We interviewed Naomi Shimada three years ago for the What’s Underneath Project video series. She inspired us then and continues to inspire us daily on social media with her singular embrace of herself, which includes her voluptuous curves, her boldly colorful style, her overall joie de vivre and its inextricable link to her darker side. In 2015, when we asked Naomi what her favorite body part was, she said it was her mouth because everything she loves most in life comes from the lips, “Kissing, eating...I feel like so much of what makes me happy goes back to my mouth.” During her 15-year modeling career, Naomi was a pioneer for bravely breaking from the confines of being a “straight-sized” model and letting her body be what it was supposed to be. Now, despite its challenges, she stands outside of any category in the fashion industry, even that of “plus-sized” model, in order to stay fiercely true to herself. Find out why Naomi has blossomed through being single, how dancing helps her get through depression, the complexities of being a model in the age of Instagram, and why, for her, getting dressed is an act of resistance. “Clothes and color are my coping mechanisms and I laugh because I have to to get through life. I really want to demystify the fact that someone is always happy and always ‘on’. I love life. I find beauty in so many things...The most powerful things are the smallest things that happened to you in the day.”

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We are super excited to be with the youngest of the three Kirke Sisters, Lola Kirke. We have already featured both Jemima and Domino on our What’s Underneath video series, and Domino was also with us in episode 6 of this podcast, so now we are thrilled to be able to dig deep into what’s underneath the equally radical and truthful younger sister. Lola talks candidly about growing up in a bohemian family of artists, the struggle to be heard in a room of men, how sexual rejection fueled a song on her debut album, ‘Heart Head West’, and why self-doubt has been a major source of inspiration. “I’m curious if I would be as prolific without that creeping sense of self-doubt at all times,” explains Lola. We love Lola’s gangster moves in bucking the body-negative trends of celebrity culture by not shaving her armpits for the Golden Globes, and refusing to chase the Size-Zero formula. “There's that wheat-paste that's around my neighborhood right now that says, ‘In a culture that profits from your low self-esteem, liking yourself is a radical act.’ And I do think that there is a systemic way in which we are all taught that we are not good enough, and this world goes around on the dollars that we spend trying to make ourselves feel better.”

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We sit down this week with the incredibly multi-talented artist, director, and musician, Terence Nance, to get inside his head about things like his HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, that airs out, in almost a stream-of-consciousness, many of today’s most salient issues like systemic racism, white privilege, gender, and masculinity. Not knowing it all is especially important to Terence’s work, “I think of making stuff as conversation; why would you get into a conversation if you knew where it was going to go? Why would it be interesting to talk to somebody if you knew exactly what they were going to say back to you?”. He also explains why honesty within his family and close relationships is what makes him feel the most vulnerable, but he goes there anyway so as to set an example to his nieces and nephews, and why he sees beauty as a scale of disarming people and emitting ease, rather than as an aesthetic quality. But most fascinating to us is how Terence unpacks attributes that we give to words such as unapologetic. “People have been using the word unapologetic a lot and I don't know that I have a relationship to that word because that means that I would have had some sort of expectation that I am to apologize for something...I've never felt any kind of dialogue with an audience or anybody making the show that made me feel like there was anything that would offend or necessitate an apology or a caveat of any kind.”

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Curandera (Mexican Healer), Chloe Garcia Ponce, was introduced to darkness at 8 years old when her father passed away. “In order to understand or to speak about light you have to experience darkness. The amount of light that I'm capable of working with is also because I have witnessed a lot of darkness and sadness and grief and pain, and all that is part of this beautiful wheel of life. We cannot have one without the other.” In a way, the passing of her father was her first teacher on her spiritual path because she realized that he was not gone from her. “I could hear things when I was younger and I was very much connected to wanting to give people the proper way of dying. When I was a kid I would find animals, dead birds, cats, that were run over, and I I felt innately my duty that I needed to give them a proper burial.” But It wasn’t until her Saturn Return that Chloe went back to her childhood roots of honoring the spiritual realm as a healer, and turned her back on what felt like the empty life she had been leading in her 20’s in New York’s art business. “I was unhappy, I was very unhappy because nothing felt sacred. In my childhood everything was sacred.” Since, Chloe has listened to heart, defying societal pressures, including that of being a mother, and instead has devoted her energy towards mothering everyone and everything around her. “You have to want to break down all of those boundaries that were imposed socially, from family, from any type of environment, if you really want to find your voice...when you are a Curandera, when you are a healer, it's one of the choices you have to make because whatever I pick up energetically could be passed on to anyone that lives with me. And so most medicine women or men that live in tribal communities don't have children because their children are the people that are in the tribe.” 

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We reunite with author and activist, iO Tillett Wright, who we first interviewed about four years ago for our What’s Underneath Project video series. In that interview, he told us about his radical self-awareness as a very young child, asking his parents if he could live as a boy, despite the fact that he was born into a female body. Even after a childhood of gender-bending, for the majority of his adult life, iO identified as a queer woman, and it wasn’t until 3 years ago that iO officially came out as trans, a shift that turned his life and his relationships upside down. In “Self-Evident Truths,” iO’s photo project of the past eight years, he photographs anyone who does not identify as 100% straight or 100% cisgender across all 50 states of America. “When I have 10,000 people I’m going to the National Mall to do an installation in front of the Washington Monument, and just ask people to confront the humanity of the community that, once again and throughout all of history, people have been trying to erase.” iO reminds us that we are all, each and every one of us, our own very special and unique self-evident truth. “If you asked an identical twin what makes up the essence of who somebody is, they're not going to tell you it's the body you come in. You know what I mean? It's who you are on the inside. It's your psyche. It's your mind. So if my brain is a male brain, that's probably 85-90% of who I am but what you see is the skin-suit that I come in. So if you call me ‘she’ you are erasing the only shot I've got at screaming to the world who I really am. You are erasing that 85-90% majority of who I actually am and reducing me to the thing that matters the least, which is the skin-suit that I come in.”

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Last week we spoke with Damien Echols who was incarcerated on death row for more than 18 years for murders that he did not commit. It became crystal clear during that interview that the heroism of his story was as much to do with him as it was his wife, Lorri, the heroine of this truly incredible love story. Lorri was a successful architect working in New York when she saw the first Paradise Lost film (which documented the circus of Damien’s first trial) at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. She was so overcome with emotion after seeing it that she sat down and wrote what would become the first of over three thousand letters that Lorri and Damien exchanged throughout his time in prison, which included 10 years in solitary confinement. Within two years Lorri had quit her job and moved to Arkansas where she married Damien and spent the next twelve years fighting for his release, as project manager of the extraordinary amount of efforts that were needed to give Damien the freedom that he so deserved. “The minute I saw him I just loved him. I just was so struck by seeing him in person. We had glass between us, I couldn't touch him. And it was so emotional and tough and painful because that's when you come in real contact with the suffering.”

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In this episode, we are joined by a gigantic hero of ours, Damien Echols, who was incarcerated on death row for 18 years and 76 days for murders that he did not commit. We became aware of his story with the first of a series of three documentaries called Paradise Lost and have since been forever strengthened by his two books (we can’t wait for the next one soon to be released). Damien’s story is one of almost superhuman inspiration in terms of what the human spirit is capable of enduring and overcoming. Having grown up in the bible belt of West Memphis, Damien was an automatic misfit with his interest in mystical, spiritual teachings and because of his style. Most poignant was his being wrongfully accused, partly because of the books he read and a black trenchcoat that he had found in an abandoned house and that he wore often. Damien’s story is so quintessential for StyleLikeU because it shows how we can be so quick to condemn based on a person’s individuality. Despite Damien’s unimaginable fate, including nearly 10 years in solitary confinement, he says he is actually grateful for what happened to him, because through extreme difficulty, he was able to find his authentic path and purpose. “A lot of what living is is figuring out what your real authentic self is in every single situation and circumstance because we've been programmed in ways we don't understand we've been programmed. We've been taught to have 2.5 kids, get married, get a station wagon and a minivan. Make sure your TV is one inch bigger than the neighbors’. People have fallen for that until they've almost become like rats on a treadmill. Falling deeper and deeper into debt, deeper and deeper into despair, deeper and deeper into hell.”

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We greatly admire New York-based fashion designer, Mara Hoffman. Her designs and principles stand out in a sea of homogeneity and “buy more” culture. The former dancer studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and London’s Central Saint Martins College. She was “discovered” by Sex and the City stylist, Patricia Field, who sold Mara’s samples in her shop. We sat down with Mara in her 6th Avenue studio to talk getting comfortable with change by facing our mortality, not being too attached to the identities we create for ourselves, and how we have to work for our happiness. We discovered why she’s not actually that passionate about the fashion industry because “it can make people feel kind of lousy...it's completely warped our sense of consuming, in that we ‘need’ all this stuff that we don't need.” Ultimately, Mara’s message is to “let it go to let it grow...Imagine holding a seed in a clenched fist...It's really hard to let things go but that's where the growth is; it's on that other side.”

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Having graced us with both a Closet and a What's Underneath video, Molly Rosen Guy is no stranger to StyleLikeU so we are honored to be sitting down with her again for a very real talk about death, divorce, finding inner sanctuary during her darkest hour, and the comfort of knowing she was a rock for her father during the last weeks of his life. We have always been enamored with Molly’s piercing presence and vivid honesty, something that is startlingly evident from the writing on her Instagram account (@mollyrosenguy), an open-ended, heart-opening letter to her father who died from leukemia earlier this year. Molly is also the Founder and Creative Director of Stone Fox Bride, lifting the veil off of the wedding industry to make it an unpretentious, un-intimidating space that is far from superficial. Molly doesn’t do anything superficial which is one of the many reasons we love her so much. “I connected with you guys first because you came into my closet, we talked about my style. And back then it was about my style and my business and those dresses. And then it was about my body, I was pregnant in that video. And now it's about the insides and so much of what this past year was about with my dad is learning about what the body is really about. When my dad began to do chemotherapy and his body began to break down it really made me reconsider and question: what is the body? What am I doing? What is this thing that we consider healthy and beautiful?”

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*Please note that this content contains sensitive information regarding mental health and topics related to suicide. The extraordinary artist, poet, model and mental health activist, Riya Hamid, opens up to us about the very brave and honest work she is doing on Instagram surrounding her own personal struggles with mental health, a subject that is all too taboo and that needs to come to the surface, because we all struggle with mental health in one way or another. She describes what it was like to grow up the eldest daughter of immigrant parents from Bangladesh, turning her back on the Muslim religion as a teen, but reconnecting with her past by wearing saris and learning to cook the traditional dishes of her mentally ill mother as a way to care for the wounded child within. Riya holds nothing back as she reveals the truth about her hospitalizations and the difference between passive suicidal ideation and suicidal intention. She explains that it’s possible to have an apparently fun life on the exterior while still being in excruciating pain on the inside. “There just needs to be a revolution in the way that we talk about mental health. Across the entire world, there's not a place where people openly talk about it and I'm sick of it. People deal with this daily, people lose lives. These conversations are bound to make people uncomfortable because it's the first time we're having them and it's actually a good sign, it's supposed to. To an outsider, I'm a person who's popular on social media and I'm attractive and I dress well and I have friends so what could possibly be wrong? What could I have possibly have been through? Every day I get messages from people who accuse me of faking my mental illness and my Go Fund Me because they see me having a good time and people don't realize that those two things can exist concurrently. I can have a good time and still be a mentally ill person.” *A note to all listeners that if you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255. Thank you.

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