Today we’d like to introduce you to Radical Clothes Swap.
Hi Radical Clothes Swap, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
We are a woman of color run non-profit that hosts donation-based clothing swaps in Los Angeles, California. Radical Clothes Swap was created by co-founders Nicole Macias and Jannine Mancilla, both of whom had previously hosted their own clothing swaps—yet never before met in person. By the grace of Instagram, both women met digitally through the shared love of fashion and community and decided to join forces, because dismantling our relationship with clothes is no easy feat.
Soon after, community advocates and longtime friends of both co-founders, Enri Navarro and Nikki Hernandez joined the team. What started off as a passion project quickly snowballed into a full-fledged organization. We are on a mission to normalize radical sustainability by providing free clothes for all. Our goal is to educate our communities on the negative effects of fast fashion and overconsumption while providing resources to change our relationship with clothing. Why free clothes for all? Because overconsumption is killing our planet and big corporate companies are capitalizing on our communities. We believe in sharing our resources with our community.
Radical Clothes Swap was created from a place of love for the L.A. community, accessible fashion, and eco-friendly practices. All members of RCS have been using sustainable practices when it comes to fashion, like thrifting, mending, and repurposing clothes without even being very conscious of it. Our ancestors and families have been doing this for years, we just never really put a name on it, or made it more accessible outside of our respective circles. Now, we’re applying what we know, what we grew up with, and sharing it with our community on a larger scale. Each member of RCS has hosted our own clothing swaps separately for different organizations and markets, when we decided to join forces to create Radical Clothes Swap to expand our reach—it’s a lot of work, and you definitely need a team!
About the team:
NICOLE MACIAS
Nicole is a community organizer and writer based out of Northeast L.A. Her work focuses on traveling, love, heartache, death, and colorism. She is the author of El Amor Es Algo Sin Nombre and Corazón Vecino, a collection of short stories about love and death published by Razorcake. When she’s not busy working as a writer for a sustainable clothing company, you can find her doting around the city with her fur baby Metztli or curled up in bed with a good book. You can read her work at www.salsaontheside.com.
JANNINE MANCILLA
As an Anthropologist, Jannine focuses on working with Indigenous communities to aid in keeping their culture and traditions alive. She’s worked in archeology as a field assistant as well as, conducting field research among indigenous communities. You can find Jannine, in Downtown LA, conducting food tours where she talks about culture, food, and history. In her downtime, Jannine likes to get lost in a good book and spend time outdoors.
ENRIQUETTA NAVARRO
Enri is a librarian and art/community organizer living in East LA. She has her degree in Fashion Journalism and is also a co-organizer for Los Angeles Zine Fest. Astrologically, her sun is in Cancer, moon in Aquarius, and rising in Taurus. When she isn’t busy shelving children’s books or working on her million-and-one side projects, Enri also enjoys tending to her plants, collecting novel keychains, and getting a little treat.
NIKKI HERNANDEZ
Meet Nikki Hernandez, an aspiring business owner advocating for radical liberation and sustainable fashion in a digital world. In her day job, she is a Campaign & Content Manager for a neighborhood shoe store, and at night, she splits her time between reading, writing, and working on her book blog. Read her work and be part of her bookish community at thebookishb.com.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The biggest challenge has been balancing RCS with all the other things in our lives. We all have full-time jobs and are only able to host swaps on weekends. It seems that every time we do a swap we get bigger and bigger, which is absolutely amazing, but also overwhelming. We are a small collective and we do it all (organizing, scheduling, designing, social media, marketing) ourselves, we even store all of the gear and donations at our homes, which if you’ve been to our Angel City Brewery swap, which is our biggest swap we host, it’s A LOT of stuff! Although some of our team members have worked (and still work) with other nonprofits, we’ve never built one from scratch, so there’s a lot of research, education and growth involved not just as a business, but as individuals. Through it all, we are lucky enough to lean on each other and remind each other of our capacities and boundaries so we don’t burn out. We’re blessed to have such a supportive team, each with our own skill set that keeps our collective running. We’ve truly created a sisterhood and we are all so very thankful for how much RCS has grown.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are a small woman of color run nonprofit that provides free clothes to the community by hosting monthly popups throughout Los Angeles. In a capitalist society, swapping clothes (for free!) is a radical, anticapitalist act that empowers communities to come together for both the greater and individual good. We are working on dismantling folks’ relationship with overconsumption and clothes by encouraging folks to swap, not shop. There’s so much apparel dumped around the world that could be used but instead new clothes are created that will probably end up in a landfill. Driving trends and making clothing that doesn’t last makes more money, we get it, but it’s hurting our planet.
Our entire ethos is all about community and resource sharing. It’s safe to say that we are products of our own communities—we know the importance of having a community that cares about you, supports you and educates you. It’s important for us to give back to the communities that gave so much to us.
One of the biggest things that we’ve learned is how simple something like a clothing swap can build community while fulfilling a need. Sometimes we forget that we can look to the people within our neighborhoods and a little beyond to share resources and form friendships with. We’ve met some really great people who just want to help us get the word out and share more resources, and to us, that’s really beautiful. It’s what keeps us going.
We love all the people we’ve been able to connect with. We get to meet patrons, creators, small business owners, and other community organizers who align with our values and vision. We’re so inspired by them and so thankful for their support. One of our favorite things to witness at our swap is first-timers’ reaction—to see their expression change from confusion or disbelief to utter joy and surprise that our clothes are free and that there’s no catch. It always brings a smile to our faces!
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
We definitely see big moves for RCS. In the short amount of time that we’ve been functioning as a make-shift collective, we’ve officially become a nonprofit after three years of hosting swaps, which is a huge feat for us! We started this collective as a passion project between friends, it was just something we did for fun and then very quickly realized how much our community needed this. We’re just messengers! RCS is its own beast, we collectively have a dream of a brick and mortar community space. What that looks like exactly is still up in the air, we know it will happen when the time is right. We look at places like Mi Vida, Jr. High Collective, SaltEaters, and Earth y Corazon as inspiration for the kind of space we want to provide for our community. A place to take workshops, hang, feel safe and seen, a Raddie Baddie haven if you will.
We also want to work with other orgs, community spaces, colleges, and universities to help spread our ethos and just make friends. We all have our individual dream brand collaborations, Big Bud Press is collectively on our list! Slowly but surely, these plans are happening for us, and we’re so thankful! We’ve been invited to speak on sustainable fashion panels and we see and welcome more of that for the future of RCS.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://radicalclothesswap.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radicalclothesswap
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@radicalclothesswap
Image Credits
Nikki Hernandez
Casey Sripramong
