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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2021 · yaledailynews.com
WEEKEND PEOPLE
STRANGERS: Making Fashion Green with Rakel Tanibajeva // BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH
// RAKEL TANIBAJEVA
Last spring, Rakel Tanibajeva traveled to Turkey for spring break — and then the world shut down. Stranded there, the Yale sophomore wound up learning more than she ever expected about the fashion industry. She found herself at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, among the most massive covered markets in the world, covering over 30,000 square meters. Standing in the bazaar, Tanibajeva said, she was struck by the scale of the mass production of clothing. “Going there was shocking,” she said. “I was overwhelmed by how everything was replicated. I watched the workers, and it seemed almost archaic how they had to lug all of these things through these cobblestone hills. It’s one thing to learn about it in school or on your own. It’s another thing to be faced with it.” The pandemic slowed many of the world’s creative endeavors. But for Tanibajeva, lockdown ended up spurring her interest in the fashion world. She wound up working in the big leagues as a sustainability ambassador behind the scenes of New York Fashion Week, one of the world’s famous “Big Four” fashion weeks. She’s picked up various other designing and style gigs while simultaneously working as a model. “It’s been a whole twilight zone over the past year,” she said. “I was originally doing an interview, and I was talking about being an environmentalist. … Long story short, they were like, ‘That is very cool, you seem very passionate about this, how would you like a working opportunity here?’” And then, all of a sudden, Tanibajeva was in the midst of a colossal fashion endeavor of her own: the startup of her sustainable living company, Lots of Berries. I talked to Tanibajeva this week over Zoom, and I got the chance to hear about the story of the company. “Being an environmentalist, I’ve always had a conundrum of concrete things I could do to support the movement,” she said. “Obviously I could educate myself and learn a lot about the topic. … I could go to protests … but I wanted to do something more concrete and hands-on. With all the free time that I had sitting during quarantine, I was like, ‘This is the moment.’ So I put all my energy into it.”
Lots of Berries, she said, is a sustainable lifestyle brand, so it doesn’t just include fashion — it extends to cooking, home decor and more. It started from the produce angle, when she organized a community garden, and thus the name Lots of Berries felt appropriate. The company is kicking off with LOB Fashion, the company’s clothing line. Soon, they’re going to try to tackle sustainable housing with a teaching program modeled on the Tiny House Project. “I thought it was a cute name, too,” she added. She said the company hopes to establish a workshop space in the Catskills, to actually create clothes “on a wider, but still sustainable scale.” As Tanibajeva told me about all of this — about being on New York Fashion Week, about designing clothes, about modeling, about the berries — one central question I had remained: How did she learn it all? After all, she’s a full-time student in college, working in what seems to be a high-level, professional sphere. The answer she gave me: that she comes from a “fashionable family.” “My mom is a very big inspiration for me, because she’s an artist,” Tanibajeva said. “She taught me a lot of what I know, and I always get a lot of inspiration from her. It was a very fashionable family. You could walk around my apartment, and most of my books are about fashion. It’s really nice to be able to bounce ideas off of somebody.” As she’s worked on her brand, Tanibajeva has been pulling not just from her family background, but from the breadth of knowledge she’s gotten from her studies at Yale. At the University, she’s an environmental studies student — “surprise, surprise,” she joked. She said she “loves” environmental studies at Yale — that it’s “global and encompassing.” She’s also had the opportunity to meet all sorts of students studying the topic. In New York, she met another prospective environmental studies student pursuing opera singing. “Environmentalism impacts every aspect of life. It’s very encompassing. I meet people with a variety of interests. It’s really cool to hear their stories, and we get to educate each other through that.” As she’s built experience — both in
environmental studies and in fashion — she said she’s picked up on many misconceptions about sustainable fashion, and she wanted to debunk them with the elegance of her brand. “A stereotype of sustainable fashion is bohemian, hippy or dippy clothing, but what I’m trying to exhibit with my brand is that you can be in high fashion and still be environmentally conscious,” she said. She also noted that while sometimes fast fashion brands seem cheap in the moment, they need to be replaced constantly. “High-quality clothing in the long term is cheaper than fast fashion,” she said. “You always have to be renewing it. With more sustainable materials, they last longer.” She said with her brand, she’s also working on trying to make the clothing affordable. As for the future, Tanibajeva said she hopes to continue the business and watch it grow for a long time, but “we’re taking it one day at a time — focusing in on the moment and getting done what we can.” More immediately, she said she can’t wait to get back to physical production. Before the pandemic hit, she was able to work on a real photoshoot, and it was a blast. “It was super fun to work as a director and work with models and have them in my clothing,” she said. “That was a very fulfilling process that felt amazing. It was a good time.” Tanibajeva said there are so many things people can do to incorporate sustainability into their daily lives. “Turn off your lights when you leave the room,” she said. “Support sustainable brands. Go thrifting — thrifting is a really fun thing to do, even during COVID. I find myself doing it even more. It’s a fun activity you can do with your friends or by yourself, and it’s sustainable.” Currently, Lots of Berries is trying to engage in online outreach. They’re working on uploading videos to their YouTube channel on the basics of sustainable fashion — what it is and how to engage with it. Tanibajeva said she’s hoping that if the Catskills workshop launches, they can teach some in-person classes there. “And hopefully sell some berries,” she added. “Maybe lots of berries!” Contact OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu .
Framing ‘Framing Britney Spears’ // BY CLAIRE FANG One of my earliest and deepest fears is the fear of becoming famous. Famous famous, specifically. I’d be okay with low-level fame, the kind that leaves you unrecognized in the grocery store with maybe one or two emails in your inbox from people you don’t know every month. But celebrity-level fame is terrifying — to be ceaselessly hounded by paparazzi, to have each one of your personal relationships dissected by strangers in tabloids and on talk shows, to exist in the public eye as a deity and as an object. You know, like the kind of famous Britney Spears is. There’s cruelty in the way people treat famous women, especially. Even more so if they happen to be working in a profession where their bodies are a focus of their work. The “moral” outrage and ridicule society voiced against Miley Cyrus when she let go of her sanitized, kid-friendly Disney image and to some extent against Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B for “WAP” surrounded Britney Spears throughout her career. “Framing Britney Spears,” a documentary produced by the New York Times and currently available on Hulu and FXNow, comprehensively summarizes Spears’ career from her smalltown Louisiana roots to her present struggle against her father’s conservator status. It goes over all the incidents that made it into the public consciousness — her relationship with Justin Timberlake, her subsequent breakup with Justin Timberlake, her marriage and children and divorce, the “breakdown” where she shaved her head, the court case that started the conservatorship and, finally, the #FreeBritney movement. Furthermore, and this is what makes the documentary stand out, it puts the events of her tumultuous life in the context of the pervading misogyny in America. During her first appearances on television, as a young preteen, she was asked whether or not she had a boyfriend (“What about me?” asked the host, rather shamelessly putting a child on the spot about whether or not she would want to date a middle-aged man in front of a live audience). These questions would only grow more invasive as she grew older: “Are you a virgin?” “What did you do to make Justin suffer?” “What kind of image do you think you’re giving to young girls?” “You know you’re sexy?” Hounded by photographers hungry for a mistake, for some proof that she was the “slut” that a Clinton-era America was obsessed with seeing, denigrating and destroying, it’s little wonder that Spears sought to send a message by shaving her head in 2007. At the time, the media dismissed her as “going crazy”, but “Framing Britney Spears” raises the point that she very well meant to say: “I do not exist for you to consume.” Entertainment shows, as a funny joke for the whole family, listed the things she had lost: “her relationship, her marriage, her hair, her mind.” Should an adult woman who is capable of headlining world-
WKND RECOMMENDS An oat chai latte from Blue State.
wide tours and producing platinum records be denied basic agency over her own life? This is the central question of “Framing Britney Spears” and the controversy surrounding Britney Spears today as she is refusing to perform until her father is removed from conservator status. As conservator, he is legally given control over his daughter’s personal, medical and financial decisions. Given the conservatee’s loss of autonomy, this legal category is reserved for people who are elderly or incapable of the activities of daily life.
// MARLENA RAINES
Why was Spears placed under a conservatorship at all? In January 2008, she was admitted to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center under a psychiatric hold following her refusal to turn over her sons to her ex-husband’s representatives. This was the inciting incident that launched the bid to put her under a conservatorship, and her (previously uninvolved) father’s complete control of her life henceforth. Despite the extremity of her mental distress during her hospitalization, she was released after just five days without difficulty and went on to
perform again the next month. This calls into question whether her mental state was in such jeopardy she had to lose many of her fundamental rights. She was able to communicate with a lawyer prior to the case, and the lawyer, on record, said that she seemed perfectly capable of understanding and taking his legal advice. That, in itself, should disqualify a conservatorship. But a court order was released declaring her unfit to select a lawyer for herself. Over a decade later, why is Spears still under a conservatorship? The documentary does not hold back in showing how much particular men in her life disregarded (and continue to disregard) her agency, and her clear, stated, preferences for how she would like to live her own life. In an interview about #FreeBritney and whether or not Britney is being held against her will, her ambivalent brother, Bryan Spears, complains that the women in his family are “very, very strong-minded, and have their own opinion, and they wanna do what they wanna do, and as much as I admire that, as a guy, being, like one of two guys in this entire family, it kinda sucks, man.” If Spears is strong-minded, firstly, that is not something that should be treated as somehow a bad thing for the men around her, and secondly, it’s additional proof that the conservatorship is completely unsuited for her situation. The documentary featured paparazzo Daniel Ramos, who photographed for the tabloids that would relentlessly comment on and mock Spears’ sexuality, her purported reasons for breaking up with Timberlake, her perceived failure at mothering, etc. When asked about whether he had a role in Spears’ deteriorating mental health in the years leading up to her (in)famous shaved head in 2007 (where she also attacked his truck with an umbrella), he claimed that she never indicated that she wanted to be left alone. “What about when she said ‘Leave me alone’?” retorted the documentarian. Well, Ramos said, that didn’t seem to mean she wanted them to leave her alone “forever.” “Framing Britney Spears” has a clear, obvious message, an “agenda” so to speak; it has chosen a side when it comes to the #FreeBritney movement, and for good reason. But, more than that, it shows us the essential humanity of its subject, through a quite moving examination of Spears’ roots, early struggles and first friends. She started as a small-town girl, but she was never afraid of fame in the way I am. She should never have been given reasons to be afraid. Contact CLAIRE FANG at claire.fang@yale.edu .
