The Iranian-American writer, who started out with no fashion background, set out to slowly but surely disrupt the industry.

By Shriya Samavai Manian
Photography by Daniel Delgado

Teen Vogue

During a talk for the Chicago Public Library in late 2020, Hoda Katebi told her audience that the fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to pollution on Earth, second only to the U.S. Military. The Iranian-American writer, community organizer, and educator is setting the scene for what led her, someone with no background in fashion, to start a clothing manufacturing co-op in Chicago. Blue Tin Production, her worker-owned organization that employs predominantly working-class women of color, is Katebi’s response to fast fashion and its countless detrimental effects on the environment and the people who make our clothes.

Life changed drastically for Katebi in the sixth grade, when she began wearing a hijab to school in her home state of Oklahoma. She was no stranger to racism and Islamophobia before then, but the taunting grew when she ventured outdoors wearing the headscarf. While attending the University of Chicago, Katebi began piecing together how fashion and politics have always been intertwined and discovered the egregious human rights violations against garment workers worldwide. With her background in social justice and community organizing, Katebi started sketching out a solution to the 21st century’s urgent issue of overconsumption and its connections to labor rights and climate change.

Teen Vogue speaks to Katebi about her journey of finding her place in Iranian culture, how her popular blog, Joojoo Azad, led to the creation of Blue Tin, and how she recovers and cares for herself after long days.

Teen Vogue: What was it like being a young Muslim person growing up in Oklahoma?

Hoda Katebi: Oklahoma was definitely...interesting. Looking back, I would never wish that experience on anybody else, but I think it was so necessary for me to grow in the ways that I did. Not to give any credit to racists! [Laughs] A lot of my learning happened outside of classrooms, and I recognized that my lived experience was more relevant and accurate than what I would learn in a classroom. I remember everything we’d be learning about U.S. history would be racist, it would erase Indigenous people. We had mock land runs growing up.…

TV: What is a “land run”?

HK: After [the settlers] kicked all of the Indigenous people out of Oklahoma, or placed them on even smaller reservations, there was all of this open land. So they had a land run: as much land as you could collect and create a border around, you got to keep. We were taught that the land was completely empty. Vast, open, beautiful prairie land, that you could claim as much as you wanted. We would dress up as pilgrims! That’s how I learned about Oklahoma and U.S. history — that there was nothing here and everyone got land.

A lot of my experiences growing up taught me something very fundamental that has helped me throughout so many other points in my life, in terms of students and organizers, but also as someone who now does a lot of teaching and speaking. The ways that we learn about the world, especially as people of color, are incredibly invalid. Seeing that as a point of knowledge production, instead of whoever decides that they have the authority — that was the biggest takeaway for me. What is truth, what are experiences, and what is knowledge?

Whenever America invaded Iraq or Afghanistan, I was made the Iraq kid or the Afghan kid. I was the fill-in for everything that had to do with Muslims in the Middle East, so I had to teach myself a lot of my history so I could fight back >>>