PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao. The consequences of fast fashion are well known: worker exploitation, environmental damage and poor quality items. And yet we keep buying it.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Fast fashion is not a specific aesthetic. It's not a specific price, it's not a specific brand. It's a model of doing business ... and it’s kind of all around us.
Anita Rao
Today on Embodied: Industry insider Amanda Lee McCarty joins us to interrogate why fast fashion has such a particular hold on us and what we can do about it.
Amanda Lee McCarty
I think it's important to tell everyone that, like, you can unplug from fast fashion and start to disconnect yourself emotionally from these brands. And I'm here to tell you that you can still be happy and you will feel very secure in your identity.
Anita Rao
The challenges of breaking up with fast fashion. That conversation, just ahead on Embodied.
Fast fashion and millennials like me basically grew up together in seventh grade when I wanted a cute sparkly shirt to wear to the dance, I beelined to wet seal at the mall. In high school, my go-tos were Rue 21 and Express. In college h and m, each company had a similar appeal. Lots of options that were fashionable, cheap, and marketed perfectly to me.
I was primed to buy new things often. Not think too much about their quality and come back soon for more. And I did. Many of us still follow this pattern. Americans today buy an average of 50 new clothing items each year, and a lot of those products are from fast fashion retailers. The perils of fast fashion are well known at this point.
Rapid overproduction at low prices is taking a major toll on the environment and garment workers. Most of the clothing produced quickly ends up in landfills. I know this, we know this, and still many of us continue to buy from these companies. So why does fast fashion have such a particular hold on us? And how do these companies keep us coming back?
This is Embodied our show about sex, relationships, and health. I am Anita Rao. To get answers to these questions, we are bringing in an expert Amanda Lee McCarty. Amanda has been working in fashion for two decades. They also now host a podcast that decodes and demystifies that world. It's called Clotheshorse. Amanda's first job in fashion was in college, working as a sales employee at Urban Outfitters in New York City. Their full immersion into the industry wasn't until a few years later, in the early two thousands, Amanda was a single mom who had just moved to Portland, Oregon in hopes of a fresh start. Portland was great, but they couldn't find a job. They searched for a year and were selling their possessions to pay rent. Then one day they walked into an Urban Outfitters, talked up their New York store experience and got a job.
Amanda Lee McCarty
My first day there was my birthday. They forgot that I was there. Wow. I ended up working at the fitting rooms for 10 hours, folding t-shirts under a very, very cold air conditioning vent until someone came back and said, oh wait, are you still here? You should probably go home and. I was beside myself with excitement. 'cause I was like, wow, I think I just made $70 today. What a, what a birthday gift to myself. I have a job now. And so I worked really hard. I eventually became a department manager. Was it the best job I've ever had? Absolutely not. But I worked with a lot of really incredible, smart, creative people and I began to really understand a lot about why and how people shopped.
Anita Rao
Yeah. I wanna take you to that because you. You were so good at kind of understanding this human behavior that when these company execs came from the corporate office, they tapped you to move across the country and join them on the corporate side of things, which is not common in the fashion world. So what do you think it was about you that stood out? Like what were those instincts that you had?
Amanda Lee McCarty
That's such a good question because as you said, this is not something that happens very often. In fact, I was the first store employee in more than a decade that was recruited to work at the home office. Wow. So I would often ask myself, you know, how did I end up here? Um, I think it's because my entire life I have been really obsessed with people trying to understand why they do what they do. And so spending. So many hours in that store. I got a really good view of what happens when people walk into stores, what they want to buy, what they end up buying, and how they seem to feel in the process. So I guess, yes, of course I have like a good eye for product and that was something that appealed to those executives when they visited our store. But I think that what really excited them is that I understood. The human aspect of it. Mm. The psychological aspect. And how we could make more stuff that people would want to buy.
Anita Rao
Well, tell me about that, because the job that you then got was as a buyer, and this is the person that is actually kind of figuring out what gets into stores. They're looking at trends. Can you gimme an example of kind of what a buyer does and how your instincts about human behavior helped you at that job?
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yeah, sure. So when I took this job, I really did not know what it was. So if anybody is listening to this conversation and is shocked to hear that there's a job called buyer, know that you are not the only person. And in fact, most people in my life have assumed that what I would do Monday through Friday is just go shopping because that's what the job sounds like. And the actual picking of product that is such a small portion of what. I would do as a buyer. Ultimately, the financial success of the business was, was my responsibility. Um, it meant taking a lot of data and making decisions based on data. It meant a lot of calculator and spreadsheet work because there is an entire genre of math for buying. It's called retail math, but beyond that. It means developing this understanding of what's happening socially and specifically with your target customer before they even know it. In my opinion, as a person who's obviously moved up the ranks and hired and managed buyers throughout their careers. I have found that the best buyers are the people who are really looking outside of fashion for cues about where the world is going and what people are thinking about. So really understanding what's happening in pop culture, really understanding what's on people's minds at any given moment and understanding what they feel. Insecure about what is keeping them awake at night. And I know that can sound really silly when we think about, oh, and how would I use that information to pick out what shoes we should sell? Yeah.
Anita Rao
I mean, connect those dots, connect those dots for me.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yeah. For example, okay, this is a, something that I'm sure many people have seen. Coming into their emails and in stores and on tags for clothing, thinking about people's anxiety, about climate change and the environment, right? And knowing that people have anxiety about the environment makes me as a buyer think about how can we. Give the customer a little break from the anxiety by perhaps falsely leading them to believe that what they're about to buy is a more environmentally responsible option. Well, we might say this is vegan leather. Which is really, you know, plastic and it's a more environmentally and ethically responsible choice because it's not animal leather. Right. And we're gonna definitely market into that. We're gonna put hang tags on the product that explain that. If we feel that people like socially right now are like, okay, well one of the ways I'm coping with climate change as I'm actually doing more outdoor activities. Well, from a shoe perspective, then we're gonna start thinking about shoes that are more. Applicable to outdoor use, or at least have that outdoor like hiking boot aesthetic to them. 'cause sometimes that's all people need. They just need the vibe of outdoors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's taking, you know, like climate change. Eco anxiety and saying, how do we create product around that? Which of course sounds ridiculous, but is the reality of what's happening in every buying office around the world right now.
Anita Rao
So I wanna pause you there because I think we, we really wanna deep dive into this question of. Branding and vibes and how companies have gotten really good at understanding our psychology. But to understand the stakes of this, I feel like we need to think about the context it's happening in, which is fast fashion. So we use this term a lot fast fashion for me, it kind of brings to mind. Very specific brands or aesthetics, but it is actually much more than one brand or one company. It is a way of doing business. So tell me more about what fast fashion really means.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yes, so you nailed it right there. Fast fashion is not a specific aesthetic. It's not a specific price, it's not a specific brand. It's a model of doing business, which means, and this makes it really tricky. You can't spot fast fashion by the prices on the website or in the store or what the stores look like or where the stores are, or the aesthetic of the stuff that's being sold, or even by the customer base that shops there. I think we, we tend to think fast fashion is cheap, young, trendy, and sure it can be, but it can also be. A brand that is selling $250 sweaters to customers in their fifties, and it's kind of all around us. And fast fashion as a business model, yes, it was sort of pioneered by the early fast fashion brands like Forever 21, like Zara, like h and m, but. After the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession, it was adopted by everyone, and it's really about, at its core, getting us to buy as much stuff as possible as often as possible. So how you can actually spot fast fashion is by looking about at how many products they have available for sale. If there are hundreds or thousands of items on a brand's website, it is fast fashion. If they are launching new products every week or. I've worked places where we launched new products every day. That is fast fashion, and that's because these are levers that they can pull that get us shopping over and over again. If a brand seems to mark stuff down really fast, like you would be embarrassed to pay full price for something because it just meant you didn't have the self-control to wait a couple more weeks. That's usually an indicator of fast fashion because so many new styles are coming in constantly that that means things have to go on sale really fast to make room for the next delivery. If you are seeing brands being accused of copying products quite often from artists or smaller brands, that almost always an indicator of fast fashion because. When you have to deliver so much newness constantly, it becomes easier to do that by knocking off other brands and makers and artists.
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll explain exactly how the fast fashion business model became industry standard and how companies toy with our emotions to keep that industry going. You're listening to Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I am Anita Rao. Today we're pulling back the curtain on fast fashion with Amanda Lee McCarty. Amanda worked as a buyer for brands like Urban Outfitters, nasty Gal, and ModCloth for 15 years before stepping back from the industry. They're now a self-employed consultant and host the podcast Clotheshorse.
It explores the inner workings of the fashion industry and asks listeners to interrogate their relationship with consumerism. One topic Amanda explored recently is how brands manipulate our emotions to keep us shopping fast fashion and its marketing tactics didn't appear overnight. The business model emerged in the 1990s and grew exponentially in the two thousands, and Amanda watched all of this happen up close.
Amanda Lee McCarty
I'm lucky enough that I began my career before fast fashion became the business model for. Making and selling clothing. And so I actually got to work through the transition and I didn't see it immediately, but could see it in hindsight. And basically, you know, 2008, there's the financial crisis. And immediately after that. Every brand out there, regardless of the price of what they sold or who their target customer was, had to sell everything on sale and like deep discounts to just recover the money they had invested in inventory for. 2008 and early 2009, and so everything was on sale everywhere and really, really on sale. No matter whether it was a store you might see at the mall or a more high-end store like Barney's or Sack's, all these businesses are keeping the cash flowing by selling stuff on sale. Their idea is this will end as the economy recovers. I mean, we could talk for three hours about how the economy never really recovered to what it was before, but. In addition to that, customers became sort of addicted to sales. Mm. It happened really, really fast. And so as we get into 2009, late 2009, brands are kind of like, okay, well we can't continue selling everything on sale, can we? But if we don't, our businesses are struggling, you know? And so while most brands are struggling to make the math, math in 2009. Forever 21 and h and m, their businesses are blowing up. This is a business model that is working. The problem that makes it difficult for all these other brands to adopt is that h and m and Forever 21 are selling at prices that are full price as on the price tag. At 50 to 25% of the prices that other retailers are selling. So just really, really low prices. And I would sit in meetings where we talked about this, you know. We knew that we could not lower our prices to be in line with Forever 21, even though Forever 21 was gobbling up our consumer base. We knew that if we lowered our prices to compete with them, it would mean of course, one rapidly changing up our product assortment. But. In addition to that, it would change these brands forever to suddenly be in line with Forever 21 from a price perspective. And so for any of these brands who were not in 2009, considering themselves fast fashion to lower their prices to be in line with Forever 21, it would sort of dismantle their brand image to do that. And the workaround was this. Keep the same prices on the price tags that we'd always had, but run a lot more sales and plan that most of what we sold would be sold on sale. So we still decreased the quality of what we were selling in order to make selling most of our stuff, most of the time on sale to make that profitable. So we had to cut. The quality of fabrics, the trims, the details, all those things to make the math, math. But we still got to preserve this image of what our brand was, which was better than Forever 21, which was higher end than Forever 21, and it worked, right? And so we see this ripple effect in the. Early 2000 tens of pretty much every brand adopting this model.
Anita Rao
Yeah. Based on what you're saying, I feel like literally everything is flashing in front of my eyes. Like every single thing I've ever, ever bought feels like it was probably fast fashion. Like what isn't fast fashion at this point?
Amanda Lee McCarty
I mean, it's hard, right? I think there are some really amazing small brands out there who are working really hard to be everything that fast fashion is not right to pay all the garment workers involved a, a living wage to pay their own staff a living wage and give them good benefits and make high quality product that lasts a long time. What you'll see is that their prices are significantly higher than what you might encounter at the mall. Um, and they don't put things on sale all the time. And I think that that can sometimes be confusing for consumers who don't know what they're really buying when they're buying fast fashion, or maybe even that they're buying fast fashion. They just look at these other brands that are trying to do everything right and are like, Ugh, too expensive. What's their problem? I could get a pair of jeans for. 30 bucks right now. Why are they charging $250? Well, when you really open the curtain there and look at how the $30 jeans are being made versus the $250 jeans, it's a very different story and the value is there, but I don't know. I think that our relationship, our perception of value and price is so broken right now. We actually all have a lot of hard work to do inside our brains to fix that.
Anita Rao
Yeah. I wanna go back for a second to you being kind of inside these rooms where these conversations are happening, where there is an acknowledgement that everything is becoming fast fashion unified, and. There's more public conversation about the environmental consequences of this, the workers' rights facets of this. Were those conversations also happening inside the boardrooms? Like were you talking with your peers about the effects of this business model?
Amanda Lee McCarty
Um, I, I think the, the answer there is no uhhuh, I mean. Outside of work. Absolutely. I remember a relatively new hire, an assistant buyer, saying to me pretty early on in my career. Do you ever feel like we just work really hard all day, every day to make more stuff that's gonna end up in a landfill? I said Yes, and you can never talk about that at work again. Like you can't. And I say that as the person who's always the person who brings that up, um, and has been throughout my career and it has not worked in my favor. And unfortunately, when you are working in fashion, there is this belief that you are very lucky to be there that. A thousand other girls want your job. So you are not gonna bring up difficult topics if you want to succeed or at least continue to have a job. Wow. Okay. So you dark. Yeah, it is. It is dark.
Anita Rao
It's, it's very much giving like Devil Wears Prada, like this. Yeah, like Insider, insider club. So there's this tension that you have kind of illuminated that. Was happening inside the industry and, and I wanna go to kind of the consumer side of that and have you help us understand why is it as consumers like it's easy to forget and ignore. Like what is it about our emotions that fast fashion brands have gotten so good at tapping into that keeps us coming back even when we know some of these hard realities.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yeah, I mean, something I talk about a lot with my friends who have, you know, also worked in fashion and who worked through the hustle culture and girl boss eras of this century is how it's no coincidence to me that girl boss and hustle culture thrived. As fast fashion was blowing up. Mm-hmm. And I feel like there was a symbiotic relationship there, right? Like the, you're working all the time, you're so stressed out. A lot of sources of joy in your life. Evaporate because you're working all the time so you don't get to rest. You don't get to read books or hang out with your friends or have hobbies or any of these things. Sometimes you can take a vacation when corporate says you can, and of course you need to document it on social media so everyone can see it and know you have a happy, well curated life. Right. But it's a stressful life and how you make yourself feel better. How we've been taught to make ourselves feel better is by buying things, and this is something that is so deeply programmed into our brains. As someone who lived, who lived a life before fast fashion, I can think back to my childhood and how. I was obsessed with collecting stickers and Barbie clothes and garbage pail kids and whatever else it was that procuring buying with my allowance meant that like happiness was here, you know? Yeah, right. So we equate stuff with happiness and fast fashion. Brands are delighted to show you. More ways that buying more stuff would make you feel happy. So maybe we send out an email about retail therapy, right? You're having a tough week. Buy something that will make you feel better. Maybe we start talking a lot more about self-care. When self-care was sort of. Stolen and, uh, distorted by big retail. It was used as like another product category that we could expand and sell, whether that was face masks or cosmetics or bath soaks, lotions. We started to sell travel. Stuff. Travel, accessories and suitcases and you know, well curated pages of clothes to take on vacation to have for your perfectly curated Instagram travels. Yeah. Which would show that you weren't as miserable as you maybe felt inside. These are all tropes that we've come to live in, but they're really all. Marketing.
Anita Rao
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting hearing you say that because, so you're pointing out kind of the, one of the polls on our emotions being retail therapy. This idea that you can kind of buy your way to happiness, buy your way to something better. But I wanna go back to the vibes thing for a second hearing. You talk about Zara and hustle culture. It completely hits home. Like I feel like I went into the workforce in like 2012. I was living in New York City and Zara was like my, when I got a full-time job, I was really excited to buy clothes there. 'cause I thought I kind of played the part, like I looked professional and chic and like mm-hmm. Yes. It felt expensive compared to forever 21. But it seemed higher quality and it, it wasn't like the highest price point and they really created this vibe mm-hmm. That I felt like would make me look the part as like a young professional in New York City. So I wanna hear more about. These vibes and like how companies build them in a way that we wanna associate ourselves with them, that we feel like they become important markers of our identity.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yeah, I mean that's what's really, especially right now, more than ever getting us to shop specifically from brands that we probably check every single week to see what they have. Right. Because there are infinite number of places to shop online at this point, and. You know, they're loosely selling a lot of the same stuff, and I will tell you that most of that stuff is made in the same factories, regardless of the label sewn into it. So, you know, the industry knows this too. Hey, we're all kind of making the same stuff. We're all kind of making it in the same place, and it's roughly the same price. How do we. Sell to a customer who will continue to come back over and over again to us, rather than go somewhere else where they could get essentially the same thing. And that's where branding comes into play and specifically emotional branding, which is how just about everything is sold to us in this century. And emotional branding is really about playing into. Who we want to be. Mm. Remember I told you a good buyer is like understanding what people want before they even know that they want it. And that's what emotional branding plays into, like who you want to be. So you're going to Zara because you want to be chic, but professional. And that's an identity, right? Yeah. And Zara is selling you that identity now. We say that out loud and it's, it's kind of sad, right? Like, oh, we're buying, we're buying who we are. But that's the reality. I mean, think. You know, think of a place like anthropology, right? Anthropology is selling this concept that if you shop there, you're kind of like bohemian and creative, and everything in your house is like well curated and put together, and you probably are the best host. When people come over to your house, you know, you make the best pie, right? It's selling you. That lifestyle, that identity. Right. And people are extremely loyal to anthropology. Trust me, whenever I try to talk about anthropology being fast fashion on the internet, people get very angry at me. Oh, but they're fast fashion, right? Yeah. Another example is, and it's completely different, is TJ Maxx.
Anita Rao
Okay. I really need you to break this one down because I had never thought of TJ Maxx as fast fashion until reading and listening to your work. And my husband is a diehard Ross dress for last chopper. He was very upset to know that he's not. Getting a really good deal. So tell me more about these, these discount stores, how they operate and Yeah. How they develop these like immense loyalties.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Yeah. And, and you know, you might say like, how could TJ Maxx be similar to Zara? Yeah. Or anthropology. And it's because they're selling another identity. It's a different identity. And that identity is that you are smarter than everybody else because you know how to get a good bargain. And trust me that. Is an identity.
Anita Rao
Yeah.
Amanda Lee McCarty
That many people find extremely appealing. And so the conceit of all of these stores is that when you go in there, you're getting designer name brand products for significantly less than you would pay for it at a department store or elsewhere because you are so smart, you know, to go there. Right. Well. The reality is that the vast majority of product in these, they're called off-price stores. So it's like TJ Maxx, it's Ross, it's Marshall's, it's Nordstrom Rack, and many, many other stores of that ilk. They. At one point many decades ago when there weren't so many of these stores, they really did sell a lot of excess inventory from department stores, from brands that they were able to buy at a significant discount and pass the savings onto their customers. In this century, that is not the case anymore because there are so many off-price stores that there is not enough, believe it or not, excess inventory from department stores and other designer brands to fill these stores. And when you think about it, there's way more TJ Maxxs and Nordstrom Racks and whatnot than there are actual department stores at this point. So what these companies have been doing is they have product especially produced for them. At a very low cost that they can sell at a low price point and give you the illusion of getting a good deal. And so the vast majority of what you see in these stores at this point is fast fashion because it was made as cheaply and fast as possible to get it into these stores. Most brands, like if you take someone like Nike or Adidas brands that you often see in these stores, they have. Specific teams within their corporate infrastructure who only focus on coordinating and producing product for these stores.
Anita Rao
Okay. So you've, you've broken the illusion of the, of the, of the off price retailer, TJ Max.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Sorry.
Anita Rao
No, that's okay. That's okay. I mean, it, it makes me also wonder about. Like these initiatives that these fast fashion companies create that kind of help extend their brand persona. I saw a TikTok the other day of a woman who was taking like multiple garbage bags of her h and m clothes back to h and m to put in their recycling bins and kind of promoting this idea of like, look like you can, you know, you can keep buying a bunch of stuff, but then you can also recycle your old stuff and h and m helps you recycle it like. They, these companies have effectively responded to our desire to be more sustainable or appear more sustainable. Like, is there any good happening with these recycle upcycle things that fast fashion companies are doing?
Amanda Lee McCarty
Um, yeah, not really. I feel like I'm ruining a lot of things for everyone listening today. You know, going back to the model of fast fashion, right? It is to get you to buy as much stuff as possible, as often as possible. What gets a lot. Harder to do that if you are thinking like, I don't know, like what happens to my clothes after I wear them? You know? Is this an environmental issue? And that's where Greenwashing comes into play, which is a marketing technique, a branding technique that. Paints a product or a brand or some brand initiative as a sustainable, environmentally friendly thing to do, and it exists not because it's about creating social change or changing these systems in which clothes are manufactured and disposed of. It exists to make you, the customer feel like I don't need to change what I'm doing and I can feel okay. Clothing recycling is, is quite a myth at this point because especially in the fast fashion realm, most of those clothes are not recyclable, meaning they cannot be turned into new fabric to make new garments.
Anita Rao
Mm.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Some of them are gonna get shredded up and turned into rags or, you know, industrial insulation, but we kind of only need so many rags and so much industrial insulation. And so a lot of them are actually being shipped off to the global south, kind of flooding the global south with low quality, fast fashion, and it's creating environmental and economic ramifications for everyone. Who lives in those areas, but for us, the customers in the global North who bought all these clothes, we don't see that. We just see like, yay, my closet's empty now. Now I can buy new things and I don't feel bad.
Anita Rao
If at this point in the conversation you're starting to feel a little overwhelmed or maybe even guilty, stick with us because just ahead we will talk about how we can use all of this information to become more mindful consumers. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking with Amanda Lee McCarty about why it is so hard to break up with fast fashion. Amanda has two decades of experience in the fashion industry, including with companies like Urban Outfitters and Nasty Gal now they're a self-employed consultant and host of the podcast Clotheshorse. It examines how the fashion world works and promotes informed consumption. We've been talking about how brands build identities to keep customers hooked, and how the fast fashion model has taken over so many corners of the fashion industry laying bare. The inner workings of fast fashion paints a bleak picture, and it's easy to feel like there is no escape from products that exploit workers and then load up the landfills. When I confessed those feelings to Amanda, they knew exactly what I was talking about.
Okay, so this is the point of the conversation where I feel like when I'm talking to friends about this, people kind of start getting quiet and then, yeah, welcome to my life. And then, yeah. Well, and then, then, then one person says like, well, is there even any ethical consumption under capitalism? Like, what am I even supposed to do? So how do you respond? To that moment, to this feeling of like, okay, there's such a big system working against us. Fast fashion is everywhere. It is hard to escape it. Like what can we even do about it?
Amanda Lee McCarty
Okay, so this is obviously a conversation I have all the time. That's probably why I don't get invited to parties anymore. Um, still working on that one. But, you know, a lot of times I'll have conversations with people like we just did, and it's like, well. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism. So I guess it just is what it is. And the thing about statements like that, or I'm just one person, so my impact is never gonna be as big as h and m as a corporation, right? Yeah. So I should just go buy some more clothes. It's, it's MBD. They were gonna make 'em anyway. The reality is those are conversation enders. They're not truths, they're just conversation enders, and they are successful at ending the conversation because if you're not someone like me who's had to have these conversations so many times and spend a ridiculous number of hours thinking about what the comeback should be, yeah, it's the end of the conversation. And what's great about that is then you don't have to think about it anymore and you can move on and you don't have to think about. What change would need to happen in your own life?
Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.
Amanda Lee McCarty
And that's the scary part, right? Because you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, we have been told our whole lives that buying stuff and buying new stuff is a key to happiness. And it's an important part of showing the world who we are. So stuff and our identities and our happiness are all intrinsically linked. And when you think about buying less stuff or not buying stuff at all, suddenly you're like. Who am I and am I sad and lonely and depressed all the time? Like I'm not signing up for that. So I'm just gonna tell you that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And then I'm gonna switch the conversation topics. Yeah, right, right. But actually like we are a really important part. Of changing this. Every single one of us, even all you Maxine Eastes out there, we can build the world that we want, but we all have to participate in it. And this is where I think it's important to tell everyone that like you can unplug from fast fashion and recognize, I don't know, the, the sort of shadiness of emotional branding and start to disconnect yourself emotionally from these brands. And I'm here to tell you that you can still be happy. You will still have friends, and you will feel very secure in your identity. You're not like, I'm not smart anymore because I don't shop at at TJ Maxx. That's not what's gonna happen.
Anita Rao
But will I still look cool? Like how am I gonna look cool?
Amanda Lee McCarty
Especially, you're gonna look cool. You're gonna look cool because here's the thing, we're not. Saying, and I, I think it's interesting to me as a person who's worked in fashion my whole adult life, and I have seen how much fashion is entangled with diet culture, another terrible thing. A lot of conversations about walking away from fast fashion. Start to feel like diet culture.
Anita Rao
Yeah.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Which I don't like. Right? So it's like you need to quit, you need to cut back. You need to not buy anything for three months or six months or a year. Um, you need to prove that you are worthy in some way. Much like dieting is supposed to prove that we're worthy of something. And what happens is. It is impossible. Like, okay, maybe impossible is an overstatement. You could maybe do this where you were like, I buy new stuff from Zara every week, but this week I'm stopping and I'm not buying anything for a year. That's going cold Turkey. And that's gonna be really, really hard. And you're probably gonna buy something at some point, be filled with guilt and despair over it, and then you're gonna get right back into your old habits. And so I don't believe in the like stop shopping diet culture kind of approach to this. What I say is like, let's slow down the process of it all. Let's think a lot harder about what we're gonna buy. And why we're gonna buy it. Mm. Like are you buying that thing because you actually really like it and are gonna wear or use it a lot? Or are you buying it because you like what that brand represents in your mind? Are you buying it because you're having a rough day? These are things I've done. I used to be obsessed with the brand free people, and I think. You know, working with that brand, knowing more about how it worked behind the scenes, and furthermore, knowing what free people really was, I didn't want that to be a part of. Who I thought I was,
Anita Rao
You know, well, how do we, how do we figure that out? I guess? Like how do we become more informed consumers? Because I think it can be hard to pick apart, like, okay, who is just rebranding themselves as sustainable and who is just rebranding themselves as 100% organic? Like, how do I even know how to, so I guess first, okay, first it's like buy less stuff. And slow the process down. Yeah. But when there is like, you're like, okay, I do like all of my sweaters have holes. I need a new sweater. Like how do I go about the process of figuring out how to get that, especially if I have a, a. You know, I don't have unlimited income. Like walk me through that decision tree.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Sure. I mean, so first off, it's gonna be different and yeah, it's gonna be a little bit more work, but not some egregious level of work where you are gonna be exhausted and have to sacrifice other aspects of your life to get it done. But it is not gonna be as simple as going onto Zara, spotting a sweater and clicking add to cart and checking out, right? It's gonna be a little bit more of a thought process. So. The first thing I tell people is like, honestly, I don't really care where you buy your clothes. As long as you buy things that you plan on wearing for a long time and you're gonna take care of and like, to me that's a lot more important at this point because yes, there are ethical and environmental issues associated with fast fashion, but the ethical environmental issues are actually exacerbated by us buying way too much stuff. And so if we can cut back and buy less stuff, that's automatically a massive shift right there. And I say that because of course, if you have the resources to buy natural fibers where people were paid a living wage to make that garment, and it's a garment that's gonna last you a lifetime. Please do that. Cast your vote with your dollar by supporting those brands that do things in the best possible way. But if you don't have those resources, which I also really understand, then the next best thing you can do is buy things that you know you're gonna wear and take care of. And that alone is. Incredibly impactful Part of getting there, of buying things that you really know you're gonna like and wear is reading the care labels, reading the content labels. So every clothing company is required by law to inside the garment. Have labels that tell you how to take care of it and what the fiber content is. Hmm. And I think reading that stuff alone can be a game changer in terms of accidentally buying things that disappoint you because maybe you don't like to wear polyester 'cause it makes you sweaty and stinky. Well, when you see that on the label or on the product page, on the website. Don't buy it. That's a clear, don't buy. If you don't like acrylic because it's itchy, skip it. You know? So don't buy things without knowing. Pretty closely what you're gonna get. I think that's a really important part of it. I also say like, when it comes to clothing, look at it and ask yourself like, what are five outfits I can make out of this? Mm. Yeah. Right. Because sometimes you're like, oh, I can't, or, oh, and I've, I've done this myself. Oh, well, currently I couldn't make five outfits out of it, but if I bought this other stuff too, then I have five outfits. No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. And so I think like trying to just make the best decisions you can, the most educated decisions is a really important part of this Now. I think a lot of people get hung up in trying to achieve perfection. Yeah. What is the most sustainable, most ethical thing I could buy? And I'll tell you, there are tons of resources on the internet. One great one is good on you. That actually breaks down these brands and the ethical and environmental implications of their practices. That's a great resource. Just go too good on you. Type in the brand you're looking at and you'll get a pretty good rundown of what's going on there. That can be super helpful, but I often find people are like, well, this brand pays a living wage to its garment workers, but they ship everything here in an airplane, which has a higher carbon footprint. So now I don't know what to do. I guess I'll just buy something from Sheen anyway. Yeah, and that's why we, we can't let ourselves get. Too caught up in searching for perfection. We want progress here and everything is a move forward. So don't be so hard on yourself, I guess is what I'm saying, and know that these systems are set up to make it really difficult for us to make the so-called the best decision.
Anita Rao
So we have been talking a lot about this idea of emotions and how our emotions get tied up in the clothing decisions that we make, how brands prey on our emotions. I'm curious about how your own emotional relationship to fashion has shifted as you have become. Further and further away from your time in the industry, like how would you describe that relationship now?
Amanda Lee McCarty
You know, I think, I'm gonna tell you, I am kind of the last person that I think anyone ever expected to work in fashion, myself included. I grew up low income. My mother was a teenager when I was born. I grew up in a small town of 300 people in Pennsylvania. And fashion was like not a thing. And. That did not mean that I have not always loved clothes because I have, and I have always loved getting dressed every day and taking things from my closet and telling a story about how I feel that day, what's happening in my brain with what I'm wearing that day. So I think clothing can be this incredible creative expression and I love it. Like I love clothes and I'm not ashamed to say that I never really cared about like. Designer brands or luxury. For me, living in a town of 300 people, it was like so abstract to me being a young single parent who like, I couldn't even afford to take the bus. It was even more abstract somehow and. Coming into this buying job and having to like know about that stuff. They asked me questions in the interview, I'm gonna tell you. They asked me, who's your favorite designer? And the only designer I could think of was Mark Jacobs. So I just said that, you know, so I'm coming into this with this intense understanding and obsession with understanding people, right? And understanding how the culture around us. Uh, shapes what we want, right? I've got that dialed in. I have no interest in like designers and labels. Like I can look at runway shows and be like, wow, that is art right there. Like, I get that. I, I think garment design is, is an incredible art form in itself that we take for granted, but. I am less obsessed with fashion and more obsessed with style. Mm, and how we get to express who we are every day. Who we are that day. By what we're wearing. And so I love clothes for that. And working in the fashion industry, I had this disconnect from, you know, pre fashion industry, Amanda, who just wore a different outfit every day that was made of all these different things that I already owned. And I thrifted everything that I owned. And my style was super unique. I mean. For that job interview, I wore a Boy Scout shirt that was thrifted and a brown jumper that was also like, I think a school uniform, but getting into that professional role and that path. I felt this pressure to suddenly have like cult brands or expensive brands or brands that you could only buy in Europe or like Japan or you know, to always be like flaunting the label a little bit. And it made me lose sight of why I love clothes, which is I love the creative aspect of clothes and leaving the industry. And you know, I still work in the industry to a certain extent because I work with a lot of small, sustainable brands around North America. But I don't go into an office every day where I'm gonna be judged by what I wear. That doesn't mean I wear pajamas every day. I get dressed up every single day to go sit at my desk, in my office, in my house, and it's always getting into my closet and building that outfit for that day that shows who I am that day. And so I think clothing is magical.
Anita Rao
So I feel like, okay, at the end of this conversation, I'm hearing you say buy less stuff. Slow down the buying process. Think about what you need and why you need it. I guess the last reminder I would love to hear from you is like, how do we build this awareness of how are. Emotions might be manipulated and and how that plays a part in all of this.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Sure. So I just want everybody to remember to recognize that all the vibes that were being sold, whether it is that you are a Maxa or you are the best hostess ever because you bought your napkins at anthropology, that those are all just vibes. They're just marketing. They're not real. And your identity. Is not where you shop. I think it's also important to remember, and this one's gonna sound silly when I say it out loud, but people will go scorched earth on the internet defending their favorite brand. I want you to remember that brands are not people. They are not your friends. They are not loyal to you, and should somebody say something disparaging about you on the internet, I'm gonna tell you right now, TJ Maxx isn't showing up to defend you, okay? So it's not a two-way street. And these brands have built this relationship with you, this very one-sided relationship with you, with one sole purpose. It's not gonna be because they're gonna remember your birthday or come to your wedding. It's because they want you to buy things from them. It is a very transactional, one-sided relationship, and the relationship is actually in your head. So when you start to recognize that the brands you shop from aren't really indicative of who you are and they aren't, what make you interesting or lovable. I think it's a lot easier to say. I can resist the latest email or collection or sale that they're having.
Anita Rao
Amanda Lee McCarty, thank you so much for the conversation.
Amanda Lee McCarty
Thank you. Well, at a delight,
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Amanda and their podcast Clotheshorse at our website, embodiedwunc.org. Follow us on Instagram for bonus content behind every episode. Our handle is @EmbodiedWUNC. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Wilson Sayre provided additional editorial guidance. Nina Scott is our intern, and Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.