. So I would take the bus. Take me forever it was just like a whole thing. I did not even have a credit card at this point, so I would have to use my debit card, meaning it would come directly out of my checking account. Well, I didn't have that kind of money. So for my first trade show season, I sold a bunch of my clothes and other stuff on ebay so I could have money to travel for work. Eventually, I did get a credit card with, like, a $500 limit at first. But the financial side of buyers life was really hard. And you also have to remember, even at Modcloth, still the best place I've ever worked, my coworkers in general came from a level of financial privilege that was considerably higher than where I'd come from. So maybe they didn't have student loan debt. They certainly didn't have a child. They were trying to stay support. They probably weren't paying their whole family's phone bill. And so they had the liquidity, if you will, to pay for their work travel expenses and get reimbursed in the process of getting a credit card. It's kind of good. Like, Modcloth forced me to get a credit card because as I was applying for credit cards, I found out that my cousin, he's the only person in our family to have ever been to prison, he had been applying for dozens of of credit cards and loans in my name because he had stolen some old FAFSA forms from a filing cabinet at my mom's house. So he had my Social Security number. It put a bunch of red flags on my credit report, but which I was able to fix. But fortunately, he was really bad at scamming because he never had the right address. So he'd never successfully gotten a credit card or a loan in my name. But, man, he had tried. And I'm going to tell you, he'd applied for credit cards, like, anywhere that would give you a credit card. Like, you know, Kohl's and the Gap and Old Navy and Target and anywhere. Anywhere. He was, like, applying for credit cards in my name was pretty wild, I think. I think he applied for, like, an express credit card. Even something like that. I don't know. It was pretty. Pretty ridiculous. Fortunately, all of my experience sending faxes early in my buying career made me really good at faxing all the documentation I had to send to get that fixed. I laugh because I would cry. Okay, so I stayed at Modcloth for a few years. But I'll tell you, things were starting to feel uncertain there. After two rounds of layoffs in under a year, something was breaking and. And I was afraid of being caught in it. I knew I needed to keep moving forward and up if I was ever going to send my kid to college. And it just seemed like if there was a third round of layoffs, I didn't know who would be left. And, like I said, loved working at Modcloth, loved my coworkers. But we were in that cycle that I was starting to recognize which is people leave or are laid off and no one replaces them. Instead, the work is divvied out to everyone else. And things were getting harder there. Fortunately, my best friend had just gotten a job up the street. Literally up the street, like three blocks away in downtown LA at Nasty Gal. Unfortunately, the interview process at Nasty Gal was super shitty and rude, but this was like 2014, peak girl boss, peak Nasty Gal. This meant this could be, like the coolest place that anyone could ever work. And if I could get a job there, one, it would mean that I was, like, so cool. But also it would be like, in theory, a huge leap forward because this company was like, supposedly like the brand of the moment. So the thing is, even before my best friend had gotten a job there, I had already begun the interview process, like, six months prior when I had been brought in for an interview after a recruiter reached out to me and I had to sneak out of Modcloth, say I was going to a dentist appointment, change clothes in a Starbucks bathroom, and go to this interview with the vibes were not good. At that interview, I was interviewed by the original Nasty Gal buyer slash first employee, Christina Ferrucci. And she seemed incredibly stressed out and unhappy. Like, low key angry. I left feeling like, I don't know about this, which was good, I guess, because they totally ghosted me for six months, never heard back. I reached out with some. Some questions, like send a thank you note, all this stuff, nothing, right? And I kind of felt like I dodged a bullet because something was weird there. And yes, ModCloth, something was going on there, but at least everyone there was nice. And that was enough for me. Well, after my best friend was hired at Nasty Gal, she was like, why haven't you hired my friend Amanda? She's literally like the most talented buyer in LA right now. Like, you need to hire her. So they brought me back in and they made me do two different projects over the span of several weeks. The second project I had to do while I was in London for Modcloth, and I had to come in and present it less than 12 hours after I got back. And I was super jet lagged. Because they were basically like, if you want this job, you'll sacrifice everything. And I was like, okay, I guess I want this job, so I will sacrifice everything. So they made me do these two different projects and come to two different sets of interviews after being ghosted six months earlier. Because the CEO at the time, Sherry Waterson, wasn't sure if I had good taste because of the previous interview places I had worked. Yeah, she thought I must have bad taste because I'd worked at Urban Outfitters and Modcloth, which is interesting because both of those businesses were much bigger and much more successful. But this kind of planted a seed in my brain again that I was lucky to be here at Nasty Gal. So I didn't push back on the salary they offered me. And I felt like a major imposter for the first six months, months that I worked there. On my first day, I sat down at my desk here at Nasty Gal, just a few blocks away from Modcloth. It was great. I could take the same subway train to work. I sat down and there was a stack of sales reports on my desk and I start reading through them and I was immediately like, holy shit, this business is fucked. This place is going out of business soon. Like, categories had years and years worth of inventory on hand. One of the categories I was managing immediately was sweaters. And they weren't going to run out of inventory until like 2020. It was really, really bad. For some context here, a healthy business has maybe three months of inventory on hand, meaning enough to fuel three months of sales and then run out maybe six months if it's a slow category. But three plus years is a disaster. And soon it became apparent that my best friend and I had been hired to try to fix this situation. But I didn't even know where to begin. I was like, this is so bad. Like, maybe if they just like let me be in charge of what happens next, I could. But the problem was that the executives picked a new strategy every week and, and they never allowed any of these strategies to play out and they expected us to work all day, every day. Sherry Waterson, she said, I like to send out emails on the weekend to see who responds because anyone who doesn't doesn't care about their jobs. So first we were chasing more expensive product. Then nevermind, everybody head off to the apparel mart for cheaper product. Now let's try activewear or, or Sophia's getting married, so let's make a wedding collection. Let's do more T shirts now, more dresses. Nothing ever stayed the same for very Long. I could tell you wild stories all day. We used to joke about writing a sitcom about working there and who we would cast and how ridiculous it would be. And then we were like, no one would believe it because it's so silly here. Still, I'm ready to make the real, the real Nasty Owl television show. So whoever's ready to do it with me, reach out, let's write a script. It was just so wild there. So things were just getting worse and worse there. And by late fall, early winter of the next year, I ended up reaching out to Anna Merlin of Jezebel, which was my favorite blog, saying, hey, I'm a senior buyer at Nasty Gal and I want to tell you, I want to talk to you about how it really is here, because I was fully pissed off and epically disappointed. And you know what? That was the beginning of several exposes that Anna Merlin wrote about Nasty Gal, sometimes interviewing me, sometimes being connected with other people who worked there, until ultimately a few months later, the whole thing came crashing down and Nasty Gal was gone. The thing about working at Nasty Gal, that was the really the worst part of it was that I was like low key, trapped there. Because working in fashion in LA, you don't have a lot of great options. There's Forever 21, which also RIP now, right? But Forever 21 was a notoriously horrible company to work for that expected a minimum of 12 hours of work each day. There was BCBG, which was equally horrible. And like a revolving door, there was Guess, which was also terrible with sexual harassment added into the mix. There was Revolve, but I'd heard weird stories. And there was Reformation, which was coming up on the the scene at that time. But so far in my Nasty Gal era, they just seem notorious for having candidates do merchandising and product projects and then ghosting them and then stealing those ideas and turning them into collections. And years later I would have several friends, both of whom had worked at Modcloth with me back in the day. They ended up working at Reformation. And this is just in the past couple years, by the way. So like, like in the 2000 and 20s and they had a nightmare experience working there. The company is super horrible. Everything is mega fast fashion. They don't even have the time to get the fit or quality right because it's just non stop. You know, most of their clothes are made overseas at this point, which doesn't mean they're bad or even unethical. But like what Reformation began as is definitely not what it is now. It is 100% mega fast fashion. And both my friends who work there ended up having, like, serious mental and physical health problems from the stress of that environment. Lots of really toxic behavior going on in that corporate office. So, yeah, here I was feeling trapped at Nasty Gal, giving interviews to Anna Merlin. And it sucked, because everyone on the outside thought Nasty Gal was this super cool, super feminist place to work, but it wasn't. It was all a lie. Lots of diet culture, fat shaming, creepy white dudes in leadership, and super high turnover and low pay. Beyond the mismanagement and chaos, or maybe because of it, there was no work life balance. Team size was constantly shrinking while we chased down more and more things to buy, which meant every time someone left, which was every week, seriously, Kim and I always joke about how we were getting really sick of cupcakes and champagne every Friday, because every Friday was someone's last day, and there were more cupcakes and champagne. And honestly, I haven't had cupcakes and champagne since. Since I worked at Nasty Gal. Yeah, it was just like every time someone left, which was every week, all of their work would become someone else's work. So by the time I got laid off from Nasty Gal, spoiler, that's gonna happen. I was managing all the apparel categories except for dresses. I had this huge team that I was managing. I had not received a raise. I was working all the time. I was trying to teach people who had never been taught how to drive be a buyer, how to be a buyer. And it was a lot. It was a lot. And every week on Monday, we had a meeting in a room called Mean Girls, where we would be torn to shreds by the CEO and her monstrous cronies. That meeting was always three to question mark. That was the schedule. Three to question mark. Because we might be there from three to five, we might be there from three to eight. The leadership of that company. Like, by then, Sophia. Sophia, you know, the writer of Girlboss, the founder of Nasty Gal, she was not really there anymore. She was on a book tour, she was getting married, she was traveling, she was having a podcast. She was being famous. And so the company was being run by Sherry Watterson. And these people she had brought in from the past to work with her. So people from Lululemon, people from Gymboree, people who were really out of touch with what it was to sell clothing to millennial women. Like, they just didn't understand what this business was like, but they sure knew what it was like to just bully people all day, every day. The pressure was definitely getting to me. I was starving myself and new and innovative ways. I often ate lunch in the bathroom so no one would judge me for eating food. And I felt like I had a permanent headache and diarrhea. It was not the first time in my life that that would happen and it was not the last, but definitely one of the first times I was like so acutely aware of it. Once again, it is a good time for me to mention something very important. Yes, I worked with some terrible people through my career, but I also worked with and befriended incredibly talented, super smart people. And I feel so lucky that I had the chance to work alongside them and get to know them. And specifically, I met some of my favorite people in the world while working at Nasty Gal. There are plenty of amazing people working in fast fashion who who feel trapped just like I did. And these are good people who do not want to create near future garbage that is made by exploited people. They are not cool with this. They just don't know what to do next. They're trapped. When I was finally laid off from Nasty Gal because the company was running out of money, I felt relieved. Maybe I could afford finally figure out something else to do that would be better for me. My friend Kim was laid off about five minutes after I was. So my newish boyfriend Dustin picked us up from the office and took us out for drinks. We felt free, we felt excited, but we also felt scared. Now it's interesting to me that I worked for both ModCloth and Nasty Gal in that time period because strangely enough, their fates were sort of entangled with one another. So after Kim and I were laid off, Nasty Gal hung around for another, I don't know, six, eight months before officially filing bankruptcy and being auctioned off in court to the most fast fashionist brand that existed at that time, Boohoo. Which I'd never heard of Boohoo before. But I will tell you, when I looked at the Boohoo website website and saw that everything was like $20 or less, I couldn't think for of a more apt fate for Nasty Gal, which had been when I was there trying to become the Barneys for Millennials. Trying unsuccessfully obviously, but anyway. So in that 8ish months that nasty Gal had left, my best friend was still working there and she was actually one of the last people left in the office when it finally closed. She could tell you a whole story of how the chaos kept getting worse and worse and vendors wouldn't ship anymore because the company was so behind on paying. And so now brands would only ship inventory on with a cod, meaning they'd have to get a check immediately upon delivery or before shipping. And how she would have to go meet every week with the head of finance to get these checks written. And they would go through all the expenses for the week. And she would see that the company was still paying for, like, Sophia's psychic and dry cleaning and all kinds of other stuff that was, like, probably not good for the company. And she told me that in the last couple weeks that Nasty Gal was around after they'd filed bankruptcy and the brand was up for auction, that the executives were pretty convinced that Walmart was going to buy Nasty Gal. Because Walmart had been starting to diversify its portfolio. It wanted to buy more online retailers. And so it had bought Jet.com, which is R.I.P. now, it's kind of hard to explain what Jet.com was. It was sort of like a bulk, like, I don't know, like a Costco online sort of. So, yeah, they had bought Jet.com and then were letting Jet.com sort of acquire other brands like Bonobos, the suit company. And so they were looking to buy a women's apparel brand to add to their portfolio. And the Walmart people came in and toured Nasty Gal, and they had a lot of meetings, and there was a lot of excitement, believe it or not, around Walmart buying Nasty Gal, because basically they were going to let the company just continue to run itself, but they would bring money and their own sort of, like, infrastructure to help the company be more efficient. And so it would seem that, like, everybody could keep carrying on as they had been, and perhaps even all of us who had been laid off could come back. Because by then, the design team was gone, the production team was gone, a lot of the marketing and creative teams were gone. It was like a skeleton crew at this point. So the day that the bankruptcy auction for Nasty Gal is set to end, the executives are like, where's this Walmart bid? Right? If they don't place a bid, we're getting sold to boohoo. And they're sitting around all day waiting for this. They're calling Walmart like, hey, are you gonna put that bid in? Hey, what's going on? And that same day, huge press release, Walmart is buying ModCloth because ModCloth was similarly in financial trouble. Remember, I told you something was off. And it was interesting to me because unlike Nasty Gal, our sales were actually good and we had, like, efficient amounts of inventory. And it seemed as if the brand was growing. But the problem was that like, the financial side of the business was messed up. I think it was like overextended. Money wasn't being managed as well as it could have been and it was catching up with the company. I think there was a lot of debt. And so, yes, things were getting weird at ModCloth, as I suspected. So, yeah, Walmart last minute bought ModCloth instead. Same day, Nasty Gal gets acquired by Boohoo, everything gets liquidated from the office. You know, the furniture, the inventory, everything. Everyone loses their job. Like I said, my best friend was one of the last people working there. She was helping to sell off the furniture in the office. And, you know, one night the Nasty Gal website turns off at midnight and it turns on the next day and it looks pretty much the same, but all the clothes are like a quarter of the price. Because now it was owned by Boohoo, who had bought all the intellectual property, but let go of the entire staff that was remaining, which wasn't very much. And ModCloth went on to be bought by Walmart. And it seemed like it wasn't that bad, actually. My friends who were still working there were like, the transition's been okay. But then later, a few years later, Walmart sold it to a private equity company who I then think sold it to another private equity company. And I don't know anyone who works there. I haven't known anybody who's worked there for a long time because everybody that I know is long gone from there. It's funny to think about those two things, those two brands who were so different, being so entangled. Now, there was one really good thing that had been happening in tandem with my career in fashion was that I was young, using every minute of free time to write. And over the years I had written pages and pages about my experiences, primarily personal. I didn't think anybody would be interested in hearing about my job. And for about a year or so in LA, while I was working at ModCloth and Nasty Gal, I even published a zine called Sandy with a friend. I also volunteered every week at a kitten rescue shelter. And the level of joy that I got from writing and volunteering almost, but not quite, canceled out some of the frustration of my career. Not all of it, especially at Nasty Gal. In fact, one of the things I think that was frustrating me so much at Nasty Gal is that, like, I was spending so much of my mental bandwidth every day on that place that I had nothing left to give when I got home. And I actually started watching television in the evening, which I'd never done before, and I just felt like things were going in a weird way, but so, yeah, Kim and I got let go. We were out there kind of like, what are we going to do next? And we did get a couple months of severance and they covered our insurance for a couple months too. So I had a little bit of a buffer. Although I was terrified. I interviewed for so many different random jobs after Nasty Gal. My thinking was like, hey, I have tons of of professional experience and clearly I'm great at problem solving, so why not shift to another industry? But every interview went the same way. Wow, you have a lot of great experience. Why would you leave fashion? Oh, I'm just looking for a new challenge. I. That sounded neutral enough, right? It felt better than, why wouldn't I leave fast fashion? I'm caught in an ever escalating whirlpool of work stress, plastic clothes, and horrible abuse from out of touch executives who can't believe people buy stuff using their phones. I have a constant headache and stomach ache. I can only let myself eat once a day, partially because I want to be thin enough to get ahead, but partially so I don't have diarrhea at work. Yeah, I don't think they would have wanted to hear that. So, oh, I'm just looking for a new challenge. It is. No one believed that I would leave the glamour of fashion behind, and they were quite blunt about that. So I couldn't escape. As I realized more and more that I was stuck in fashion, I started to apply for every fashion job possible. I applied for a job at Lucky Brand Jeans, and they were like, well, you don't have enough denim experience. I applied for a jewelry brand and they were like, oh, it seems like most of your recent experiences in apparel. I'm just going to tell you all that. Yes, there are skill sets that come from managing specific categories, but ultimately, the rules, the strategy, they're all the same. So I interviewed and interviewed and some of these jobs, you went on like four interviews and did a project and blah, blah, blah. And it all came down to three jobs. One was going to be at Forever 21, which I was very anxious about. Two was going to be at Ross Dress for Less, which I was really freaked out about because I was going to have to wear business clothes. And the last one was at a feminist brand in Portland, Oregon, and I had to decide which one I was gonna take. And I gotta tell you, it was a tough decision. I had only heard horrible things about working at Forever 21, but I would get to stay in LA, which I loved. And by then I was also engaged to Mr. Justin Travis White, who also really loved LA. And this is where, I don't know, where we saw our future, but also I was like, I don't know if we could afford to stay here long term. Like, I think maybe we do need to leave here, I don't know. But. So there was Forever 21, then there was Ross, which was also in LA. But everything about the interview process had just been not sitting well with me. I can't explain it, but I was like, I don't, I don't know if I'm gonna like working somewhere so corporate. And that left the feminist brand. It was in the Pacific Northwest, which meant we would go back to Portland, which was a great place for all of us. I felt this brand was doing things, or at least seemed to be doing things that aligned with my values. There had been a few red flags. There were things I was a little nervous about. But I also once again was like, I have to have a job, right? People rely on me, so I have to pick one of these. Of course I had friends who were like, I think you should start your own business. And I was like, with what? I don't think you understand, I do not have the resources to start a business. And to be honest, I don't even know what that business would be, you know, So I have to take one of these jobs. I have to pick the one that will be the least worst. And the feminist brand won out. And I'm not going to name that brand one, because it was the worst job I've ever had. But two, the CEO of that company is incredibly vindictive. She wants to filed a lawsuit against Target that was completely stupid, I think, just for the PR and I just, I don't want to around with it, to be honest. When I arrived back in Portland, however, I thought this was my chance to merge my desire for a better world with my professional experience. Sure, this brand sold clothes just like all my previous employers. But it felt exciting to challenge the status quo of gender and clothing. And while you will never see me in a suit and a button up, I. I wanted to make the best versions of these for people who wanted them. After all, the fashion industry had been ignoring them forever. I loved the idea of challenging what society thinks women are supposed to wear. But that job ultimately broke me. It turned out it was just another version of the toxic girl boss feminism of Nasty Gal just wearing pants instead of a leather miniskirt. All the same bullying, chaos and diet culture we exploited people's desire to do good by selling them lots of fundraiser t shirts that really didn't benefit anyone except the company. We used the same exploitative supply chain that every fast fashion brand used and we wasted fabric and resources at the same rate. I accomplished many things there and the business grew exponentially under my product leadership because you know what? I am good at what I do. But I was miserable. In addition to an incredibly toxic and uncomfortable workplace, we didn't even have real chairs, just stools from ikea. The job did not offer health insurance. Meanwhile, we were allegedly donating all this money to fund women's health care via Planned Parenthood. It made no sense. And while I had Affordable Care act insurance for myself and my kid when Trump was inaugurated in 2017, rates went through the roof while coverage declined. In one terrible year, my child and I had serious illnesses that required hospitalization and treatment. I was drowning in medical bills and considering bankruptcy. My job was not paying me enough to get by. I was trapped. If I left, I could not support my family. I began fantasizing about taking out a big life insurance policy and then jumping off the Burnside Bridge. It seemed like a win win. My family would be cared for financially and I wouldn't have to make another feminist tea ever again. That concludes the first half of this story. You'll have to stay tuned next week for the second half. Writing this has actually been more difficult than I imagined because it has forced me to revisit so many difficult times and it's scary to be so transparent about my life. So thank you again for giving me the chance to feel safe being vulnerable with all of you. The recurring theme of how and why I worked in fast fashion is how out of control I felt. How trapped I was. Even though I was at work making big financial decisions every day, it always seemed as if I didn't get to make decisions when it came to my own life. I think this is a feeling many of you can relate to, no matter where you work or what you do for a living. Capitalism is a treadmill and jumping off it is rarely an option unless you have a financial safety net, and many of us do not. The last thing I just want to add here is in the last episode I told you about how I have been sending out postcards to everyone and I know I said last time at that point they were only open to people who had supported the podcast financially, but I have sent all of those out and I still have a few left. So and they already are stamped. So now's your chance to get one. If you'd like, I'm going to link to a Google form that gives you a chance to share your email address, your name, and your mailing address with me. The email address is just so I can reach out to you if something is wrong with your address. But please go add yourself to that list and I will drop a postcard in the mail to you. That's all for this week. So now it's time for me to say to you. Thank you for listening to another episode of Clotheshorse. Written, researched, edited, hosted, all the things by me, Amanda Lee McCarty. But Dustin does help me put the stamps on the postcards. This podcast exists in the form it exists in and talks about the things it talks about because it it is an independent program. That means keeping this afloat, keeping this going requires support from all of you. So if you'd like to throw some money my way, there are many ways you can do that. There is Patreon, there is Ko Fi, there's the Apple Premium subscription. You can buy merch from the Merch Store. All of this stuff is linked in the Show Notes and at my website. Click closehorsepodcast.com and in the bio of my profile on just about every social media platform. Thanks as always to my other half, Mr. Dustin Travis White for our music and audio support and I will talk to you all next week. Bye. Sam.