Laundry, among other things

I’ve been doing laundry for six months today. Or maybe it’s ‘I’ve been doing six months of laundry today.’ It’s felt like an eternity, or at least a lifetime. What I am certain of is my wardrobe has spiraled out of control, into a mess I have to learn to accept—despite my wanting badly to light all this shit on fire and become a minimalist. Or would that make me a pyromaniac? A pyrominimalist? 

The first items I would like to ignite are all of the clothes that do not fit. They bring me an extraordinary amount of pain and distress, reminding me as they do of the fashion industry’s failure to care about the many interventions of the human body, fat being the primary intervention. I’m well aware of industry’s shortcomings, but still somehow my body’s at fault. Skinny jeans, silk shirts, and seamless cotton t-shirts—they’ve all been kept with the hopes that my body will grow in instead of out. Now, they’re just taking up space—in my apartment and my mind. These clothes will make a wonderful foundation to the wardrobe pyre I could build to liberate myself from all these fucking wash cycles. Next in the queue: the items in the rainbow-striped Ikea bag, clothes that continue to cost me money after they’ve been purchased, thanks to the cost of dry-cleaning. The lime-green gown was designed with tulle from France by a Japanese man, constructed in England, sold in Paris, and now lives with me in Harlem, and yet somehow must travel to a Korean family’s processing plant in Queens (or New Jersey) to launder out the scent of champagne and tonka. This’ll be the perfect kindling. Next: any items whose care tag lists more of what you cannot do to the item than what you can: DO NOT WASH, DO NOT DRY CLEAN, DO NOT TUMBLE DRY, DO NOT WEAR MORE THAN ONCE IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED, DO NOT DROP BARBEQUE SAUCE ON, DO NOT WEAR MAKEUP THAT BETRAYS A NORDIC HERITAGE. And anything else with that little symbol of the X’d-out triangle. 

The first commercial washing machines made their appearance in the U.S. in the decades following the industrial revolution, when textile mills made clothing more affordable and accessible to ordinary citizens. A version of the electric washing machine that I own wouldn’t make its way into American homes for another one hundred years, along with all the petrochemicals, solvents, and fragrances that make up our common detergents. When I first purchased my high-efficiency, stackable washer-dryer combo, I knew I was entering a new era of luxury. I would watch the water pour out and fill the drum, my knees grazing the machine as I sat across from it on the toilet. I was now an adult woman with an apartment in New York City who could privately wash her panties. Now pride has turned to pain, as I sort through dozens of worn drawers that will have to be sorted, washed, dried, folded, and then put away into different drawers of their own. I’m in a bit of a cycle myself: the laundry pile-up phase of my year. It can last six weeks or more. 

I’ll rummage through a clear plastic container of plan-b underwear because all of my nicer panties are living in pairs of pants, in balled up pantyhose, or are hiding from me. The plastic bins made their way into my home at the end of the last pile-up cycle in an effort to mitigate this drama with my drawers. Somehow, they have become conspirators. In some ways this strategy isn’t a total failure, but the dreams I have of my clothes being washed frequently, then organized, and put away neatly have yet to be fulfilled. In my imagination I am more organized than this. And in a lot of ways, I am.

Some astrological enthusiasts will suggest that Virgos like me are wont to be neat and tidy. When commiserating (or celebrating our supremacy) among those born between August 21 and September 21, I learn that I am a unicorn in my aversion to sartorial order in the home. The thing is, I’m capable of tidiness. My laptop is impressively organized—by affiliation, date, type, etc. The same goes for the items in my kitchen and the cleanliness of my bathroom, its shelves, and cabinets. The pressure of a Virgo’s allegiance to order will now and then sweep me into fits of organization and housekeeping. But with laundry, I have found no recourse. Recently, I read some astrological advice that suggests that the disorder might remain until I have a central organizing principle to guide my actions. The search continues. 

Simply put, when it comes to my clothes, I’m messy as hell and would much rather have my yearning for organization transported to a metaphysical maid. This see-through servant would take great pleasure in haunting my closets and coat racks. I would hope that it could be a bit spooky. Jump-scare: my sweaters have been folded! Jump-scare: the blouses and dress from the dry cleaner have been removed from their disposable hangers and returned to my armoires. Imagine the horror of my coming home after a long day to find all my body suits and stockings neatly folded into my dresser with little lavender sachets slipped in between. Unfortunately, there is no maid, and my organizing principle remains hidden. Despite the clutter, I do want things meticulously arranged and I imagine that the fulfillment of that desire would be so detailed, so-time consuming, and taxing that I opt out and live like what my mother calls the Collyer brothers. My mother would mention these brothers when taking a peek into my childhood bedroom, often my clothes exploding out of the closet. The Collyers would become known for being the original hoarders of the 1930s & 40s, and whose Harlem brownstone was once a landmark, despite the city’s decade long efforts to evict the two from their home as they lived. When I finally looked up the photos of their three-story home, filled to the brim with everything from newspapers, boxes of ephemera, and even human remains, I felt attacked. 

It’s always a spirited beginning to the laundry project. The first thing I wash is a mostly red, Walter Van Beirndock Pantone-swatch-inspired sweatsuit I bought at a Japanese-inspired concept store in Hudson, New York. As the basin fills with water, I add a color-brightening agent that calls itself free & clear, notwithstanding its price of nearly nine bucks and iridescent blue coloring. I pray that the colors won’t bleed. They don’t, and my faith in prayer is restored.

Prayer was a daily habit for my mother’s mother, though I never witnessed her carve out space to actually do it. I got the sense though, as she would silently gaze out of the living room windows or hum melodies off-key in her ancient, shrill-gravelly voice, that by the time I met her (she was eighty when I was born), she was in a constant state of intercession. My grandmother did work that my mother refers to as working in white people’s homes. Not quite the washerwoman of her childhood, but not freed from the economic disadvantages cast upon her by the richness of her skin tone in the first half of the twentieth century. Like many others, she was a reluctant keeper of the homes of people who preferred not to tend to their baseboards or dinners. Or their dishes. Or their silver. Or their children. And of course, their washing, their laundry. I cannot imagine having to survive by working in household labor from the 1930s till the 1960s, and to come home only to have to do the same.

At my best friend’s moving-away party, a group of women sat in a semi-circle at a Crown Heights cocktail bar drinking hot toddies, our conversation bouncing off of boundaries and weaving through themes of style, beauty, and sex. Gazing into the delicately rendered rouges on the lips of my homegirls, I felt a rush of gratitude, one that felt generational. With an urgent excitement I declared, we are literally doing better than our grandmothers at this age. A chorus of you damn rights flew, and in the sanctuary of that backyard under the red light of the heating lamps, we discovered that all our grandmothers did the exact same work. New York. North Carolina. Virginia. California. Mississippi. This work in white people’s homes. The boundaries of violence surrounding our bodies may have expanded slightly, but in the broadening of that survey, we each were offered wiggle room in the form of imagination. Somehow, we’d escaped what Saidiya Hartman named the marriage plot: a predetermined destiny that tethers a Black woman’s body to a man’s, to children, and the grunting work that ages the skin on your hands. That troubles your soul. Each of us, now, only needs to reckon with her own laundry, dishes, and housework. This is another plot entirely. Agency. I wonder if this is something my grandmother imagined for her daughters when they came into the world, or for me when I was born. Agency. Did my grandmother say a prayer over the waters as she added detergent to all those errant loads of clothes? If so, I wonder if she fantasized for herself a reality where she was offered a different inheritance? Should I be grateful that these twenty-plus loads of laundry that I must sort, wash, dry (or hang dry), then fold, and store, are mine? That I can wash them (or not) at my own leisure? Am I an embarrassment to her legacy for crumbling at the thought of the chore? Or am I shining example of a newfound freedom, three generations in the making? I wish I had a hot toddy.

The task of laundry is a complicated one for me at this time in my life. It’s mostly complicated because I don’t want to do it. Maybe I started too young. 

Until I said something slick about a striped shirt of mine yellowing from her overuse of bleach in the sixth grade, my mother did all my laundry. In the 1990s and the early aughts Mommie worked as an administrative assistant in white people’s offices and then worked some more at her Black family’s home. I’m not sure how she sorted the clothes, and I never got the chance to learn from her. As quickly as the comment slipped from my tweenaged lips about the state of my striped t-shirt, she exiled me to the wilderness of the laundromat. Well, you can do your own clothes now. I ask her, Mommie do you remember when I began washing my own clothes? She did, and more vividly than I could recall.  We were going back to drop off Mommie [her mother] back at the nursing home. She and I giggle our way in and out of our usual digressions in conversation, when I try to bring us back to the subject of laundry. I make the mistake of asking her if automatic washing machines had been invented when she was a girl, living in a suburb of Nassau County, Long Island. No, we went down to the river and beat them on rocks, her response dripping with a girlish vaudevillian sarcasm. 

I’m sorry mom, seriously.

I started doing my own clothes around the same age you did. I went to the laundromat on Post Avenue. 

An inheritance uncovered, one where my grandmother unburdened herself of her daughter’s dirty laundry, too.

Schlepping a large black shopping cart filled with two nylon laundry bags packed liked Italian sausages became a chore I hated so much I’d push it out of my mind until doing so became absolutely necessary. I was in Junior High school, and the kitchen had been renovated, leaving no room for the washer-dryer that once stood next to the fridge. Sometimes, I’d have to do laundry hours before sunrise to avoid having to wear a worn and stretched fleece or some off-color combination of jeans and itchy acrylic sweater, or worse, borrow clothes from my mother. My pubescent body ripe with pheromones, I learned there was no way to style myself out of funky clothes. Negotiating a pissy elevator floor with the uncooperative wheel of the large wobbly shopping cart as the doors opened into the lobby of the building, I hoped not to lock eyes with any of my neighbors rushing home to snuggle into Downy-scented pajamas washed by their mothers, aunts, or abuelitas. 

Once inside the laundromat I would shove all my belongings inside the two biggest washers, feeding dozens of quarters into the machines, emptying out the bottle of whatever carcinogenic detergent I could get from the 99-cent store, and running out of there. I’d do a version of this dance when it came time to dry, this time adding nine dryer sheets from the same 99-cent store into each drum. All of my gripes about my mother’s one mistake couldn’t make up for the tugging and fading and shrinking I inflicted upon my clothes. But I never once thought to ask her to do it for me. There was something freeing in managing the laundry myself. By the time I entered my second year of high school, I’d adopted a whole new look that was essentially a work-around for my wrinkled, holey, misshapen garments.

Some might have called it eclectic. Folks around me called it the Village look, which was code for you dress like you’re hanging out with white people. Sure, white people were around but certainly not at the center. The way I chose to dress was in stark contrast to the Bling Era styles of the early aughts. My best friend and I became pariahs among our peers for a number of reasons, but especially because of our wardrobes. And it mattered very little to us because we often kept company with grown-ass women and men and it was important to dress the part. We weren’t American-Dream-downtown scene kids trying to break into the fashion or hip-hop worlds, we were just trying to break free of the limitations on our lives that felt so palpable in our neighborhoods. My Alphabet City, her Flatbush.  So, we retreated to lower Manhattan’s West Village and SoHo.  It was then too, that I tried my hand at dressing gay. Yet, the idea of performing my sexuality through dress wasn’t something I wouldn’t come to understand until I neared high school graduation, a lifetime in those teenaged years. My mother didn’t say much of anything about my more experimental outfits. Long gone were my days of wearing brands like Baby Phat, Guess, Polo, Roc-A-Wear, ENYCE, Nike, Timberland and Sean Jean, all made popular in the aughts through Black adoration and product placement in music videos. I traded in the logos emblazoned on booties, breasts, and backpacks for one-dollar vintage tee-shirts from the local thrift store. This was the look for the fashionable downtown-industry-scene filled with dirty backpackers and skateboarders, and we were on the cutting edge. Our clothes were meant to look distressed, and boutiques like Filth Mart sold tees for upwards of $100 and jeans could be in the thousands. My best friend worked at a vintage clothing shop a few blocks from my house and helped me amass a collection of random shirts. Some with company slogans, Long Island boys’ softball team’s logos, the names of bands I’d never heard of, and random iconography from the late eighties. The need to keep my jeans perfectly ironed and unfaded went out the window, alongside any spare dollars from work and allowance. In came designer jeans meant to look raggedy. 

With my new style, laundry felt less like a burden and more a badge of honor. A performance of cool. As my wardrobe grew, so did my pride but it didn’t make me anymore mindful. Care labels were just a tag I cut out of my clothes at that time in my life; I didn’t have time to read. And dry cleaning was not in my budget. As a result, what could have become an archive of designer clothes suffered greatly. My favorite blush-colored silk Marc Jacobs button-down blouse lost is shape and a few threads after being washed with jeans, tee shirts, socks and drawers. I still wore it. 

I’ve always be proud to own a lot of clothes. Having a body constantly in flux—growing fat, shrinking some, or a lot, growing fat again—made having a lot of clothes a necessity. Secondly, growing up and attending public school and the various institutions in and around New York City required an assortment of outfits to suit these spaces’ varying social temperatures. The closer to poverty a school’s funding might be, the more likely a student is expected to dress in accord with the opposite. Clothes were not just a shield from the elements, they were armor, to some extent, from the reality penetrating every other part of me. Dark skinned. Un-skinny. Short haired and verbose. Armor was necessary. Protection from the casual cruelties of anti-Black fatphobic misogyny. Lastly, I possessed so many clothes because my mother has always taken pride in dress, and that’s an inheritance I am proud of. She was fond of decorating her youngest child in garments that told a story that was likely less about me and more about her. Good mothers have good girls and a good family and so they wear nice things. Respectability politics in shorthand. Our clothes tell the story so we don’t have to, or when we can’t. This is critical in Black life. When the time came for me to do my own washing, I had enough clothes to avoid doing laundry for weeks at a time. 

When I first moved out on my own, I did my laundry on the top floor of the building where I lived. The design college I attended had an arrangement with a landlord in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, known then for its wealth, proximity to the lake, and designer boutiques. My first roommate, from Scotch Plains, New Jersey by way of Columbus, Indiana was nicknamed Sleezy. Sleezy tapped her Newport cigarette packs on the back of her hands and rolled her weed in Optimo blunts. She had this large colorful parrot tattoo on one of her thighs, to cover a scar from a gunshot wound. Sleezy also had the worst sense of style but was thin, shapely, and right at the color of a paper bag, so she got away with those stretchy jeans with lace cutouts on the side. We laughed often. This young woman, two years senior to my seventeen felt like a woman to me in this big town masquerading as a city. On our first trip to the top floor of our building, I gazed out the floor to ceiling windows in the laundry room and took in the view of the Cabrini Green public housing development. It was being torn down, and redeveloped into something new, more affluent, and less familiar to its residents.

When I turned around, Sleezy was sorting her clothes into piles I had only witnessed on TV commercials: darks, lights, delicates. The piles corresponded to the knobs on the machine. Colors, cold water. Darks, cold water. Heavy duty, warm water. Whites, hot water. Permanent Press? She measured her brand-name detergent out and placed her clothes into the machines. What in the entire fuck, I thought to myself, trying to hide my store-brand washing liquid. Here I was, the self-righteous and relentlessly self-proclaimed New Yorker, from the most cosmopolitan city in the world, draped in boutique fashions, designer jeans, and versed in the finest of East Coast rap lingo, and I didn’t know the first fucking thing about how to wash my dirty clothes. I swallowed that shame like a Tide Pod, then quietly followed her lead. We came back to our shared room, and neatly put our clothes away, though eventually all our clothes would come raging out of their drawers off their hangers and onto the floor. Still, back then, the process of doing laundry felt good.

That was a million loads of clothes ago. I’ve only had one closet that elaborate, but the house had mice, so into bags and bins my items went. Up until recently, I relied on public or shared laundry facilities that came with their own politics. Politics meaning some asshole deciding to take your clothes out of the machines for you. Politics also meaning me deciding whether I’d be that asshole. Sorting clothes became run of the mill. I switched to brand name detergent, read the care labels and washed everything except linens in cold water. And with these new rules; more rigor. 

Nine of my nineteen black bras now hang from the shower curtain rings and the bathroom smells of freshness and eucalyptus. The basin of my bathtub is ominously dark from the water flooding out of my machine and down the drain. I’m considering bundling the remaining loads and calling in a professional. I’ve done this before, but only with items that have less chance of being ruined by a person who gives less fucks than my teenaged selves. There’s no worry like sending my precious clothes out to be cleaned by a stranger. Forget some perv sniffing my unmentionables – have at it for all I care – but please, please don’t wash something in hot water that is meant to be washed in cold! Please no fabric softener (I’m allergic). Listen, I know this shirt seems white but actually it’s off white and OFF-WHITE and the black stitching will be ruined if you bleach it. In the past I’ve left detailed notes hoping the messages will be received. They never are. My three white friends never talk of these kinds of tasks, but even I fear what might happen if someone fucks up their outgoing laundry. Repercussions will be had. I’m sure I won’t be taken as seriously. I can see the sliver of a smirk on the brown man picking up my clothes when he discovers I am the one sending them out. No, no, no, I’m not like them! Though, maybe I should be. See, see, see, my grandmother cleaned people’s homes, did their washing. Indifference covers the delivery guy’s face when he returns with only half of the washing I sent out. When I ask where the rest of my things are, the look in his eyes reminds me of Gramma. That grimace on her face—it never left, even decades after she stopped doing that kind of work. 

The routine mandate of cleaning clothes has been coded into my DNA as labor. I cannot experience it any other way. Something about this dark skin. Something about a never-ending struggle. Generational memory is like waking up from a dream, one that you can no longer remember but somehow can still feel. The laundry is never really done.

That night, back at the bar for my friend’s going away party, as my girlfriends and I collectively exhaled our relief of the burdens of our foremother’s—my one homegirl, who grew up in the notorious commonwealth of Virginia, quoted a family adage that has been permanently folded into my mind: I’m not gonna be snapping sheets for the rest of my life. Instantly, my mind recalled the image of sweeping panoramas of fields with big houses and long clotheslines in those disgusting antebellum period dramas romantically telling stories of violently enforced, agonizing, unpaid labor. Perhaps my procrastination around laundry originated not from the anxieties of growing up fat-ish and Black in the fashion capital of the U.S. (and thus cultivating an insatiable appetite for shopping and trends), but from the ancestral transference; the alchemy of mixing up of garments, water, and detergent. Every weave, stitch, pile, and fold could be haunted. We kept drinking that night and I spilled whiskey onto my swishy two-toned Jordan OFF-WHITE green warm-up pants. Thinking of all the clothes piled upon the bed—and then the makeup on the hood and neck of the beige hoodie—I felt pissed because I wouldn’t be able to repeat the outfit. My other casual clothes—those that fit—were dirty. I came home drunk and filled with desire to write something deep, but all I could fixate was on what I would wear that week. 

I pressed the washer’s grey on/off button. I fetched the pants that I’d ripped off moments earlier and thrown across the room. Added some more of that free & clear jazz to the cold water, turned the pants inside out, snapped them closed, read the label just to be sure, and tossed them in. I’ve been doing laundry ever since. Sometimes it’s a pair of pants that sparks a revolution. 

My delicate black items are swishing around in their cold bath when I realize I haven’t had a hot one. After hours of small loads—drying some, hanging some, folding none, I worry if all this labor will be for naught. Something about this laundering process is revealing that in some ways I am not reliable, even to myself. I want to organize my beloved wardrobe but can’t find the drive to finish the task. A metaphor about my life, one I do not want to explore beyond this sentence, is emerging.

There’s a pile of sweaters, sweatpants, and other casual garments leering at me in the corner of my hallway. Whenever friends visit, I describe this little nook as the laundry room. Hahaha. Two huge laundry bags (that I’ve made no commitment to washing) stabilize the flimsy collapsible rack, as it sways gently under the weight of the clothes I’ve hung on to it to dry. I pledged to launder only what I planned to wear in the coming week, but there are far more than seven days’ worth of clothes here. I also said I’d keep writing this essay until the clothes were done. What I really want is to take a bath, but not sure if I want to with a bunch of damp brassieres hanging all around me. If I did, it would be like my bathroom had become some sort of art installation. With my naked ass in the tub I just cleaned, I’d surely give some white collectors a run for their money. Laundry, Among Other Things, a new conceptual work by Artist and Writer Jet Toomer, explores the meanings of laundry, the history of domestic labor, fast fashion, clothing as protection from oppression, and a woman’s struggle to break the cycle.

Usually, my messy room indicates a messy mind—thoughts, ideas, unfinished business, wishes hiding behind dread. I call it the Big Sadness in therapy. I call it that to make my undiagnosed depression sound chipper. Like my laundry, it’s easy to stuff that feeling away. Easier to shop it away too. I compulsively invite new outfits, shoes, and accessories into my house—to be worn, of course, and they are (at some point), but only to maintain the veneer of my own sanity. The façade of being fashionable. Underneath: turmoil, chaos: vacillating distractions. Being habitually well-dressed and groomed signals to the parts of me hidden under the piles of clothes that I still exist, that disorganization hasn’t taken over. But also, the mess signals that it could, that it has the power to overrun my house, and possibly my image. Could being untidy be the end of me? It feels like it sometimes. 

I’ve laid down just shy of two dozen warm-from-the-dryer garments on my partner’s side of the bed, to ensure that when I go to bed tonight, alone, they won’t become a weighted blanket kicked to the floor. I want to say that tonight will be different, that writing about my literal dirty laundry will somehow liberate me from the shame of letting life pile up all around me. But I know myself well enough to know that I will have to fight with myself. To push past the peculiar kinds of organization I have designed to match the desires of my exacting mind. There are consequences, namely meeting with the Big Sadness for failing to fold my shirts and organize my tops and bottoms by use, color, texture, and whatever other arbitrary rules the washerwoman-and mistress-in-me deems fit.

Finally, I’ve washed the clothes I want to wear, and I’ve set aside items to donate to charity. I’ve read that the world’s largest piles of discarded fast fashion are being shipped to Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya. I’ve always wanted to visit these places in Africa. In some way, little parts of me are there. I wonder how many of my donated clothes, the ones that weren’t first sold in US thrift stores, have become Mitumba (Swahili for bundles of American goods, from consumers and corporations alike), are being sold in village markets. I wonder which items are now deteriorating in 185,000-ton heaps on the mother continent. Of the 15 million items a week that make their way to African shores, would I recognize some of those business-casual tops from Zara I bought when I tried to have an office job? It’s not lost on me that many of these items are discarded in waterways, disrupting the washing for a woman trying to make a living or keeping her family looking presentable.

All I need is a match and I might be able to solve my part of the waste crisis. I’m sure there’s some kind of legislation that could tax the CO2 emissions produced by the burning of a Zara blouse.

My queerness has freed me from some of the prescribed obligations of adulthood. I do not fantasize of a life of motherhood. But the silhouette of a daughter haunts me. If perhaps one day she is born, I’ll be nothing like my mother when it comes to laundry. I will teach my sweet dark brown child the importance of order, how to sort clothes, to distinguish the right temperatures to wash these items, to invest in some really good “natural” detergent, to never buy things that need to be dry cleaned. She will know the plight of all the women before her destined to snap sheets and know that she has choices. That she doesn’t have to do anything that resembles what she’s been taught or what she’s witnessed. By then, I will have won my battle with clothes, with excess, with the trouble of getting it all done. As she grows from infant, to baby, to toddler, I will have discarded all the items that no longer (fit) serve me, and streamlined my wardrobe into a uniform, with the exception of dressy garments for special events. 

Since we won’t be poor (I hope), and I’ll homeschool her, she’ll have a uniformity to her style, and thus never need to fill her drawers in order to prove to other children and some adults that she is worthy. If she chooses to express herself through dress, she’ll be conscious of the global impact of her choices and buy clothing she loves, that will last, perhaps swapping clothes with friends instead of adding her items to the colossal mountains of fashion waste. Then, once she’s confident and trained, I’ll have her do my laundry. I can imagine her rage when she learns, no doubt from her talkative grandmother, that I was tasked with washing my own damn clothes, and not the family’s and it is with hope that she ignites her great-grandmother’s wish, a prayer as kindling, and lights all the shit on fire. My little pyrominmalist.

Jet Toomer is a writer, community organizer, and muse. She’s a LAMBDA literary & Joel Gay Creative Writing Fellow. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Her column Tiny Violences is a featured newsletter on the Substack network. Jet’s writing can be found in Lesbians Are Miracles, Miami Herald, The Angry Africans, and Charlotte Observer, and is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review. She lives in New York.

Shinique Smith’s sculptures decontextualize ordinary objects and belongings, assigning them complex definitions that question the objects’ origins and alleged neutrality. Through her process of bundling and accumulating items with stories that are deeply connected to systems of labor, Smith’s practice speaks to the dangerous consequences of fast fashion and overconsumption which intersect socially, economically, and environmentally. A Baltimore native, Smith received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992 and 2003, respectively, and has also served on MICA’s board of trustees.