A conversation with Aja Barber

When I had an office job in London, I would go to Pret A Manger every morning to buy the same breakfast. I would eat it at my desk. Then I would go to Pret A Manger on my "lunch break" — it wasn't really a break; I would just go there to buy a sandwich and take it back to my desk. Almost every day, I would eat the same thing. After work, I would make plans to socialize, and if I didn't have arrangements or had time to kill, I would wander around high street shops. I would spend hours in H&M, Zara, and Cos, scanning the racks for something that caught my eye. 

My penchant for high street shopping as a leisure pursuit started at around 19 years old. I remember whiling away hours of my summer break from university, back in my home city, looking around New Look or TopShop — bored and despondent — buying the odd dress or top to wear to the pub. It was a lifestyle based on convenience. I was conveniently distracted by a new dress or shoes. It was convenient to shovel food into my mouth while sitting at my desk browsing the internet.

I spoke toAja Barber this week, who like me is a reformed fast-fashion shopper — which means we are not in a position to be judgmental. Today Aja has amassed a following on Instagram of 234k where she shares how her past ways of consumption made her feel and why she stopped buying cheap clothes. Her posts aim to educate people about how fashion could be sustainable — her advice is to consume less — and she speaks frankly about how fast fashion is linked to colonialism, oppression, and inequality.

I asked Aja about her journey to become a fashion and sustainability influencer and whether she thinks all sponcon is greenwashing. If you are interested to read more about Aja’s journey she has written a book calledConsumed: On colonialism, climate change, consumerism & the need for collective change, out in September click here to pre-order a copy.

Image courtesy of Aja Barber

Shonagh Marshall: I wanted to begin by asking you about your career. You talk about how you have worked in multiple fields: in TV production, and you once worked operating the lights at large sporting events! 

Aja Barber: Operating the lights was the most stressful job I've ever had. Have you ever had a position where you wake up every day with your heart racing because you were having a nightmare about work? That was that job. But you know, it gives you a great story. It was a super toxic work environment. I think any job can be toxic if you have the issues at play that we constantly talk about; the elements of oppression. It can be the most fun job in the world, and those elements of oppression will make it miserable. It all depends on the people you work with.

Shonagh: How did you end up focusing on fashion? Was it something you were drawn to as a young person? 

Aja: I always wanted to be in fashion, and I always wanted to write. But since we're talking about oppression, let's be honest — a little Black girl in Virginia wasn't exactly being pushed in the direction of the fashion industry or the literary world. I felt when I was at university, the only people that got to say they were going to be the world's next greatest writer, with any sort of real bravado, tended to be white males. My parents said, Look, we're helping you with school, but you need to get a degree in a field that you can work in. So I ended up in communications, but I would always take moments, when I had the opportunity, to work in the fashion space. 

For example, my school had a work abroad program. So I found this clothing label in London that I had been into from afar. I wrote them a letter on the off chance that they would have me and they said, Come on! Funny enough, the two founders of that label — the label itself no longer exists — are illustrating my book. We've been friends for almost 20 years now. That was a pivotal moment in my life. It was 2003, and I was trying to get out of Northern Virginia. So I thought, let me take this opportunity and see what I can do with it. 

I moved to London, and it was just the most magical experience that anyone could have. I lived in Hackney, in a big house with tons of young people, and everybody worked in the East End. Shoreditch was still slightly wanky, but not as wanky as it is today. It was just a great period to be in the UK and London in particular. After that, I was sold; I felt this is my town; this is where I need to be; I need to be going to squat raves every weekend. The energy was amazing. 

When I moved back to the US, I moved up to New York and interned, and later freelanced for a magazine, which was a bad experience. At that time, I was also starting to blog; this was when blogging was taking off. That made me feel quite hopeful for a time, but it just seemed like the wealthiest people were being celebrated. Blogging, when it started, felt democratic; it felt like you were connecting with that person over there who liked fashion as much as you. Everybody was trying to impress each other with outfits that were maybe a little bit too wild for where you live. That was fun. Then all of a sudden, brands entered the scene and started rewarding people by giving out designer handbags. It is funny because it was the cheapest marketing ever for brands, they didn't have to do anything, and all it did was make the rest of us feel insecure and buy more. 

By the time I was done, I felt more depressed with blogging than I had felt about magazines. I had been doing it for years, and a person would come on to the scene after a week, and they're already being written about magazines because they were incredibly wealthy and they had all the designer shoes. Fashion felt like a rich kids' game. I quickly realized that very few people weren't from financially privileged backgrounds, which made me feel very depressed. I also couldn't keep up with it; I knew interns that had done five and six unpaid internships. I couldn't do that, my parents have never paid my bills, and they never will. I also felt silly for not understanding that. Everybody says You should just go for it. But you can't if there are systemic barriers that make it so that only people from a specific background can play. 

In the fashion industry, it kept being so apparent that you needed to have a certain amount of privilege, and a certain amount of disposable income, to play. So I just gave up, and I started to write more about race, feminism, and systemic oppression in a column. It was during the latter half of Barack Obama's last years as president and I began to see that the conversation about race was changing and growing in a way that I hadn't seen before. So I was writing about systemic issues, but I would still write the occasional piece about fashion for blogs and websites. By the time I got on Instagram, I had begun to realize that actually, all of these issues are intertwined — why not just talk about them together? 

Shonagh: I am interested in the different mediums you use. 

Aja: Believe it or not, the first platform I had a big following was Pinterest — not that big, 7,000 followers. I still really enjoy Pinterest; if you like a mood board, how can you not love Pinterest? I used to have a Tumblr, and I used to have a Blogspot, I've had a WordPress, I've written for magazines, I had Flickr at one point. 

I was a late adopter of Instagram. Part of it because I didn't want a smartphone; I avoided having one for years because when I was working in the TV industry people could be very abusive of your time, labor, and energy. It's not uncommon for somebody who's very demanding to want to contact you during off-hours or send you emails through the night about stuff that can wait until working hours. So part of my avoiding having a smartphone was setting firm boundaries for myself in an industry that I didn't want to work in because they're abusive towards labor. I was the last person standing in my family without a smartphone; I had a brick phone for years.

Also, as I talk about consumption, I have always thought that smartphones — although they can improve our lives — are a bit nefarious. I was living in New York when the first iPhone came out, and I remember seeing people lined up around the Apple store in Manhattan and thinking what a bunch of schmucks. I couldn't believe people were lining up for a phone; I thought it was ridiculous. I didn't like the created frenzy around this material possession. I thought it was weird, and I was critical of the material frenzy around hyper-consumption, specifically surrounding smartphones. 

Shonagh: You were seeing things and joining the dots that many weren't seeing. I was a very unconscious consumer when the iPhone came out in 2007. At the time, nobody in the mainstream was questioning consumption. 

Aja: People weren't talking about planned obsolescence. I remember having my first iPod and thinking it was terrible that it became outdated — this product, which you've locked all your music on, is suddenly not working, and all your music is kind of locked into it. I remember thinking, Wait, this is weird. Although I have to say I liked the convenience of the iPod — it was amazing to have my entire library of songs in a product. I remember my acquaintances uploading all their CDs onto their iPods and then just trashing all the CDs. I remember thinking, What are we doing? 

I think I've always been relatively critical and skeptical of things. Even when I was a fast fashion consumer, I knew that there was no way people were making a living wage in the back of my head. I had to ignore those feelings to participate. Still, as someone who has sewn things before — poorly, because they're tough to do — I always knew that if it takes me X amount of hours to work on one scarf, or a skirt, and to have it look reasonably good, how on earth can this store sell a product like that for £10? I knew that if I went to the fabric store, even if I got the fabric out of the scrap pile, it was £2 a yard. If I bought three yards, it's £6, which doesn't account for the labor. I knew it wasn't right, but the part of me that wanted to participate in any way possible sometimes ignores what I know in my heart of hearts. It comes from being a childhood wallflower. Because no matter what happens, you don't want them to look at you too hard and start judging you.

Shonagh: You did eventually start using Instagram, and you now have a massive following of 234k people. As you mentioned, you began to use it as a platform to discuss fashion, race, sustainability, colonialism, class and systemic oppression, and how they intersect. Why did you do this?

Aja: I started talking about the way it was interlinked around 2018. Although this was when I began to talk about it, I've always thought it's amusing that companies we know are responsible for slave labor are making t-shirts that say "feminist" in pink. For example, people believe that a liberal person must own Urban Outfitters because if there's a liberal cause, they're in it, but they used to give money to the GOP in actuality. There's always been this thing with fashion where people don't want to look beneath the surface. 

I know this because I was always doing that. I always had to convince myself not to look beneath the surface. Anytime I read about some disaster, you know, sweatshops being investigated, The Rana Plaza garment factory collapse or the Dhaka garment factory fire, I would always feel some sort of responsibility to do my due diligence. I would find the brands involved, and I would go to their corporate responsibility page, where I would be greeted with this cheery message, which was just absolute bullshit. They never actually address the thing you're looking for; they just sort of pat you on the head and tell you, There, there, don't worry, we're good, you can keep buying with us! 

Shonagh: You do work with brands while at the same time being critical of performative allyship and unsustainable practices. What kind of work do you do with brands, and could you talk about why you choose not to accept sponsorship to promote products on your Instagram? There’s a lot of hypocrisy in the influencer space, how do you avoid that?

Aja: I see people who take the sustainable brand partnerships during Earth month, which the sustainable influencers all have to scrap over, but they take it because they're relevant or whatever. Every other month of the year, they don't care about labor rights. They don't care about sustainability. That hypocrisy drives me up the wall. There's not much I can do about it except give people the side-eye. 

In general, I don't sponsor my Instagram because I don't want to. I think that your integrity is worth so much money. My partner, Stephen, really helped me to figure this out. When I first moved back to the UK, we were pretty broke. We were sitting at a pub, and my platform had started to grow a little bit. Stephen asked me about the brand that annoys me the most, and said if this brand offered you $10,000 would you take it? We were talking about how my Instagram was growing and how to make money from it. I remember biting my fists and realizing that my integrity is so much more valuable than $10,000 because you can't buy it back once it goes. So I decided that day that I would never take a penny from a brand that didn't have its ducks in a row — and that's the majority of brands who do advertising through sponsored Instagram posts. 

The only big campaign that I've done on Instagram to this day is with Vestiaire Collective. I like them because they are not creating new products. The only way you'll see me taking money in this space through advertising a new product is if my name is on the tag or if it has a very, very low impact on the environment. If my name is on the tag, you better believe it's going to be ethical and somewhat sustainable — I say somewhat because you can do what you can do but creating any new product is in some ways inherently unsustainable.

Shonagh: Because of this, your space is very different from almost all other fashion "influencers."

Aja: In a space like Instagram, where people are constantly being sold to, people needed to see someone who was giving them information and not selling the product, who was showing off outfits, but not saying, Swipe up to buy. In our lifetime, we've seen fast fashion come to its full fruition — when I was a child, even when a teenager, we didn't shop this way, and we didn't buy this way. Many of the stores, which dominate the high street today, did not have power then. I've always made the connection through my work that social media has played a huge hand in this. 

I didn't want to be the person criticizing the industry because the industry doesn't like being criticized, and it's hard to get paid that way. But I was aware there's something hypocritical about making your money selling people an item they don't need every couple of days but at the same time saying, Oh, we also need to buy less. Make up your mind!

Eventually, I decided I would try and keep my Instagram space as ad-free as possible. Instead, I started a Patreon. So on Instagram, if someone asks, Where do I go shopping? I'm not going to help them. But if you want to sign on to my Patreon, I talk about brands there all the time. Every time I discover new brands, I share them, and I talk about brands in my Instagram stories — when I see a brand that's doing something beautiful or cool. But I'm not going to ask, What are you guys buying this week? I would instead invite you to ask yourself, should I be shopping as much as I am? 

We're not going to shop our way to a sustainable solution. That's not how it goes. I'm happy to talk about brands that I think are doing good work and need to be uplifted. But the solution isn't; where do I shop? It's so much bigger than that. It's, how do I take care of the clothing I already own? How do I get the most amount of wear out of my clothing? How do I figure out my style to buy pieces that I'm going to want to wear for years and years? My platform is about unpicking that and offering an alternative voice to the perpetual selling of products on Instagram. I've been influenced before, you're scrolling, and you see someone wearing a nice dress, and you're like, Maybe I'll go and check that out as well. I hope my post is the next scroll you see where I remind you that 60% of materials on earth are polyester, and you know what never biodegrades? Polyester. 

The fast fashion problem, as we know it, is intrinsically linked to social media. The New York Times did a profile of teenagers and early 20 somethings in 2019 and of all the people that they surveyed, the vast majority said that they don't feel comfortable being seen photographed and the same thing twice on social media. Social media brands love that — Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing — because it means that they can sell people disposable clothing. 

As someone with a massive platform, I would be part of the problem if I were selling people's products several times a week. I don't want to blame influencers, because ultimately, the billionaires and the brands, this is their mess to clean up, but an influencer can sell people a lot of crap. Take my platform; I've got 234,000 followers and an excellent engagement rate of 4%. To make the math easy, if my engagement were 1% and Monday through Friday, I always offered something to buy through affiliate linking, I could be very, very rich. If 1% of my following buys that item every day, that's 2,300 items being sold. If I do that every day of the week, Monday through Friday, we're looking at over 10,000 items. And then, if we continue to scale up the math throughout the year, that is 100s of 1000s of items being sold by one person. So when influencers say, It's not my fault, I'm an individual. I agree, but I think they do have some responsibility here.

But many people don't realize how they could be monetizing their social media accounts, and some of these brands rip off influencers. If you look at the Instagrams dedicated to sharing influencer pay scale, we know there's a difference in how white and Black influencers are paid. Don't let them get away with ripping you off and the planet too. 

Shonagh: You also focus on the role of colonialism in fashion and how this manifests not only historically but today. Could you unpack this for someone who's not familiar with your work?

Aja: For anyone who's not familiar with colonialism and fashion, I would say check out the Slow Factory; they are doing groundbreaking work around unpacking this conversation through free classes online. Celine Semaan, the founder, is a contributor to my book. The fact that the classes are free is such a revolutionary way of thinking about how we're educated about these things. 

For anyone who doesn't understand the way, colonialism and fashion is linked. The slave trade, which I am a descendant of, was about cultivating cotton to be supplied to the rest of the world. It was a massive part of the industry; even if you look at India and the partition, weavers were not allowed to practice their trade because they were competition for the British. There are so many different links historically.

If we look at today, we have to look at how our products are made, where they are made, and how people are paid. I always used to get pushback when I told people there's no way people should be making clothing for that amount of money. People would say, That's a good wage for that country. Why is it a good wage in that country? Is it because that country has been traditionally pillaged for its resources and its labor? I invite people to look at the history of how colonialism built these systems. Look at where your products are made, and ask yourself, why are the wages so low? One thing we know is that the countries where a lot of our products are made are incredibly resource-rich and extremely labor rich. Shouldn't that mean these countries are financially solvent? They're not. Why is that? 

The last part of the puzzle is clothing is being pushed on us so quickly — for some stores, there's a new season every week. This speed encourages us to feel we should be buying clothing once a week. But you can't store all of that clothing, so you have to clear out your wardrobe pretty often. You give it to a charity shop because even if you don't want it, surely someone elsewhere does. Never mind the fact that it might be shrunk, faded, the zippers broken — because that's what happens when you make clothing this quickly. Often the product presented at the end isn't very well made, which is a shame, because the people making the clothing deserve to work with excellent materials and create something that we can give a long life. But when you're working on a schedule that moves that quickly, you cut corners, and you make your manufacturer's cut corners to deliver the cheapest product possible. 

So we've got all this clothing, a lot of it isn't very good quality, and you don't want it after one season. You give it to a charity shop, but because everything is so sped up and our consumption has become hyper-consumption, charity shops can only sell about 10% of the clothing donations they receive. So the vast majority of what is given to charity shops is either being passed to another charity shop, another country, incinerated, or ending up in the landfill — which is an ecological disaster. 

If it gets passed to another country, different countries take on the burden; for example, Greece receives many seconds from charity shops in the UK. Eventually, if it really can't be sold, it gets put on a pallet and is shipped somewhere in the global south. Then countries in Africa are tasked with receiving all of our donations. Clothing given to charity is a for-profit business. It is a misconception that it is not. These pallets get shipped to maybe Rwanda or Kenya but quite possibly Ghana — the Kantamanto Market in Accra is one of the biggest second-hand clothing markets in the world. But they can't sell everything they're receiving; it's too much, which means outside of Kantamanto, you have a mountain of rotting clothes polluting the environment. It ends up getting into the ocean; it washes up on the beach; it's polluting a country that never asked for that. When we look at the start and finish of these products' life cycle, how they are made, and where they end, it's marginalized people of color getting the shaft.

Shonagh: You also talk about class and privilege. What is your response when people say making clothes better from natural textiles, and paying people better, will impact people with lower incomes in the West as they won't have access to fashionable clothing?   

Aja: First thing I would say is there are many assumptions about what poor people want to buy. Does anyone want clothing that isn't good quality? I would argue that all of us should buy clothing that is of good quality, which means that we need to raise the bar on the corporations. The price of what our clothing costs, especially from the high street, is artificially suppressed. We're going to have to get used to the idea that the price you see in these shops isn't genuinely fair — it's an exploitative price. We all have to wrap our heads around that. 

Within my lifetime, I have seen fast fashion become what it is. It didn't exist this way when I was a child, and it doesn't have to continue this way. In the past, people were dressing — I'm sure we'll figure it out. There's this huge misconception that it is poor people that keep this system profitable. That is untrue. You see that when you scrutinize the billions upon billions of dollars that the industry takes in. When researching my book, I learned that poor people and working-class people in America account for 3% of America's wealth. It takes a lot of money to make this many billionaires. I don't like this misconception that, Oh, but what about the poor people? If you want to defend the system because you want to buy into it as a middle-class person, just own that, but stop acting like you're a crusader for the poor. These people are never the type of people that show up, when we're having a conversation about raising wages for everyone. 

I reference my mom a lot, as she grew up in an economically disadvantaged background. But she never bought fast fashion because she thought it was ridiculous and a ripoff. She used to tell my sisters and me that we were wasting our money on that clothing. My mother's favorite place to shop is a charity shop in my town. She likes good heritage brands that last a long time — like Patagonia. That's how my mom shops. This idea that every person below a certain income level is snatching up all the fast fashion is ridiculous. The system is profitable because people with disposable incomes buy garments multiple times a month. If people with disposable incomes didn't buy that way, it wouldn't be a profitable system.

Shonagh: You have mentioned your book Consumed: On colonialism, climate change, consumerism & the need for collective change, which is coming out in September. You focus on consumption; can you tell me a bit more about it?

Aja: It's sort of a light biography of my life. It talks about learning the history that I've just shortly summed up, and charts how I began to understand, Oh, all of these cycles feed into oppression. I write about my need to stop feeling compelled to buy something every month because it doesn't make me feel good; it makes me feel disgusting. There were times in the past where I would go shopping and hit up all the fast fashion stores, and I would feel immediately disgusted with myself. There were times when I was living with my parents and hiding clothing I had bought in my car, and I'd have to wait until my mom went to sleep to get my shopping bags. Thinking, What has my life become? What am I doing with my life? The book is all about this journey. 

I also bring in some friends to talk about colonialism. 

It's not a shopping guide at all. If anything, it's to tell my story as a cautionary tale; Hey, young kids, don't fall for fast fashion. It's a waste of your money, time, and life. There are other things you could be doing than waiting for your app to update so you can buy something new from Boohoo. But something I always try and do on my platform, my book, and in my work generally, is I never want to be the person who can't believe you're still buying fast fashion. No, I'm always the person that's like, Yeah, I did it too. Here's why I stopped. Maybe you want to stop too.

Shonagh: I think it is a cautionary tale that a lot of age groups can gain from. Thank you so much for talking to me today, Aja. I have one final question: what would your fashion utopia look like?

Aja: The power would shift radically; right now, a small brand, most of the time, can survive five years max. So what I ultimately would like to see people with disposable income, those who are keeping the system profitable, start backing off of fast fashion a bit. Obviously, all these stores aren't all going to fail. They'll always need to be someplace for people at different price points. If you are someone who has to decide whether to get new shoes for work or to pay your electricity bill — I'm not looking at you; you are surviving. But for the people with disposable income, do you have to spend all of it at Zara? Or do you want to support an independent designer? Think about how much you're buying and consider it.

In an ideal world, small brands which were already doing good things will give some of these mega multinationals a run for their money. There'll be more options for everyone. Because when you have a small brand based in England that is surviving and thriving, that's job creation. That's people in that town being employed. That is something that can ultimately be very, very good. What I would like to see is more diversity in the fashion landscape. There is nothing more depressing for me than going to Oxford Circus and seeing one company, in particular, that seems to own one side of the street. That's depressing. That shouldn't be the world that we're going for. I want to see more designers with different abilities, more queer people, with more gender-expansive fashion. That plus-sized people are included everywhere you look, where it isn't one of those things where plus-sized people should be lucky to be a part of the conversation. I want something for people at different price points. 

That looks like a diversity of brands. It doesn't look like one group of people hoarding all the resources; it doesn't look like either superduper, high-end, expensive, or $3 for a T-shirt. Let's have a little bit more of the in-between!