About Ethical Fashion and Beauty
Why I made this Blog
The clothing and beauty industries are often powered by the three horsemen of the ethical apocalypse: exploitative labor, wasteful production, and trends that die faster than an old iphone at 1%. I started Ethical Fashion & Beauty because I believe fashion can be a force for good—or at least less of a force for evil. The idea here is simple: every purchase is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. Which is terrifying, because if that’s true, my vote in 2012 was for “synthetic leggings that unravel in public.” Just like the incident with the goat - I prefer not to talk about it.
At Ethical Fashion and Beauty, I want to make sustainability something you can actually do. Here, hopefully you’ll find ways to:
Understand the mess: Learn how fashion and jewelry impact people, animals, and the environment.
Shop without falling for greenwashing: Because a little leaf on the tag doesn’t mean your shirt was woven by woodland elves.
Choose quality over quantity: because your clothes should last longer than the average celebrity marriage.
Go circular: Swap, thrift, and upcycle like someone who can turn a tablecloth into a showstopper.
Support Indigenous designers: because they’re here, they’re brilliant, and they’re not your festival costume.
Find your style without selling your soul: Because fashion should never make you complicit in someone else’s suffering.
What You’ll Find Here
This is not just a blog about clothes and jewelry. It’s about reconnection, decolonizing our closets, and maybe, just maybe, looking really good while doing it. Whether you’re new to ethical fashion or already in so deep that you’ve started lecturing strangers in the checkout line, you’ll find:
Spotlights on Indigenous-owned brands and artists.
Practical tips for ethical shopping without having to pawn your old camera lens (or maybe that was just me :/)
Reflections on identity, resistance, and reclaiming fashion spaces from the people who think turquoise is a personality (is that just me again?)
Why It Matters
Fashion and beauty are among the top polluters and waste creators on Earth. Fast fashion has trained us to think of clothing as disposable, like paper napkins or seasonal pumpkin spice. But there’s a cost: poisoned rivers, mountains of textile waste, and human beings treated as machinery. Choosing ethical and sustainable fashion is not just a “personal choice”—it’s an act of resistance. It says: I won’t wear suffering on my skin. It’s slower, yes, but so is cooking your own dinner instead of eating instant noodles every night—and we all know which one’s better for you.
Join Me
If this sounds like your kind of thing—or if you just want to see me try to make a point using only sweater metaphors—stick around. Subscribe, follow along on Pinterest, or just lurk in silence and rethink your last Shein haul.
Let’s make something beautiful together—fashion that’s rooted in responsibility, culture, and truth.
With love, humor, and a decent seam allowance,
Karina
A place where fashion meets culture and social responsibility—sometimes for coffee, sometimes for something stronger.
Hi. I’m Karina. I’m an Indigenous woman from the Purepecha people in western Mexico. I’m passionate about reclaiming and reimagining fashion through a lens of ethics, sustainability, and cultural integrity—because if I’m going to be judged on my clothes (and we all are), I’d at least like them to tell the right story.
Fashion has always been stitched into my life, literally. I grew up surrounded by women who could bead, crochet, and sew with the kind of intention you normally only see in heart surgeons. My mother, grandmother, and tías didn’t just make clothes—they made identity. Each pattern carried a memory, and each piece told a story, which is more than I can say for the sweater I once bought on sale that shed so badly it looked like it was trying to escape.
In my family, garments weren’t just garments—they were stories. My mother’s blouses could recount migrations. My grandmother’s shawls remembered births, deaths, and that one incident with the goat we don’t talk about. Patterns weren’t trends; they were history written in thread. Which is why it’s always been jarring to walk into a store and find “Native-inspired” ponchos with a price tag that reads $450 and made, naturally, without a single Native person involved. It’s a bit like being invited to a dinner party only to find they’ve served your grandmother’s signature stew and credited it to Chad from accounting with a price tag that reads $450. This blog is my way of taking back the narrative, one bead, seam, and story at a time.
So I started this blog. Not to scold (although I am excellent at it), but to share the beauty, complexity, and stubborn resilience of Indigenous and ethical fashion—from the inside out.