Oh lad, dear listener, kipasor Radueskuchak Gomostan. Today we're going to bring you an episode from Classy. It's a new podcast hosted by Jonathan Menhivar, in which he explores a topic that well, a lot of people find uncomfortable. It's the issue of class. Jonathan grew up in a working class family in a suburb of Los Angeles. His dad is from Al Salvador, and as Jonathan built a career in public radio, he didn't talk about his past. And that was because of the issue of class. Now, you
can't separate class from race. They often go hand in hand with the way we look, the way we dress, and so in this episode of Classy, Jonathan interviews two people of color who work in the fashion industry. One of them is Brenda Equihua, Latina designer, who has turned our beloved gobekass into a luxury fashion item. Because why should we feel guilty about wanting nice things? And who decides which things are considered nice and which things aren't.
Here's Jonathan men Hevar with this episode of Classy.
This episode was supposed to be about fashion. I think a lot about what our clothes say about us and what they convey to the world. What I wear has been a pretty monumental part of the class shift I've made. But then I talked to the two people who you're going to hear from today. They've both worked in the clothing and fashion industry, and those conversations they ended up being about so much more than clothes, and more about who is considered classy and who has the power to
say what classy actually is. From Pineapple Street Studios, this is You Guessed It Classy, a show about the chasms between us that are really hard to talk about but too big to ignore. Your host Jonathan and Hev We're gonna get started with this guy. His name is Amichi Uguo, and I called him up because I knew he'd worked in retail, selling clothes and high end men's to wear shops across the country. I was interested in that dynamic of being a salesman and selling really fancy suits and
shoes to people with a lot of money. Amichi first got into clothes when he was in college. Back then, he was experimenting a lot, and some of his clothes were pretty wild.
I can describe to you one outfit that everybody always remembers I had on a horse jockey helmet. A helmet, yeah, horse jockey helmet, some mirrored aviator sunglasses, a satin gold bow tie, a dress military jacket, some corn corduroys, red sox, black pat leather shoes. I mean, if you can picture dad outfit in your what that might have looked like. Oh, I was having fun.
I mean, you grew up in Houston. His family was middle class, it was mostly black neighborhood, and for college, he went to Southern University in Baton, Riuge, Louisiana.
Southern University is a historically black college, and I remember sitting in the crowd, you know, at convocation and I looked to my left and every my right, and everybody's black. I look into the stands and everybody's black. I graduated on a Saturday. I start my first job following Tuesday, and I remember being in the first morning meeting and looking around. I was like, damn, it's really just it's just me now, you know, It's just I'm I'm the
only black person now. And that was a different experience. That was something that like in my life I had never experienced. I think from elementary school, all the way to college. Everybody was either black or Hispanic majority.
The shop Amichi was working at was fancy, the kind of place featured in GQ magazine. His coworkers there, they were welcoming, and they all had to wear a kind of uniform, a blazer and Oxford shirt. Amichi looked good in the clothes. He was wearing leather sold shoes for
the first time in his life. But pretty quickly the fact that Amichi was black became a thing between him and some of the guys he was working with, not in any kind of overt way, but things would come up when they were standing around waiting for customers, Like.
If we were talking about cars, right, and everybody's super into the Ferraris and porsches in and Lamborghini's, you know, and I was talking, man, I want a nineteen seventy six Cadillac Eldorado. I wanted to be silver, and you know, I'll describe my own car like what inspire me, you know, I think about like blaxploitation films and just in the neighborhood, like you grow up seeing like that was part of our culture. Was like taking these old school cars and fixing them up.
I mean she would talk about the bright, shiny paint people used on the cars, the big sound systems.
Those were the things that like really inspired me, Like seeing those things like, man, look like spaceship. I was like, look at that, look at the cars, like the hood of the car is super long. It's something about seeing those cars that like, really I wanted one. So to come to that group where that's talking about Ferrari and Porsche and Binzes and Rose Royce. They were what like that Cadillac? They thought it was strange. They were like,
why would you want a Cadillac? And I was like, man, look at it like they didn't get it, Like they just didn't understand.
And what that feel like?
It's like feeling rejected a little bit. You know, you like you present something that you're excited about or that you love and then people laugh at it, and it kind of like puts you in a position where you kind of doubt yourself, you know, like is this good? Like should I not? You know, like you start to look at your opinions or your ideas and question yourself. And it was frustrating because I wanted to be myself, but you also in a sense want to be a
part of the team. You know, you want to feel like the things that you think are cool that somebody else is like, I see what you're talking about. You know, they can relate to it in some way, But sometimes it felt like they wouldn't even try. Even though I learned a lot about Porsches and Ferraris and Rolls Royces, and you know, I learned a lot about it.
This car thing. It wasn't just a matter of not fitting in and having his taste questioned. It's actually important to the job relating to customers, having some sort of shared understanding of the things you're into. That's how you sell clothes.
In luxury fashion. A lot of your job as a salesperson when they walk in is not necessarily trying to sell them this one item, but to connect with them and make them feel like they belong here and this
is where they want to buy it. And I think it was when I started having conversations with these people that I started to get a better understanding like how different we were, Like, oh yeah, me and my wife went to the country club and we were you know, played some rounds of tennis, and then we had brunch, and then we did it, and it's like, that's not a part of my brand. I don't you know, I don't know anybody who went to brunch when I was when I was growing up.
Selling clothes to guys who are driving roles choices, this kind of power dynamic. I mean, you found it intimidating. He says. He kind of folded in on himself at first, but over time it went away because he developed this way to combat that feeling.
You know, growing up in my community, we have a way of still being able to like find our own worth regardless of what such and such or whoever might have. You know, you can't tell me I'm not that guy because I don't have money. You may have money, you may have the cars, whatever, But I'm flyed in you. I dress better than you, I look better than you. You know, like all of these things you find to like stop, I ain't worried about, you know, what such
and such has when he walks in the door. And that became like the attitude that I had to tap into.
I Maye worked at this store for a few years, and then he moved to New York and started working I didn't even higher end menswear store that kind of place where you can't just walk out the door with clothes. You gotta get measured and have them all tailored and everything. This shop is a little more international. There were Asians from all over the world and some white.
Guys, so it was a little bit of a mixed bag. And then again just me still the only black guy here.
There weren't people actively questioning them Chie's taste, but still being the only black eye, he found himself kind of hemmed in trying to follow some unspoken rules about the way he should behave all the standard code switching that people of color often have to do in situations like this, but maybe weirder, there seemed to be these rules that the other employees in the store were following about the way they should behave around him.
There were times when it was really apparent that some of my white coworkers had never worked with black people before, like they didn't know how what to do with themselves, you know, like it manifests itself as like over compensation. I mean sometimes it would be like just overpraising me, you know, like, oh, you're doing this so well, you're doing that. It's like, man, I literally just put the shoe on the shelf, like why are you doing?
Like?
You know.
So it's in this environment that something happens one day that really shakes him achi It makes him question all the ways he's been adjusting himself to fit in.
It was a really quiet day, we didn't have a whole lot going on in the shop, and this guy walks in and immediately when he walks in, everybody's ears kind of perk up because dude kind of looks like he's homeless and tells everybody he wants to get a suit. So they're like, all right, they start putting suits on him. You know, he's trying on everything. He eventually ends up with a whole kid on shirt, jacket, shoes, socks, tie, whole thing, and he puts it on. He's looking at mirror.
He's like, oh yeah, man, I like it. He's like, I'll take it. And we're all kind of like because all of the clothes at this shop come unfinished. So the hem on the pants is not done, the sleeves are not done, and it looks like at this point the suit is swallowing him a little bit.
I mean she is standing off to the side watching all this happen. The guy tells the salesmen that are helping him that he'll take the suit as is. He wants to walk out wearing it.
So he gets up to the counter and they ring everything up, comes out to a couple thousand dollars, and he starts looking for his wallet. After we give him total. He's like patting his pockets, and we're like, oh, man, I think in the back of everybody's mind, we're like, he ain't got no wallet. And he starts patting his pockets. He's like, maybe i'll lift it in dressing room, goes back in the dressing room. There's no wallet, and we're preparing for something to happen. We're like, all right, he
can't find his wallet. Like this is the point where he just like braks for the door and tries to tackle somebody, you know. So you know, we kind of get into this formation that lets him know like, you know, we're all here, we're all paying attention, we're all alert, and you can kind of see him looking around and checking. He sees somebody at the door, he sees somebody standing
next to him. The guy at the counter is just kind of like waiting, like what you're gonna do, and then he just kind of pauses and says, you know what, I guess I'm just gonna come back, you know, I gotta go find my wallet, and goes back to the fitting room, takes everything off, and leaves, never comes back. That was a particularly strange like scenario for me because
the guy happened to be black. I had my own you know, there was my own ideas, my own thoughts that were that were happening while this was going, and I think one of them was feeling like, oh man, why is this guy coming in here and and doing this? Why is he making us look bad? You know, That's that's what's going through my head at the time. It was unfair, that was I mean to say that, like, in hindsight, that's an unfair way to look at that, But that was that was what I was thinking at that time.
Did you guys talk about it after the guy left?
I think when he walked out the door, everybody just kind of stared at each other for like thirty seconds. We were just like trying to figure out exactly what, you know, what just happened. Yeah, that was something I more had to sit with on my own, and I don't I don't even think I talked to any friends about it or or really got to like hash that out with anybody.
What is that making us look bad?
What?
What in what way were you thinking, like he's making us look bad? I think I understand, but uh, well, you know, like there's this idea in in the black community that like we always have to be on our best behavior, like we all have to be doing, you know,
doing the right thing. Like you know, a white person or anybody, it doesn't have to necessarily be somebody white, but they experience like a black person, one black person or two or five, and then they say black people are this, or they behave like that, or black people are always doing this. So where I was coming from when I thought that was, you know, like this is just another strike on that you know, on that list.
You know, someone who's not black experiencing a black person in this way and them putting that like, oh they black people, da da da. And this is in my mind, this may not even be what these other people were thinking, but this is just because of how I'm experiencing the world and people who look like me have experienced the world. This is what's going through my mind.
I may and with all my coworkers, with all of the people that we work with, I might be the only black person they ever interact with, you know, in their life, and I just think about like those space. I think in that space, I was thinking, well, like, we're never here, so when we do show up, it needs to be in the best light.
Did that make you think anything at all about the way that it's different? But in some ways you had to be on your best behavior at these places, Like you couldn't be one hundred percent authentically who you were.
Yeah. Yeah, I felt like that. And maybe some of that might have been in my head too, you know, thinking that I couldn't be myself, and maybe I could have been and they would have been totally accepting of it. You know, that's quite possible. But I think at that time, I don't think I ever felt comfortable completely, you know, one hundred percent being myself because there was still a little bit of discomfort for me in being the only
black guy, like being the only black person. I still feel like there were certain topics, certain subjects that I would only want to talk about with other black people, or only want to hear the perspective of certain people. I mean, like I think about that scenario that I
just told you about. It's like I couldn't imagine ever having that conversation with somebody, or telling somebody about my thoughts and how I felt with somebody who wasn't black up until now, because if you don't come from that or understand why I might have thought that, it'd be hard for you to understand where I was coming from or how to rationalize what it was I was saying.
I mean, chi Uu no longer works at that shop in New York. His last retail job was in twenty twenty. In some ways, he's returned to a place where he's not having to think about things like this all the time. He now runs his own brand, making sportswear for HBCUs. It's called Torch Sportswear.
Where I am now, I don't think I'll ever work another retail job. I pray that I never have to work in retail again, but I know that if that day ever came, my approach would be a lot different. You know, how I would move in that space and how I would present myself would be different than I have in the past. I can't compress myself anymore.
I'm never going to fully understand what it was like for Amhi in that moment, but it makes so much sense. I think you probably understand it to some degree too. But I have had experiences where the combination of race and class has made me do things that I have questioned. I'm a pretty white, passing Latino. I grew up with the culture. My first language was Spanglish, but my Spanish
is pretty broken now. Sometimes people don't know I'm Latino until I tell them, Like this one time at work, someone pointed at my face after I told them, and they said, I knew there was something going on there.
The thing that's happened for me, the way that I have frankly gotten a little confused, I guess when it comes to race and class, is that when I decided that I wanted a life where I could be creative and not have to do manual labor, I mostly look to white people and white culture, but like odd, dorky pockets of white culture. Like when I was a teenager, one of my first exposures to journalism, the thing I would watch whenever it was on TV was this guy,
Hugh Houser. He was from Tennessee and he'd travel all over California with a microphone, doing features on things like making peanut brittle.
Now we're gonna pour it out.
That's right there.
You go, oh look, now that's peanut brittle.
That's peanut brittle.
There's other stuff too. I'm an eagle Scout. I wore that uniform until I was eighteen years old. But maybe the strangest thing I got into I think I am very embarrassed to confess right now, is it. For a year or two when I was in high school, I had a subscription to Country Living magazine. I think maybe it started because I was into ram and they were from the South, or maybe I just wanted out of my house, out of my boring suburban town, and the
country somehow seemed appealing. I don't know, but one day in the grocery store I picked up this magazine and I just couldn't get enough. There was feature after feature of nice, proper little houses out in the country somewhere, with everything decorated just so. I thought it was so classy. It was like Dwell Magazine if Colonel Sanders was the editor in chief.
I loved it.
And you know, people of color are allowed to consume whatever culture. They want all this nerdy white stuff. It influenced me deeply, still does. My daughter makes fun of me because I will watch hours and hours of that home renovation show Hometown that's basically country living on HGTV. The part of all of this that feels upsetting is that when I was looking for an escape hatch, I didn't see any examples of Latinos out there. They were there in music and film and literature, even journalism. I
know that now, but they weren't on the TV. They weren't mainstream. This was all happening at a time when anti immigrant fervor was raging in California. Voters had overwhelmingly supported Prop One eighty seven, basically taking away all social services for undocumented immigrants, and kids at my school were openly talking to me about Mexicans stealing jobs and living
off of welfare. At the same time, some people in my own family were calling me owero for living in the suburbs and being into the things I was into. I think, in some ways, through some combination of all of that, I internalized that Latinos didn't deserve better, that we didn't deserve nice things. Coming up, someone helps me see that we do, all right, Jonathan, back here, you're very classy host. Brenda Akihwa is a luxury fashion designer in la Her work has been featured in Vogue and
The La Times. Bad Bunny and Lil nas X have worn her stuff, but it took her a while to get to that place. Her journey into the world of fashion started in high school when she applied to Parsons, the Art and Design College in New York.
I'd heard of that school just through overhearing someone's conversation. That's how I heard about that fashion school.
Someone at school.
Yeah, someone at school. So I'm a very curious person, and that's how I've acquired. Percent of the information has been through nosiness. You know, I am a professional Chi's moosa, that's use this information for good reasons.
A chismosa is a gossip and you could call Brenda a Chi's moosa. But really what she was was an observer, the trait she picked up from her mom. Brenda grew up in Santa Barbara, California. It's a town right on the beach, super affluent. Brenda was being raised by her single mom there in a Latino community that was mostly employed working for the rich, mostly white people in town.
Brenda's mom cleaned houses, and sometimes Brenda would come along with her, and she'd see firsthand the way her mom was actively studying these people's lives.
So my mom would always show us like, oh, look, you know, smell this perfume. It smells really good. We should get this. Or I've seen this grandma at this other lady's house, so this must be really good, you know. And so we learned through this sort of unauthorized access what good products were that we wouldn't have known otherwise.
Brenda's mom would do the same at yard sales. She'd drive her rich neighborhoods and buy up all the brand name clothing they couldn't normally afford. She got brand of fancy, almost over the top stuff for coats, this pleated vintage dress from the thirties.
In my world, having a crocodile alligator clutch, you know, in junior high was totally normal.
Her mom would indulge in nice clothes too, living out a life where she was saying that you can be classy no matter where you come from.
My mom was wearing evening gowns like to my fifth grade parties that were outside in the dusty like environment of our apartment complex, and she'd be decked out for our parties, like she was like my Beyonce, And now that I'm older, I'm like, that's so cool that she was like that because maybe in her mind she knew that she might not ever have the opportunity to wear that gown to whatever is considered acceptable.
So she's Mosa Brenda. She overhears about this fashion school in New York. She applies to Parsons, she gets in. She can't afford to visit New York before she goes, really can't afford the school, but the community rallies around her to help her cover some costs, and once she's there, she's overwhelmed by the level of wealth. There are students from all over the world, and they are wealthy in a way that even growing up in Santa Barbara, she'd never seen.
I had a friend who told me that, you know, back home, she'd come out of the shower and all of her clothes was already laid.
Out for her, who laid out her clothes.
Her workers.
But the thing she really notices, the thing she struggles with, is that it Parsons all the reference points come from white culture. It's in the designers they're being taught about and the classic films they're being shown.
Some of the movies were like Gone with the Wind and some like It Hot, You.
Like go watch My Do Frankly might hair, I don't give a damn.
And these were the things that you were supposed to know, right like the Marilyn Monroe, Catherine have Burned, you know what are considered American classic icons and movies. It was good education, Like I was happy to learn it because I didn't really have a lot of exposure to that. I mean, I did grow up watching classic films, but they were Mexican ones. They were movies with Betherin Fante
and Maria Felix. And then of course we're in New York, so it was all about being chic, and it was about Calvin Klein and Donna Karen and Jill Sander, and it was about being sleek and chic and clean cut.
Brenda says she was in survival mode at Parsons. She was scraping money together to buy fabric for her projects. She was basically just eating bagels with cream cheese for every meal, and on this tight budget and under stress. She couldn't make work that matched the garments she was seeing in her head. She started failing classes.
And as this was happening, I remember I went on a walk one day with one of the guys that I was in class with, and I shared with him my story of how I was being failed, and he told me that he had a woman that lived with him, that cooked for him, cleaned for him, and sewed all of his projects for him. And I'm just listening to this story, thinking, our worlds are so drastically different, I can't even believe that we're being graded by the same standards.
Brenda eventually finds her stride. She manages to get through Parsons. After she graduates, she gets a couple different jobs working in the industry as a designer, but she finds it working in the fashion world. It's like Parsons the Reboot. There's money, there's whiteness. She's working in fashion, but she's miserable. The people she really connects with are the pattern makers,
who are working class, mostly Asian and Latino. She really values the level of skill they're bringing to the work, but still she wants to build something of her own. And then one day, she's with her family. They're driving to Six Flags Magic Mountain. Her brothers at the wheel, and she says.
Turn the music down. I have an announcement. I have something I want to tell you guys. So they turn the music down and I told them I have this crazy idea. I want to make jackets and outer wear out of Golobeha blankets.
Okay, Latinos, this school golobia has are these blankets that are super popular in the Latino community. They're soft, thick, plushy, and probably the most notable thing about them is that they're loud. You can get them with almost anything printed on them, Lakers logo, the Virgin Mary. A lot of them have exotic animals, tigers and lions and wolves and cheetahs and wild horses and tigers and unicorns and tigers, so many tigers. I still have some that I've had
since I was a kid. They're also pretty cheap. So with this idea, the next day, Brenda goes to her studio and gets to work right away. She wants to take gobe has and turn them into something luxurious.
I built a pattern, I figured out what, you know, what I need to do first and try to figure out the steps, and I knew that it logistically it was going to be a hot disaster.
Okay, I understand you like have this vision, but why, like, why do you want to take this thing that is seen as cheap and kind of even like low class if people even know about it at all? Why do you want to take that and turn it into a coat?
Gosh?
You know, I mean it's my story. I feel like it's very much me right, Like I came from that world and then I learned all of these things, like all of like ways of seeing that were a bit different, And when I thought about the blankets, a part of me felt like, damn, I really don't want this to disappear.
Is any of it at all a kind of fuck you to a culture that sort of rejected you for a while?
Oh?
Absolutely. My life has been a series of fuck yous at every environment that I've been in. You know, that's always been me. I've always been like with my finger out in every environment. That's why I'm like, I don't care if I belong, I'm going to be here. This is where I need to be. Growing up in Santa Barbara and going to school aut Parsons and being in the industry, it was always felt like this very curated experience by other people that didn't feel relatable to me,
And I was like, how do I change that? Like this isn't right, this doesn't feel good.
I'm so jealous of people like this who can walk through the world giving the bird and relying on the strength of that, that ability to deflect rich with your middle fingers like their wonder Woman's bracelets. I've tried being angry, but all it ever got me was bitterness and callouses. Instead, I've kept my middle fingers in my pockets and tried to blend in. For me, that seemed like the classiest way to get by, But I don't know. Now I'm not so sure.
I'm about to try on the devotion coat.
Unfortunately, I was stuck in my closet with all my lame clothes while I was talking to Brenda. But my producer Kristen was there in Brenda's studio in La surrounded by all Herkulebeha inspired clothes. Kristin pulled out a full length hooded coat. It's deep red with roses all over the front, no big gest virgin mary on the back.
My gosh, thank you.
Wow, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Like eating, but wow, I look so fine.
The pockets are perfect. The moment I put my arm in.
The sleeve, I felt like.
Ephic like it, Like I just felt like my arm just dipped into some like comfort puddle.
Yeah, that's what we try to do.
Wow, these coats are so nice. Anybody who's spent winter's snuggles under golovi hus LUs after them. But I wondered how Brenda felt taking this blanket you can get for forty dollars, this working class immigrant luxury item, and turning it into coats that some of them I sell for more than seven hundred dollars.
These codes don't have to be that price. I make them that price because of all the work and the details that I put into it. You know, Like we buy all of our zippers here in LA because they're the best zippers that I could find. So they are expensive because I make them more expensive than they should be through my choices. And that is my education. That is me. Like, that is how I grew up. I wanted to have nice things. I like how nice things feel. I like having them in my home. I like touching
nice things. I like looking at them, so I make things that look and feel good. You know, we've never been given the authority to be the curators of style, and that's sort of what I feel like I want to do.
Loudly hearing Brenda's say this, it had a profound effect on me, just hearing someone say it's okay to have nice things and that those nice things don't have to be what mainstream culture says they are. A lot of us are Latinos because we grew up with people who didn't have nice things, and because the images of Latinos that we see most often are people who are suffering and working their asses off, desperately trying to build new lives.
Sometimes it feels like an abandonment to want, but I want. It wasn't immediately after this interview, but sometime in the making of this show, I put on this this old gold chain my dad had given me when I was a teenager. When he first gave it to me, it didn't feel right. It wasn't my Weddo vibe at the time. But a few weeks ago I dug the chain out of a little box in my nightstand and I put it on and it looked right. I know gold chains aren't solely the domain of latinos, just like country living
isn't just for white people. But this one is. It's gold, and it's a little loud, and it looks good on me. Okay, here we are. We've been talking about class for three episodes, and man, it is even clearer to me now than when we started that class can be so sticky and uncomfortable, and you know, nobody's perfect no matter what our class background is. We are all bound to cross some lines
and make mistakes, maybe even defend people. And I don't necessarily have all the answers for what to do in those situations, but I know someone who might be able to help, and he's going to answer your questions. That's on the next episode of Classy. Classy is a production of Pineapple Street Studios. It's written and produced by me Jonathan men Ivar. Our producer is Kristin Torres, Associate producer Marina Hanke, Senior managing producer Asha Saluja. Our editor is
Haley Howell, Executive editor Joel Lovel. Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardallas and Jade Brooks. Senior engineers are Mari Na Fais and bedro Lviira, fact checking by Tom Colligan. This episode was mixed and scored by Marina Pais, with additional scoring by Me. Music in this episode from Joseph Chabasan courtesy of Western Vinyl Joseph Chabasan and Vibrant Matter and Shavason and Gunning courtesy of Seance Center. Additional music from
Epidemic Sound. Our artwork is by Kurt Courtney and Lauren Vira at Cadence thirteen. Marketing and promotion by Grace cohen Chen, Hillary Schuff and Liz O'Malley. Legal services for Pineapple Street Studios by Crystal Tupia at Odyssey Special thanks to Jeremy Kirkland. Jenna Wey Sperman and Max Lensky are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. The next episode will be out in a week. Make sure to listen on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.