Radical Optimism in Sustainable Fashion Movement Building

The world feels like it's on fire all the time, and honestly, there are days when fashion feels like the stupidest thing to care about. I’ll be scrolling through news alerts about wars and military violence and all these systemic issues that are quite literally killing people and destroying the planet, and then I'll catch myself thinking about whether a certain fabric is sustainable or if a brand is actually ethical, and it feels so small and ridiculous. Yet the thing I keep coming back to is that people and the environment are connected, and those systems I'm reading about are all connected, and fashion is actually tangled up in all of it, whether we want to admit it or not.

The same supply chains that exploit garment workers are tied to global economies, and the same extraction that destroys ecosystems is feeding fast fashion, and the same indifference that lets wars happen is the indifference that lets brands keep producing without consequence. So maybe caring about fashion isn't stupid, maybe it's just one thread in a much larger web.

And I actually used to do the real grassroots sustainable fashion organizing, which involved like clothing swaps and panels and calls and writing guides and blogs, and I was a Remake ambassador back when they were like THE org for sustainable fashion. I genuinely believed in all of it: the garment worker rights, the systemic change, the movement building.

I thought if we could just educate enough people and put enough pressure on brands and build enough community, something would shift. And then it recently went down due to a lack of grant funding. I don’t know the details of what happened, but I never saw grassroots fundraising efforts pushed out.

But we MUST ask for money, we need to build our organizing muscle, and yet we often just let it slip away, like failure is inevitable or something. But I still think: what if we had really believed in our cause, adapted to how we approach our goals, and what if we had believed in our own cause enough to ask people to invest in it?

I still deeply care about sustainable fashion despite leaving community organizing orgs, and don’t care to be in privileged spaces or work for corporate America. So, now I have been gearing up to resell on Whatnot full-time, and it's literally the only viable career I see having.

I am sure it will give me the freedom to work at any hour of the day or night. I can make 40k easily just by streaming a couple of days a week, connecting with people over something simple and fun. It's not glamorous, and it's not what I thought I'd be doing, but it's real, and it's mine, and I don't have to perform some version of myself that isn't authentic.

I just want to show up and talk about clothes, and people show up too, and somehow that's enough.

Twitch and YouTube fashion streaming are different worlds because they're subscription-based and run on emotions and connection. You can't really quantify that or make some strategic plan for what's gonna happen. You can do everything right and have a quiet week, or do everything wrong and have people show up anyway. It's uncontrollable to a certain point, and I've had to learn to be okay with that. I’m not just saying it, but sitting in the discomfort of not knowing and trusting that the connection matters more than the metrics.

I'm not interested in having a career, even though I could probably be making moves in the major sports industry if I wanted to try hard and climb some ladder. That world is there, and I could probably insert myself into it, but the thing is that world wants you to want it so bad. It wants you to be hungry and ambitious and performative about your goals, and I just don't have that in me. I don't want to be climbing; I just want to live.

And right now, my home base is boring, and affordable housing is a joke at this point, a real illusion for the working class, but I can’t imagine giving up on a different, more ethical world.

Like, what if we restored garment hubs and built up a local fashion industry again with skilled designers just making cool ass shit that actually means something. not chasing trends, not squeezing every last penny out of factories on the other side of the world, but making clothes that matter to the people making them and the people wearing them.

Change feels like a fantasy sometimes, but it’s possible if enough of us want it.

Radical optimism to me isn't pretending the world isn’t on fire. It's not ignoring the wars and the violence and the systemic collapse.

It's looking at all of that and choosing to build something anyway, something small and real and maybe even something that lasts, not because it'll save the world but because building feels better than burning….. giving up in it all, and making connections to build community that can change everything we think is true.