.png)
The Lexy Show: Fashion That Gives A Damn
I think we need to make people care. What does this mean for them.
The clothes in your closet may be affecting your health, polluting your water, and funding a system built on exploitation -- and the fashion industry is counting on you not connecting those dots. The Lexy Show: Fashion That Gives a Damn is the podcast that asks the questions fast fashion brands hope you're too busy to ask. Each week, host Lexy Silverstein breaks down the real cost of what we wear -- from toxic chemicals and greenwashing to secondhand shopping, slow fashion, and sustainable style that actually works. Whether you're thrift shopping for the first time or already deep in the conscious consumer world, you'll learn why what you wear matters more than they want you to think. New episodes every week.
The Lexy Show: Fashion That Gives A Damn
Haute Talk with Emilee Shield | Craft, Community, and Cosplay
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if your next costume could begin with an unwanted sweater, discarded cardboard, or something already sitting in your recycling bin?
This week on The Lexy Show, Lexy talks with Emilee Shield, better known online as Our Shield Maiden. Emilee is a cosplayer, activist, sustainable fashion advocate, and creative maker who believes cosplay should be affordable, inclusive, and accessible to anyone with the imagination to participate.
Emilee shares how thrifting and upcycling can lower the cost and environmental impact of creating costumes. She encourages makers to revisit inexpensive techniques often associated with childhood crafts, including papier-mâché and air-dry clay, rather than assuming every project requires new or expensive specialty materials. Lexy and Emilee also discuss the overwhelming amount of clothing moving through the secondhand system and what it is actually like to search through the Goodwill bins, often the final stop before unwanted garments are sent elsewhere or discarded.
The conversation challenges the idea that upcyclers are taking clothing away from people who need it. Emilee explains that the volume of unwanted clothing is far greater than many shoppers realize, with mountains of garments continuing to move through donation centers every day. She also shares how creativity, resourcefulness, and a willingness to experiment can make cosplay more sustainable without making it less exciting.
Listen to the full episode, subscribe to The Lexy Show, and follow Our Shield Maiden for more sustainable crafting, cosplay inspiration, and creative ways to give old materials another life.
Social Media
Instagram: @ourshieldmaiden
TikTok: @ourshieldmaiden
If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to The Lexy Show, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's ready to make more mindful choices for themselves and the planet. For more information visit https://lexysilverstein.com/
emilee_LEX
lexy: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Lexi Show, FA fashion that gives the damn. This week I'm joined by an amazing activist and sustainable fashion advocate. Please show me extending a warm welcome to Emily Shield.
emilee: I am just a huge proponent of like upcycling, un thrifting. I know it's not something everyone has the time to do, or maybe even like the stores around them to do, but, um, I think it's just such a huge resource when it comes to keeping down costs.
Um, a lot of what I did, I mean, I still would do it if I needed to for a certain project. Um, but a lot of what I did when I first started cosplaying was um, like paper mache and like things like that that you can just make at home and you're using like garbage essentially for that. Um, and things like that that, um.
People kind of forget about doing after they're out of elementary s school. Um, even like multiple, like dry drying clays and like, things like that. Like, I always kind of encourage people to think about like, um, just thinking about like what, it sounds funny, but like what kids are [00:01:00] encouraged to do. 'cause normally kids have like a very low budget, um, is a huge way.
' Everything is still at full. It's not like we stopped today and what we have today is what we have. It's like, yeah. It's absolutely. I wish I could take field trips of people to like the Goodwill bins. Yeah. 'cause it's like that's the last stop before the landfill. That's not a thrift store.
That is like, they then go on the truck to the landfill. Right. Like there's no saving those items at that point. There's no like. Oh, you should have left it. I get that comment. Oh, you should have left that for somebody who was less well off than you, or something like that. And I'm like, do you realize like I am digging at that point through mountains of clothing?
Yeah, it's, yeah. And again, like I said, maybe like five sweaters, six sweaters that I'm taking and it's like, as I'm doing that, they're just rolling them back. Like they're, 'cause they rotate them, right? Yeah. So like they're rolling them to the back to go to the landfills. Mm-hmm. As I'm digging through like [00:02:00] mountains of clothing and it's like people just don't realize there's like such a cognitive dis dissonance of what the actual clothing situation is
lexy: right now.
emilee: At R Shield, maiden, mostly I'm on TikTok and Instagram and lately Facebook,