The state of fashion

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From TED and NPR. I'm Anush Zamorodi, today on the show, The State of Fashion. What we wear and why we wear it. Over the last few years, minimalism has been in, pairing back a few simple sheet pieces. Keep the look clean.

The idea of dressing efficiently has always resonated with me.

So I was a little terrified at the prospect of embracing the exact opposite. Which is my love for my whole maximumism. This is my studio. This is where the magic happens. This is where the magic happens.

“A little while back, I visited the artist and costume designer machine dazzle at his workshop”

in Jersey City for a maximalist makeover. And as you can see, it's a large space, but it still could be bigger. You know what I mean? It's like walking into the most glittering, dazzling closet. I have ever seen in my entire life.

There are mannequins dressed to the nines. There are dreams of fabric, there are 1,500 square foot space, is packed with supplies, wigs, sewing machine, racks, and racks of clothes. Well, right now it's extra crazy, you're here, but now I have a photo shoot tomorrow. Most people know me as a costume designer, but I'm also a fine artist, photographer, sculptor.

Machine grew up all over the US. Then about 30 years ago, like many young people who feel out of step with mainstream America, he moved to New York. I moved to New York so that I could actually start my life. After those past three decades, he has built a reputation for creating wild, whimsical,

and over the top outfits for the stage.

“Maybe it's opera, maybe it stands, maybe it's theater, maybe it's me just walking on a street”

for the sake of something at a protest. I need a reason. There has to be a reason. But it wasn't until 2022 when he had an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in New York that his style got a name thanks to the curator.

Yes, Elizabeth Arthur, when she curated my show, she decided to call it Queer Maximillism.

I was aware of Maximillism before, but I never called myself a Maximillist.

I mean, yes, am I Maximill? Yes, but I'm so much more than that. Of course you are. Yes. So I mean, I change.

I'm constantly changing. I go with it. The Museum chronicleed how, as they put it, a closeted suburban kid from Upper Derby, Pennsylvania, turned into Machine Dazzle, the queer experimental theater genius. There was an apple pie headdress, a skirt made of candlesticks, a blouse that looked like

giant typewriter keys. So while he may not exactly embrace the term, Machine believes his take on Maximillism promotes something very specific. It's about sharing your vision. Queer space is about sharing.

Yes, we're making space for ourselves, but we're also sharing ourselves and we're inviting people into our circle. We're being generous. Maximillism is generous. It's everything.

It's the cake. It's the flower, the eggs, the sugar, it's the oven, it's the heat. It's the love that was put into all of it. It's the mouth, it's the smile, it's the party. All of it, because you can't have one without the other.

Can I get an amen up in here? Where's that a gay man? Can I get a gay man in here? Oh, man, a gay man. Depending on your perspective, fashion can be frivolous or make a big statement.

It can bring out our creative side or our consumer side.

so how can we do it better?

“On this episode, ideas about taking style to the extreme, the environmental impact of our”

shopping culture, and how our obsession with beauty, built an industry with an ugly underbelly.

But first, back to machine dazzle.

Get a better sense of what his maximalist outfits look like. It helps to hear about the 2016 performance he did with the artist Taylor Mac. We are about to venture into uncharted territory. It was called a 24-decade history of popular music. A spectacular queer take on American history that lasted for 24 hours, featuring 24 costume

changes. The HBO documentary about the performance, one machine, an Emmy in costume design. It starts in 1776 and goes to the present day. Here's machine dazzle on the Ted stage. For every decade, I created a costume that is conceptually adjacent, not historically

“accurate, because traditional historical costume already exists, and I like to break”

traditions and invent new ones.

So it's the top of the show in 1776, right after we freed ourselves from the British and the United States, and inspiration came when I was passing this linger mat. What were they doing? They were taking down these old plastic grand opening flags. I noticed how weather, worn and brittle and fragile they were, and I got to thinking about

the end of the American Revolution and how tattered and torn and broken everything must have been. And then it hit me. This costume wants to tell a story. The outfit feels like a sports uniform on acid.

The headdress is made of cheerleaders pompoms fashioned into a massive wig.

There's a big 13 for the 13 colonies, jersey number, over metallic streamers, sparklers are shooting off the back of the outfit like fireworks. The whole thing is one big party. This is maximumism. Not only is it layer upon layer aesthetically, it's idea on top of idea conceptually.

It's become its own story almost, that you can almost read like a book. Another particularly memorable outfit commemorates the Civil War era. So when it came to the Civil War decade, I had read somewhere along the way that the American hot dog evolved out of this time by German immigrants selling their sausages on the streets. And so I wanted to include it in the costume.

To create the costume, machine paired hot dogs, with another invention from the 1860s, carved wire. I love what barbed wire stands for. It's a barrier. And what we were doing in the Civil War was trying to break down those barriers.

So the costume features a huge, barbed wire skirt adorned with hot dogs. That almost looks like a cage, plus a headdress of hot dogs, and a civil war style soldiers jacket with red and yellow streamers flowing off of it like ketchup and mustard. And it's also almost a grotesque.

“It's like, well, is it ketchup or is it blood that we're talking about the Civil War here?”

On stage, we often deal with dark things, heavy subject matter. I will say that humor is good. Humor is healing, so audience gets to decide what it is. There was no audience back at machines workshop in Jersey City. Nonetheless, he was hard at work on my maximalist makeover, putting together quite an outfit

for me. That's really good on you. Yeah. Yeah. These are good colors for you.

So right now, I have a wig made of hair, red hair, but also plastic bags, yarn, flowers, all sorts of things. The Bollero jacket that's vintage, with very poofy sleeves, and then the colonel and short skirt just pops out, and we're not even fully dressed. It's like this, you know, we're not even fully dressed yet.

We haven't even really done accessories, and also you're not in your heels. I'm not in my seven inch product heels yet. No, you're not. And I might want to have it. By the time I got in my heels and rhinestone gloves, put on some copper lipstick with many

dashes of glitter layered onto.

Oh, plus some cat-eye sunglasses, something kind of transformed inside of me. I think we were headed at one point into a direction where it was like too much, like Halloweeny, but then you like took us in a different direction, and now I actually feel super chic. All the sudden, because you're so outrageous, it's like you have a license to say almost anything

and do almost anything.

But I never would have thought I could wear this many colors, this many accessories.

It's the way you put things together, there's sophistication involved, there's effort. I think there's a lot of minimalism that's, you know, it's effortless. There's nothing to think about, and I understand why people do that.

“We live in a crazy world, life is stressful, I can't handle, I mean, I can handle”

it. Having fun. A minitramate running through the mountain that is your hand dress, and then like your shoes are just like propping you up, it's like putting a painting on a wall. I figured, at this point, as we get ready to go out to get a coffee, that I would be embarrassed

and terrified, but I don't, I feel like I need to be seen because I look, oh no, you're going to want to do this all the time. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of each other. Can I buy you a coffee? Are you sure, can I?

Let's go. We took our outfits for a spin by going to the local cafe and surprise the prize. We turned some heads.

“Oh, they just said, you look amazing and you just cheered me up.”

See? I told you. We look like a celebration of life, you know.

I was finally embracing the maximalist mindset and it felt good.

And maybe machine is right, maybe we're attracted to minimalism because it's a way of taming the madness of modern life, whereas machines approach is to run joyfully towards the chaos. I'm trying to give light to it, and sometimes a thing of beauty can be a hand that you hold through a dark time.

I feel like a walking piece of art, it's really special. It is a flash, it is a moment, most people would not leave their homes wearing what I wear. It's an offering of changing the way people see the world, changing what is possible.

“Machine Dazzle is a costume designer and performer.”

You can see his full talk at TED.com.

The HBO documentary featuring his incredible outfits is called Taylor Max 24 Decade History

of Popular Music. You can also go to TED.npr.org and my Instagram to see photos of me and machine all dressed up. On the show today, the state of fashion. I'm Manish Zamaroti and you're listening to the TED radio hour from NPR.

We'll be right back. We'll take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the fresh air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR, I'm a new summer-rody.

“On the show today, the state of fashion, which of course includes shopping and for many”

of us today, that means shopping online. I have shopped for every single thing online, anything and everything that I can purchase.

I look at it online first.

This is a Parna Meta, a few years ago, when she was a busy working mom, online shopping was a huge time saver, especially for buying clothes. I worked 12 to 16 hours a day. I don't have time during the week to go out and look for things. So in the evenings, she'd scroll and shopped.

My daughter's in bed, I'm relaxed, I'm watching TV, I start browsing, I like hmm, you know, let's look at not strums today, look at anthropology, what do they have there? I'll start seeing these things and I'm like, oh, that looks really good. And wherever I would go on any website, they would sit at turns off free. I would intentionally buy the same item in a couple of different colors, a couple of different

sizes with the intent of keeping only one.

“I mean, that's what I've been told as well is like, you know, you're a busy person,”

you're a mom, save time, just order it in various sizes, then ship back the ones you don't want. And that's perfectly fine. Is that what you understood as well? Yes, I mean, I would try on 6, 7, 5, 6, whatever.

And then keep one, if I liked it and return the rest. At your peak, how many deliveries would you say you were getting of clothes per week? Oh, per week? 12, 15. Whoa.

Sorry. You were serious. But I didn't think I was doing anything wrong, look, the store is making it possible for me to order as many as I want and return back what I don't want. Sometimes I would return all of them because you can't check the material when you're

buying online. My daughter, she was a teenager at that time, and she said, mom, you have a real problem. And this is a daughter telling me, I'm supposed to be telling her, but it was instead her. A partner's shopping habit was definitely out of control.

And she started to realize that it was a problem for the environment too. There were packages showing up at my doorstep almost every day. I have all these empty boxes, I mean, yeah, I recycle it, but oh my God, so much cardboard. And there's some irony here, because at the time, a partner was a global solutions director for UPS.

Part of her job was to help retailers make their operations run more smoothly. So she knew a lot about how shipping works. So think about supply chain design, supply chain optimization, carbon impact analysis. That's the kind of work I did. One day in a meeting with a client, she heard a statistic that put her shopping habit

in perspective.

“I was at a meeting with one of our largest retailers, you know, one of the key members”

from the customer side said, the largest opportunity we have right now is with returns.

Last year, they had 7.5 million pieces of clothing returns to them.

Wow, I just sort of got that number on my paper, I'm like, oh my God, in one year, one retailer. This is not a small problem, this is a big one. The return situation online, it is a problem entirely of the internet's making and of internet retailers making. Amanda Mall is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Business Week, where she covers consumerism.

The idea that you'd go into a store and plan already to just return half of it, that is a behavior that before the internet was considered like pretty maladaptive. If you were doing that regularly, that would be sort of like characterized as like a compulsive shopping issue. But now that is just how the internet has trained us to shop.

Amanda says that when people buy things online, they tend to return them at a very high rate. Even average brick and mortar stores have like a single digit return rate.

Online, it can range from usually 15 to 30 percent and for certain types of products, especially

during the holidays, it can get up to 50 percent. And that's because online shopping is not designed to produce good decisions in the people where we're making purchases. It's designed to make it as easy for you to buy things as possible. This all began back in the early 2000s when online shopping debuted and shoppers were

skeptical. People understood really well at the time, a lot of the goods that they wanted to buy just weren't ideal for online shopping. Things that you have to try on, things that have to fit your body, things that have to

There's all kinds of stuff that you just can't really know with full certainty online and you still can't. You certainly couldn't in 2004.

“So early online retailers had to figure out some way to overcome these objections in order”

to encourage people to change their habits.

Enter Zapos, the online choose door, and the first online retailer to offer free returns.

Ending up with a pair of shoes that doesn't fit is like a big risk, so they may return free. That is what got people to shop online. That is what created the set of habits and people. It also was really really unprofitable for the companies doing it.

Amazon Zapos, a lot of early online retailers did not turn a profit for a very long time. Like they were investing money in creating habits in the American population that would in the long term be advantageous to them. Has it worked? Would you say?

Yeah, it's worked really really well because it's created these behaviors that a lot of people have now like buying a size up and a size down from what you'd normally buy. Or adding something random to your order to get past a free shipping threshold. They created a set of incentives for shoppers for people to buy stuff with the intent

of returning it because if people didn't really start trusting this process and start

“seeing it as convenient, they were never going to peel off a considerable amount of like”

market share from in-person retailers. Shoppers came to rely on that online convenience. Exactly as retailers had hoped. But now as we buy and return, buy and return, the cost of processing all those packages is hurting retailers' bottom line.

We'll have to fall. I went to visit a return facility run by in Mar Intelligence, which is the largest returns processor in the United States. They processed hundreds of millions of packages per year and their different facilities across the U.S.

The one that I went to was one of their big ones, the few hours outside of New York City. It's sort of a regional facility that collects a lot of returns from the sort of New York City, Philadelphia, metropolitan area.

So I'd probably sent something back to this warehouse without even knowing it.

Oh, almost certainly, almost certainly. This one facility processes about a hundred thousand packages a day. It is just like a perpetual motion machine of taking stuff out of your taped up polymailer and figuring out what's going on. A real-life person opens each package.

“They try to ensure that what you've returned matches what it says on your order.”

They check the product for defects for signs that it has been used. They even have to do things that are kind of gross. Especially if it's a parallel, they're supposed to sniff it. Sniff it. Yes.

Like smell? Yes. To see if it smells like it's been warm. If you return to pair of pants, they check the pockets. The guy who was showing me around told me that the most common item to find with return

pants is somebody's underwear. Oh. No. Not great. No.

That seems like pretty time-consuming. Oh, yeah. It's really, really time-consuming and labor-intensive and, you know, they, in more and it's competitors, all have technological advanced systems that use whatever, you know, machine learning or AI capabilities they can, but like, there is no replacement for human eyes

and human noses and human hands. After that, sometimes clothes do go back to the retailer and are resold. But Amanda says there's a very high bar for getting clothes back on the shelf. Some retailers only take back things that are in perfect, like, new, unworn condition, sometimes in their original packaging.

Otherwise the item might go to an outlet, like TJ Maxx. But again, if there's any indication that something has been worn, it is very hard to resell anything like that in any channel. So instead, it might be donated or recycled. But textile recycling is like pretty difficult.

The more like embellishments, the more types of material, there are on a garment, the less likely it is to be easily recyclable. So not everything can be recycled, not everything that's donated can be used. And pretty much everything that can't be slotted into one of those categories is destroyed in some way.

This incinerated landfill, it every step this process just sort of sheds waste. It's funny. It's reminding me of a time that I tried to return something to Amazon and they were like, you know, it just keep it. We'll give you your money back.

Yes. At that point, what's happening? They're making a calculation that it's not worth it for that. Yes, absolutely. Returns on a per return basis can cost retailers anywhere from like $5 to $25.

Especially the fast fashion has a really short shelf life. That becomes a real problem when taking returns because maybe it takes you a week or two weeks to actually drop it off at the post office.

When a company takes that return, like, your dress might not have been available for sale

and any capacity on their website for two weeks by the time it gets back to them and gets processed. So there's like no way for them to resell it. And they've had to pay a return's processor to look at it. They've had to pay the logistics service to bring it back to them.

They have already just been leaking money. So the last thing they want to do is take a return.

“So what would happen, though, if each of us just returned a few fewer items per year?”

Well, I mean, we're about to find out. A lot of retailers are trying to change the system ever so slightly to prevent us from returning so much stuff because it is started to eat into their bottom lines. And if they want to, you know, extract the profit that they've spent so much time encouraging us to create, then they need us to return less stuff.

Like they have set up a system that is not inherently profitable anymore. So this reintroduction of returns fees, of restocking fees, of shipping fees, of the concept of the final sale and you can't return something. I think does make a meaningful difference in the amount of stuff that people return. The system is in like a state of flux right now.

They are trying to figure out the correct combination of incentives and fees to institute in order to keep more products sold. You know, I have been writing about retail logistics and returns for a long time now. And every time getting a conversation with somebody about it, I see people have this feeling of horror that you've just discovered that you've been participating in something that you

don't feel good about. You really start to think about all the times that you procrastinated, taking a package to UPS.

“And I think sometimes people feel a little bit dumb for not thinking about it.”

But like the system is designed to ensure that they don't think about it as much as possible. We've talked about, you know, the problems for these businesses. But what about the environmental impact?

Is there any way to calculate just how bad the problem is?

So, there is this EPA stat that gets thrown around a lot, which is that the average U.S. consumer throws out approximately 81.5 pounds of clothes annually. That doesn't mean that like every single person is taking 81 pounds of clothing to the trash. But it means that for every American, the amount of textile waste that gets created within

this country is about 81 pounds. That works out to a little bit over 11 million tons as a country. It's like, yes, returns create a real issue and a real waste in the process. But the much bigger waste is just the volume at which these companies manufacture clothing that nobody wants or needs and nobody buys.

I think that's even more the case for this slightly older model, past fashion retailers, where you're creating a lot more stuff upfront to see if it sells. And that is the cost of doing business at that volume at that scale. There are dumping grounds all over the world in poor countries, where a lot of these costs this cast off clothing tends to go in Ghana and Chile in particular, just sort of

like these trash mountains of clothing, which just, I think, illustrates like the real overproduction problem that we have in these types of goods, you know, that much is thrown away every year as a country and we're not missing any of it.

“I mean as someone who's tracking this, you must have imagined what could be done systemically”

to make a difference, what would that look like? I think it's regular story. There is a real capacity for responsible regulation and responsible oversight to change the behaviors of these companies.

But, you know, the companies that populate this industry are very, very, very powerful.

They have very powerful lobbying arms. The Biden administration made some important steps, but it's hard to say exactly how much anybody is going to be willing to do. All right, so I'd love to end our conversation with sort of best practices. Let's say someone is like, well, I am not going to be part of this online shopping machine

that is hurting our planet. What are some of the things they can do? I think one of the best things that you can do is when you decide you want or need something to try to buy a second hand. But I think that if you're looking at a system where you've got just like this massive

over supply of consumer products, then it makes sense both systemically and just price-wise for you to look for, you know, opportunities to buy something that is not brand new. But we live in a consumer economy and the system is set up to prompt us to buy as much as possible. That's the economy we have.

Like the amount of like personal resilience you need to say no to that all the time is just

Like nobody can be expected to say no to these prompts a hundred percent of the time.

“You have been as a consumer sort of like herded toward the least friction possible.”

If you can add some friction back in for yourself in whatever way makes sense for you and what you're looking for, then you're probably going to make better decisions. You're going to save money, you're going to be less wasteful, your house is going to be less cluttered. Like you were just going to have an easier time of things in the long run.

Which brings us back to Apparna meta. The now retired UPS executive and former online shopaholic.

As Apparna learned more and more about where her online returns were actually going, she

knew she had to make a change. Because I saw the wastage that happens in the supply chain, you think about the amount of fuel you consume, you're talking about labor, you know, every time you touch a package it's a cost. As a supply chain expert, Apparna focused on solutions to reduce this kind of waste. She worked with her retail clients to optimize their shipping routes, consolidate shipments and

use less packaging, and you start thinking about your supply chain in different ways. In her own life, she joined a clothing reuse initiative within the Indian American community. But most of all, Apparna changed the way she shops. Yes, significantly. It takes me a lot longer now to make a decision when I'm doing online shopping.

“I really think about it. I'll put the item in the card. I'll go back the next day and see if I still”

want it. And I try. I try very hard to keep the returns to a minimum. I don't buy with the intent to return. So that's the number one change. I don't buy multiple items of the same item with the intent of only keeping one. That's like my way of saying, "I'm going to minimize this as much as I can." I mean, there's also the question of fashion, right? But were you very sort of trendy previously

when you were shopping more often, were you more up on style and have you decided to go, "I don't know more classic or go back into your closet?" And no, so that part hasn't changed unfortunately. I still, I still like trendy stuff. What I don't do is I don't buy fast fashion. So if I purchase stuff, it is to keep. I take some time to buy. My daughter and I, we have a phrase.

She points to her heart and says, "Mom, does it hurt you here if you don't get that?" And I say, "No, she's gonna get then don't buy it." That was a Parna Meta former vice president of Global Customer Solutions at UPS. You can see her talk at TED.com. We also heard from Amanda Mall, who writes for Bloomberg Business Week. And on our next TED Radio Hour Plus episode, you can get more expert advice from Amanda on how to

be an intentional consumer. She's got some great tips. Today on the show, the State of Fashion. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anusha Zamarote. Stay with us. . Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our

times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

You know, every day on our first NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast,

“we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story, our questions. What really happened?”

What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow our first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. This week on Wayway, Don Telly, we talked to best-selling author Caro Clare Burke about how it feels to write the hip-book of the summer. I've been very dissociative, so that's a problem

for my future therapist. Yeah, I say let's talk about the fact you're not in therapy, that's fast. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games listen to the week-week don't tell me podcast and the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the Ted radio hour from NPR, I'm Anush Zamarote. On the show today, the state of fashion and a warning this next segment contains an offensive word and we talk about sexual misconduct.

So, we can't talk about fashion without including the perspective of a very select group,

first names. They made modeling the goal of many a-tween or teen and shows like America's next-top

model further the fantasy that it could happen for anyone, but it actually did happen for Cameron Russell. I was scouted when I was 14 or 15, I was swimming in Maine and a talent scout saw me swimming and then gave me a card for an agent in New York City. Eventually, Cameron ended up walking the runways of Versacee, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Victoria's Secret. She appeared on the covers of countless magazines. Now, 20 years later, she's written a memoir documenting her experience.

“I think that we have this sensibility that if you are a model, the life is very glamorous”

and you are famous, but of course, the job doesn't always look like that.

So, models have written tell all memoirs before. But Cameron's book chronicles her life as she grows to understand the industry's CD economic underpinnings, including labor conditions, the environmental impact, and the exploitation of models themselves. In some ways, this should not be a surprise. It's an industry that relies on the exploitation of gender labor from top to bottom. So, it would make sense that that extends to women at the right time. And while she calls out a lot of

people, Cameron also calls out herself. It all goes back to the very first gigs she booked, because even though she grew up in a feminist household and had no interest in fashion, the opportunity was too good to pass up. I was offered very quickly a couple thousand dollars for a single day of work. You know, any other job I'd had I'd put like after school and been a babysitter for way less than minimum wage. So, on the eve of going to college and thinking about

“saving money and what am I going to do? That was a massive opportunity. And then I think”

there's this other piece of what fashion is. There are so few women with access to media. And so that idea of being able to access a large platform, a large audience. I even at 16 was thinking, wow, this is so unique. And so I was thinking about that particular type of access. There's a moment where you start to, well, there's many moments in the book, which I will say is a gripping read, but also a very hard read, because you are a girl.

I'm a mother of a 14 year old and the thought of my daughter being in these situations really treated like an adult, because you look like an adult. But with, you know, not a ton of emotional maturity, you look back on those years and and feel what? Yeah, I guess I the way that I ended up writing this book is there was a word that I just couldn't get out of my head, which was the word tolerate. I thought it was so much more complicated than the word consent.

And it also seemed to me more complex than complicity. So as I was thinking about how to write a book about working as a model, I started just making lists. And the first list that I made was just a list of things that I had tolerated. And the very first item on the list is a story of showing up at my first photo shoot and the stylist telling me to wear this bikini with a belt around my

“neck and telling me it's an SNM vibe. And when he says SNM, I think of like, you know, three letters”

SNM, I didn't know what it stood for. I had just turned 16. On my second shoot, the makeup artist

paints my lips red and they tell me that I have several lips. I've never heard this word before.

It's so jarring. I'm trying to make sense of what that means. I talk about, you know, having a photographer that I shoot with for a couple of months who is calling me sexy. And no one's ever called me sexy. I'm a kid. And I was inside, you know, other people's fantasies that I had no understanding of. And I tolerated it. You know, I went along with it because I was thinking, well, this is a wild opportunity. And, you know, it's an industry where you are standing in a

casting line with 400 other young women. And you just start thinking, you can be replaced in an instant.

how to make myself agreeable to everyone that I encountered. In 2012, after modeling for about a decade, she decided to be a little less agreeable. She gave a talk acknowledging some of the uncomfortable truths about her career. It was called, looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. Cameron walked out on stage looking like the quintessential supermodel,

short black dress, sky high heels. But then, luckily, I brought an outfit change. This is the first

“outfit change on the Ted stage. So you guys are pretty lucky to witness it. I think she pulled”

on a long skirt, stepped out of her stilettos and into a pair of loafers. These heels are very uncomfortable. So good thing I wasn't going to wear them. Next on, a comfy card again. The worst part is putting this sweater off my head because that's when you'll laugh at me. So at the time, this on-stage costume change seemed revelatory that a supermodel was willing to drop the glamour

and look, well, average. So why did I do that? That was awkward. Image is powerful. But also,

image is superficial. I just totally transformed what you thought of me in six seconds. And of course, barring surgery or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work. There's very little that we can do to transform how we look and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. I am on this stage because I am a model. I am on this stage because I am a pretty white woman. I want a genetic lottery and I am the recipient of a legacy.

And maybe you're wondering what is a legacy? Well, for the past few centuries, we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that were biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures and femininity and white skin. And this is a legacy that was built for me and it's a legacy that I've been caching out on. So your talk ends up being, and is still one of

the most watched TED Talks of all time over 40 million views. But you say in the book, after words,

at the moment, you feel like you have power, like you're writing your own story, except once you go off script, you say, "I don't know what to say." So talk me through how you started to figure out

“what you wanted to say. Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that was hard to figure out”

was how to talk about an industry that particularly for me was both privileging and depressing. And I felt I just did not share, you know, what does it mean to be complicit and tolerant of an industry that is very exploitative? You know, both claiming responsibility and shame and blame for some of that. And then also, you know, not taking responsibility for everything, right? I mean, it's interesting because in the book, you really characterize your upbringing as

the kind of household where you were steeped in issues about social justice, privilege, racism, labor rights, and you describe, or you say that as your career grew, you became very aware of how the fashion industry makes those problems worse. There is a section that I think really sums up the sort of confusion that you were feeling at the time. It's the story you tell about a photo shoot you did on the grounds of a former plantation in

Georgia. And I wonder if you could read it for us. Yeah. And now we're outside Atlanta for a job. We drive up to the location and the production assistant points at some rubble in the woods and

“tells me that you should be slave housing. Then he points where we're headed and says,”

and the same white family still owns the big house. The woman who answers the door tells us this again.

The plantation has been in my family for hundreds of years. She says, it's the first thing

she tells us and she says it with pride. I sit on the porch waiting for the team to set up. How different is what we're doing celebrating this place? Celebrating my white face over and over, while women of color make pack ship and sell the clothes for nothing close to a livable wage. There are many scenes in the book where you are sort of at the center of a

remembering another scene where you describe reading the headlines about

hundreds of Bangladeshi garment workers being killed in a fire and a factory and that you excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and have diarrhea and describe yourself reading these stories on the can. And I almost feel like you're trying to say to the reader, it is ugly. I can be ugly. There's a visceralness that you go into in the book that sort of

“shocked me and I think that's what you were trying to do. Yeah, I guess I thought a lot about”

telling a story where as you say, my body was being used to make this in many ways really

grotesque industry beautiful, enticing, aspirational. And I thought the way to begin to dismantle that is actually to return to the body, just this really repulsive human experience of being sickened by what was happening. There's a quote in the book where you say, "Each day I become less of a witness and more of an accomplice." Yeah, I think it's really hard not to be in an industry where 20 conglomerates own 97% of profits, the negative climate impacts,

the negative impacts on labor. It's really hard to not work for companies that are doing those things.

“I think there's this sort of fantasy sometimes that feels like if you don't like it then quit,”

but it's true in nearly every industry. And a solution to me anyway is not really to just live off the grid. It is to actually acknowledge I am and have been an accomplice to some really egregious things that this industry is doing. And I want to take responsibility and be part of a group of people that try as hard as we can to transform the industry at the same time to acknowledge that there are systems which have been in place that are so much bigger than us

that we cannot shoulder responsibility for. Cameron has spent the last decade organizing her fellow models and speaking out about the industry, like in 2017 when the MeToo movement started and Cameron was reminded of the early

“experiences she had in modeling. I think we looked at that and said, wait, if this is unacceptable”

in Hollywood, why is it the norm over here in my industry? And so of course that led to this very different theory of change, which is the set, we can't make change without each other. She got hundreds of models to share their stories with her, stories of abuse of boundaries crossed, people telling them to just suck it up. She anonymized the stories and then posted them online. Together I think the power of sharing them all out was really to introduce norms about what was

acceptable and what was unacceptable and what it broke was this expectation that this job is a fantasy. And I think it also built this sort of camaraderie or solidarity across the supply chain and across women, 80% of the fashion industry is women and most of them don't make a livable wage. That actually includes models, most models don't make a living wage. So I think it introduced this idea that actually that gendered exploitation is something that is happening across the

supply chain and it shouldn't surprise us that it's happening across the supply chain because it's an industry that is really relying on exploiting women and using cheap labor to make profits. To somebody listening who's saying, I feel confused by fashion. I get told that I should invest in pieces that are ridiculously expensive, but really I can only afford fast fashion, which I here is destroying the planet and I feel the need to connect with friends on social media that

is also objectifying people. Like I think people feel confused in some ways by fashion and part of them just wants to enjoy it for the pure pleasure it can give people. But what do you

makes it simple for me is trying to pull apart fashion from industry, which in this particular

moment is such a rampant exploitative type of capitalism. And when we can pull those things apart,

“we just see fashion in a whole different way. I think fashion is familial, you know, when we”

take it apart from industry, it's long been the work of women where we really can access

creativity and culture and it's just always been in the home. It's been for people that we love.

And it is our responsibility as people who work in fashion, as people who consume fashion, who are excited by this industry to try to hold those two things, grief at being an accomplice

“to the system at working inside this and grounding in that and using that as motivation to turn”

towards and grasp on to the ways that fashion can be really beautiful and powerful.

That was Cameron Russell. Her book is called How to Make herself agreeable to everyone. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week. The episode was produced by Katie MontLeone, Rachel Faulkner White, Harshana Hada and Fiona Guren.

“It was edited by Sana's mesh can pour, Rachel Faulkner White and me. Our production staff at”

NPR also includes Matthew Clutier and James Delahousey. Irene Naguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gillie Moon. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar and Danielle Labella Reso. I'm a new summer odie and you have been listening to the TED radio hour from NPR. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of fresh air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour

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