Interview With Amanda McCarty
Amanda McCarty
As the founder of an initiative called Clotheshorse, that is a podcast that focuses on the harms of fast-fashion and how to implement slow-fashion, Amanda is an expert in the negative impacts of shopping and how they effect the world.
Molly: So I'm just going to start with one of my first questions. I know you've done a lot of work on raising awareness against fast fashion and trying to raise the popularity of slow fashion as well. So can you just walk me through how you got involved in this line of work and the whole sustainability of fashion?
Amanda: Sure. So my previous career experience is that I worked as a buyer in fast fashion. When you're a buyer, you're really in charge of picking out the products, developing products, negotiating pricing, all kinds of things. You have a really good idea of what happens behind the scenes to make clothing. How we pressure factories for lower prices, how we substitute out fabrics and details to make things more profitable. I did that my entire adult career, basically worked as a buyer. I started my career working for Urban Outfitters, which is a fast fashion brand. And after that, I worked for some other fast fashion brands along the way. And when you're in it, you don't really see what's going on, I think, too much. You're aware of it, but you're working all the time, so you just don't notice. And in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I got laid off from my job because it was a pandemic, right? And I worked for a rental platform called Newly then, and they just didn't think people were going to run a rent close. But the thing that I had done right before I got laid off was cancel every order we had, whether it was stuff that wasn't going to come for six months or it was already being sewn, or it was already on the boat or the aeroplane on the way here, or maybe it was even already at the port here in the United States. We cancelled all of those orders. That meant that brands went out of business. It meant that factories It meant that factory workers didn't get paid. That really affected me negatively. I was very upset about it. It felt really wrong because I knew that my company had the money to pay for those orders. Now people were going to suffer because of it. Having that happen and then being laid off, it really gave me a lot of time to think about how unethical clothing was and how people. Clothing is so important to us. It says so much about who we are and who we aspire to be, and shopping is something we do for fun. It made me wonder, what if I could tell people how clothes are really made, the real story behind their clothing, would it change their behaviour? I launched Clothesource, the podcast that year, and then social media accounts shortly after that. In the beginning, Clothesource was easy because I just talked about what I knew. But over time, I learned even more. There was even more to talk about, and it became almost even more of a serious issue. It was five years ago that I started doing that. Since then, I've definitely... I have learned so much that I didn't even know before, like what happens to our clothes when we donate them, the kinds of pollution that making clothing creates, the carbon impact of clothing. The reality is that a lot of the biggest challenges we face as humans right now are being really created by clothing. Like climate change and the plastic pollution crisis because 65% of clothes that are made right now are synthetic, which means they're plastic, and they shed microfibers everywhere. They get into the water, our food, etc. So clothing is helping to drive the plastic pollution crisis. It definitely keeps people poor by repressing wages, water pollution, and water scarcity. I mean, I could go on and on, but people think clothing is just this fun, frivolous thing, but it's actually really serious.
Molly: Yeah, I get that. For Clothesource, how would you describe the platform and what it does? And then how would you say your mission has shifted over the years as you've learned more, how has the vision you've had for it changed over time?
Amanda: The tagline for Clothesource is the podcast for people who love clothes but hate capitalism, because I love clothes. I get dressed up every day, whether I'm going somewhere or not. I have a ton of clothes. I think getting dressed is one of life's simplest joys, and it's a great way to express yourself creatively. I think personal style is very important. But I wish that clothes didn't have to destroy the planet and we probably don't need to make and buy so many clothes. In the beginning, when I started Clothesource, my main goal was I just wanted people to know why clothes were the way they were and why they were a problem, so maybe they would buy less clothes. Then along the way, I learned about what was happening to all these clothes that people barely wore and donated or threw in the trash. I learned about piles of clothing in the desert in Chile and clothing washing up on the shores in Ghana. I learned about even just the human exploitation that exists within the second-hand supply chain and the global second-hand clothing trade. I learned more about plastic and how it impacts us, how it affects animals and plant life and just on and on and on. But I also, along the way, I started to think about this idea of slow fashion being more than just the opposite of fast fashion, but being a way of life. Where not only are we making very thoughtful decisions about what we do and do not buy, it means taking care of it, mending it, doing laundry properly, making our stuff last, whether it's clothing or our phone, just taking care of things and not overconsuming. Then I was like, Okay, well, that's one part of this lifestyle, actually. But then there's also this part where we're active citizens, and we do good things for the people around us, and we vote, and we get involved with our communities, and we build community within our communities. In that way, the mission of Closed Horse has expanded to just be like, How can you do good things in difficult times?
Molly: Yeah. So it's not... It stays in fashion, but it tries to bring the ideas or the ideals behind slow fashion to other parts of your life.
Amanda: Yeah, exactly. How can we just be good people?
Molly: Yeah. So how would you say you can help get people to do that? Can you just explain what slow fashion is and then how you would say to apply that to other aspects of your life as well?
Amanda: Sure. So I think the most important thing about slow fashion is that it's about slowing down the process of clothes coming in and out of our lives? Because it's wild to say this out loud, but the majority of clothes only get worn a few times, and then they're gone. And we buy them so fast, especially if we want to just go lay on the couch and place a Shein order. It's just so easy to end up with a huge box of clothing. These clothes, they come in our lives really fast, minimal effort on our part. We wear them once or twice, and then they go away and we replace them. What if we slow down that process, meaning slowing down the shopping process and taking more time and thinking about it. What if, for anything we end up buying, we take really good care of and we wash it carefully and we repair it when it needs to be repaired and we wear it a lot? Because it sounds really silly. Every time I post about how the most sustainable thing you can do is just keep wearing your clothing over and over again, people will be like, Isn't that called wearing clothes? I'm like, yeah, no, I agree. But there is a against wearing the same clothes over and over again, especially on social media. That's real. People will make fun of you. We got to disrupt that expectation that we should wear new clothes all the time. We're slowing that down. Then when we're done with clothes or anything else that's come into our lives, because people can overconsume more than just clothing, they buy a tonne of makeup. They're placing orders at Glossier all the time or Sephora Halls or Home Good. People buy too many throw pillows. It's all these things that people just keep buying. If we could buy less stuff, make it last longer, and then when we're done with it, when we can't use it anymore, rather than dumping it in the trash or the donation bin, actually mindfully rehome it with someone else in our community, that's a pretty incredible radical way to exist in 2025.
Molly: Yeah. I completely understand what you mean by the idea, the stigma, of rewearing clothes. I use TikTok, and I'm always seeing videos of people trying not to rewear an outfit for a whole school year. That's crazy. How do you have that many clothes? It's like, if the outfit's cute, of course, you can wear it again. And then you're also being more sustainable. And then, this is a separate topic, but most people who shop fast fashion, I feel like it's well known that fast fashion isn't the best for their environment. It's very well known that Shein does child labour and stuff. So why do you think people still shop at it? How do you try to convince them to not, to act on their knowledge of its harms?
Amanda: It's really hard. I've never purchased anything from Shein, but you'll never see me doing a post about that because I don't think that's helpful. It just makes people be like ‘oh, are you pretentious? You know, like you, what, you think you're better than me?’ So I never talk about it that way. I talk about it as a we problem, like we have a problem shopping from Shein or Temu or whatever. And, you know, when I talk about Shein, for example, a lot of people will show up with a case of what I call the whatabouts, right? Yeah, well, what about Amazon? It's just as bad. Yeah, I totally agree. What about a lot of the clothes at the ball? I totally agree. What about this? What about that? Yeah, I totally agree. These are all problematic, right? I understand why people buy from Shein. One, it's like literally anything you can think of is probably on the Shein site right now. And if you are looking for something really niche, like you're like, I want to be like a milkmaid coquette cottage core or something. And you type that in there, they'd probably, you'd see all these options, right? It's really inexpensive. They have more sizes. They kind of low-key have something for everyone. Yeah. But that doesn't mean we need to buy all of it. And I think if you need to buy new clothing, I honestly like don't care where you buy it if you actually need clothing and you're not over shopping clothing and you're not planning to only wear this thing once for this party or your vacation, but it's actually something you're going to wear a lot because most brands at this point, especially in the more affordable realm, are fast fashion. Yeah. Right. I would prefer that people just not buy a haul. Like if you can say, I bought a haul, you already bought too much. Right. It's more clothes than you need right now. And I think for us, I think we focus so much when we talk about sustainable fashion online. We focus so much on where you buy. And listen, that's important. If you have the money to shop somewhere else, then you should. But if you don't, that's okay too. Just don't buy a ton of stuff. I think rather than talking about where we buy stuff, we need to talk about how much we buy and how we buy it and how that stuff lives in our lives. And I don't look at people who buy things from Shein and judge them because I understand it.
Molly: Yeah, I agree. And I feel like social media doesn't help that at all either. It's especially the whole culture of, oh, everything on Shein is $2. So now, instead of getting a $20 top from Edikted, I can now get 10 $2 tops from Shein. And I feel like that's where it kind of becomes unnecessary because you could have just gotten that one top, but no, now you have to get like 10. And those are all tops you're probably just going to wear one time and throw out because, you know, Shein quality isn't great. And if you're going to be buying so many tops, you're going to be like, I have like nine more. I can get rid of this one. So it's that whole idea.
