Episode 224: Slow Fashion & Inclusivity with Itohan and Marlee

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that has cried so many times in the past week.  It feels like I’ve lived ten lives since the last episode, but apparently it was just a week ago?

I’m your host, Amanda and this is episode 224.  Today we’re going to be picking back up with my series about slow fashion and inclusivity.  Basically we’re just gearing up for next week’s big panel discussion episode, filled with super rad people. And in this episode you’re going to meet two more great humans who took part in that panel discussion: Itohan and Marlee.  Itohan is the owner of  HNI Collective, a fashion agency  focused on sustainability & size inclusivity based in sunny Philadelphia, PA. Marlee is a personal style coach and the host of Style Me Slowly, where she uses her platform to share sustainable, size inclusive brands.  And let me tell you, she has an amazing podcast voice, as you will discover this week! Both Itohan and Marlee are out there doing the very important work of getting others involved in slow fashion and supporting size inclusive slow fashion brands.   Honestly, editing my conversations with them and getting to hear all of the smart things they both said was a balm on my scorched brain this week. It really made me feel so happy and excited. I hope it will have the same impact on you!

Before we jump into everything I have planned this week, I wanted to share the details of an upcoming fundraiser workshop I am hosting to benefit survivors of the LA wildfires.  

I asked everyone on instagram to vote on two different options and in basically a landslide vote, y’all decided you wanted the fundraiser workshop topic to be “How to talk to others about slow fashion.”

So let’s do this!

What will we discuss in this virtual workshop?

★ Why it’s important to talk about fast fashion/slow fashion with the people in your life.


★ How to start these conversations without being a total party pooper.

★ How to meet people where they are (and avoid using shaming or blaming language).


★ How to deal with common responses like “talking about fast fashion is classist” or “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.”


★ Sharing our own stories/successes/challenges in having these conversations.

And of course, we’ll also be spending some quality time together!

This workshop is happening on Wednesday, February 5 at 7pm and I think it will last about 90 minutes.

Tickets cost $10. In addition to access to the virtual workshop, you also get a discount code for 50% off the Clotheshorse merch shop (iron on transfers + stickers).


♥ All ticket sales will be donated to GoFundMe’s for LA fire survivors.


♥ Workshop will be conducted via Zoom.


♥ Buy your tickets via Venmo or Paypal

If you want to buy tickets for friends, just go ahead and you can forward the event info to them after I email it to you.

All of the money will be donated to GoFundMe’s with less than 20% of their goal. I made this decision after listening to an NPR story about how these fundraisers have been pivotal for getting money in the hands of fire survivors super fast, so they can pay for housing, personal items, food, etc.

My hope is to sell 100 tickets…and yeah, we’re still pretty far away from that goal at this point.  But 100 tickets would mean donating $1000 and that feels amazing.  If this event is successful (meaning enough people show up and we raise some money), I want to do this every other month with a different topic. I’ve been thinking about how I can work more mutual aid into what I do without overextending myself mentally and financially. This feels like a good approach.

Thank you to all of you who have been involved so far. I’m so grateful for this amazing, compassionate community that always wants to help others!

I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all of you who reached out over the last week to tell me how much you enjoyed the “fighting doomerism” episode.  That means a lot to me because I spent months thinking about how to tell that story…and I think there is still so much more to say.  I get nervous about talking about things that aren’t clothes here on this podcast called Clotheshorse, but the reality is that I’ve been doing this for almost five years and it’s always evolving.  As a friend said in a DM today, “I think your podcast is about clothes, but mostly about politics and how to be a better human!!” And that’s so true.  Like, that’s my goal. And this year I have a lot of stories planned that sometimes involve clothes literally (like what it’s like to run a thrift store) and sometimes only tangentially (how creativity can fuel large scale change). This year we’re also going to talk about how we can make a difference locally and build communities around us.  And so much more!  

I’ll be the first to admit that the last week has been all caps BRUTAL here in the United States, as the Trump administration unleashed a torrent of horrible executive orders ranging from mass deportation orders to removing the cap on prescription drug prices to erasing trans and non-binary people and even removing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement.  And that’s just the beginning of a long list.  Dustin and I have been using the term “shock and awe” to describe it, something we learned from watching the first Gulf War live on television as kids.  I want to read the definition from Wikipedia to you because it really nails it: “Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.” 

That last part “destroy their will to fight.” I’m not going to lie…I feel that so hard right now.  Last week, some time between a guy on Threads telling me that he was reporting me to CPS as a groomer and getting my kids taken away from me because I’m non-binary and watching people fight with one another about whose fault all of this is, I said to Dustin, “I’m too tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.  I don’t want to do Clotheshorse because does everybody really need to hear from another mediocre white person?” And he reminded me that I feel this way every few months and it just means that I need some sleep, to get off my phone, and maybe drink more water. 

But it’s easy to see how someone would feel like giving up right now because it all feels overwhelming. Like where do we begin?

All week my feelings have teetered somewhere between rage and fear. Someone should invent a word that truly captures that combination of feelings because I think it’s going to be very popular in 2025. Frage? Eh that sounds like a helpful storage bin from Ikea.

When you’re bombarded by bad news and overwhelmed with fear, rage, and grief, it can be really difficult to see how you fit into making the world better. Or to even feel powerless to do anything at all. I think it’s really easy to slip into doomerism when you feel like you just don’t know how to help. And as I discussed last week, sure doomerism feels “easier” because you just don’t have to care anymore. It feels almost freeing, right? Because being a good person is so hard in 2025 when the systems around us don’t set us up easily for sticking to our values.  And certainly doomerism, this sense of giving up, is really going around in a major way right now. Ask me how many times I’ve seen someone say (mostly on Reddit) “I’m disconnecting myself from all of this stuff for the next four years.  Let the people who voted for this shit, who didn’t care enough to show up to vote…let them deal with the repercussions of their decisions.”

Okay doomer.

I can’t do that. And neither can you. Because if you didn’t care about a better world, if you didn’t care about this planet and its people, you wouldn’t be here listening to this.  And we know that doomerism is not as easy and free as it appears at first glance. It’s actually lonely. It actually makes you less happy. It just doesn’t feel good.

The thing is, we all have a choice here when it comes to any of the issues humans are facing right now: we can either be a part of the problem or we can be a part of the solution. And the good news is that you already ARE part of the solution by being here, being a part of this community. And many of the things you are doing already are actually radical and revolutionary!

We’re out here making stuff. Repairing stuff. Shopping secondhand. Buying less. Reusing and repurposing. Upcycling. Sewing. Creating. Talking. Building community. Caring about the people around us, even the ones we don’t know at all.

In the era of “fast everything,” many of us are completely disconnected from how something is made/the labor and skill required to create it. By making it ourselves, we experience the work, frustration, and joy of creation. We understand why the prices of “fast everything” are an illusion, built on low quality and human exploitation. 

 By mending/repairing the things we love or choosing secondhand, we are turning our backs on the social norm that new is always better. We are giving a strong middle finger to a system that only makes low quality stuff for us, while exploiting people in the name of profits.

By building long term relationships with the stuff we own and wear, using/wearing it over and over again for years…repairing it when needed, we are breaking free of the convention that we should always be seen in something new and exciting. That success=a steady flow of new stuff in our lives.

THIS IS SOME RADICAL, REVOLUTIONARY THINKING!!

Yes, one person can’t make a difference alone, but when we’re all doing the same thing together (aka collective action), real change DOES happen. And I know the past week feels like a big old kick in the gut on top of so many other problems facing humanity right now.  Take a minute to rest. Regroup. Think.  Do something creative.  Do something that makes you laugh or makes your heart grow ten sizes.  Then know that we are going to get through this together. This community is full of super smart, passionate, creative, special people.  And when we work together, we really can get things done.

And speaking of super rad people, let’s jump into my conversation with Itohan.  I’m going to warn you that Itohan’s computer was misbehaving during our conversation, throwing out some random notification sounds.  I cut a bunch of them out, but she said so many super smart things that I had to keep in, despite those sounds.  So don’t get freaked out and think that there is a secret laptop hiding somewhere in the room with you. We just keep things very authentic here at Clotheshorse.

Thanks to Itohan for spending some time with me. Please give Itohan a follow on Instagram because she really is out there spreading the gospel of slow fashion.  She and Ruby of Spokes and Stitches just had a clothing swap in Philadelphia two weeks ago and it sounds like it was very good! I hope that there is another one in the future so I can join them!

Okay, next we’re going to talk to Marlee.  Marlee is also based in Philly, and I lowkey feel jealous of how many awesome people live there.   Let’s jump into my conversation with her!

Thank you to Marlee for spending some time with me. Please do yourself a favor and check out her podcast, Style Me Slowly. And if you, yes YOU, are a small business owner making size inclusive slow fashion, reach out to her because you just might be a great fit for an episode of Style Me Slowly.

Itohan and Marlee will be back next week for the big roundtable discussion, along with Maggie, Nico, and Donnelle.  And it’s going to be great!

I wanted to round this whole thing out by talking about how we can support the small businesses in our community, especially those that are size inclusive.  

I’m recording this just a few days after Target (among many other companies) rolled back their DEI initiatives.  And I gotta tell you, I’m not super surprised about Target.  

I suspect that many of us have found ourselves shopping there less and less over the years, because we’re consciously trying to buy less stuff that we don’t need. And TBH, Target has not done a good job of keeping its stores stocked for years now.

Still, for years I considered Target a “better” alternative to Walmart and Amazon.  I did appreciate its work consciously bringing BIPOC owned brands into its stores. While lots of other brands made promises to something like this in 2020, they never really delivered. Target did.  And it gave so many people opportunities to build their own businesses and bring that money back to their communities.

But still, there were a few things made me think “Okay, Target, you’re not the worst, but I’m watching you.”

⁕ A line of $5 “sustainable” tees that they launched in 2022-ish. Just to be clear, it’s not sustainable if the people making it aren’t getting paid a living wage…and there’s no way a $5 tee is doing that.

⁕ In 2023, they pulled their Pride collection from stores after a backlash from bigots. This might seem minor to you, but watching the conversations in the Target employee subreddit illustrated how hurtful this was for the company’s queer employees.  And last year, the Pride collection was only offered in select stores. Now you can say “@#$% rainbow capitalism,” but seeing Pride merch in a massive retail chain 10-15 years ago was a major win for everyone fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. It does seem sad that the company walked away, even if I don’t believe you need to buy a new rainbow outfit every year.

⁕ Reading the Target subreddit regularly and seeing how terrible it is for its store employees: understaffed, overworked, and underpaid. 

Over time, I found myself staying away from Target. And last week, Target announced the end of DEI programs that helped Black employees build meaningful careers, improved the experience of Black shoppers, and promoted Black-owned businesses. 

I think the most important thing to come out of Target’s DEI decision is that the mask is off for Target: It’s not a philanthropic organization. It’s not a social justice group. It’s not mutual aid. It’s certainly not your friend or even a safe space.

It’s a publicly traded corporation with profits as the goal. Many of us knew that for a long time, but for others it’s a big surprise because Target did a great job at marketing itself as something else.  And as we have been discussing on Instagram in the comments section today, many people have a very intense parasocial relationship with Target. And it makes sense, when you think about how “Tarjay” and overconsumption of stuff from “Tarjay” was meme-ified for years, the “treat yourself” era of walking in for one thing, and leaving with $150 worth of stuff. Target was supposed to be different from every other mega corporation out there, and well, it’s just not.  It’s no different than Amazon or Nike or your credit card company.

And things like this just remind me of why we need to support small businesses when we can.  And yes, I’m quite aware that not all small businesses are run by great humans or doing a good job of taking care of their employees. We shouldn’t support shitty small businesses either, and we should believe employees when they tell us these businesses are bad.

But for the businesses out there who are trying to change what “business” means and maximize their positive impact on their communities, we should do what we can to support them.

Yes, that can mean shopping with them, but it can also mean other things that literally cost no money:

• Recommend your favorite small businesses to friends.
• Like, save, and share IG posts from your favorite makers, sellers, and small brands. Bonus points for commenting on posts and tagging friends!  That engagement really does help.
• When friends/family ask you for your gift list, include items or gift certificates from small businesses.
• Write positive reviews for businesses you have already shopped.

It’s really that easy.  And it’s another way that we are actually engaging in some pretty radical behavior by ignoring the big box stores or the hyper convenience of free next day shipping.  All of these things add up.  And we’re just going to keep doing the best that we can!

While most of us are probably not feeling “amazing,” right now, I have to say this community continues to amaze me with its strength, passion, and bravery

I want you to take some time today to bask in pride and/or joy about something you did this week or this month. Because I know you did something great!