Five Questions with Macy Eleni
What do thrifting, sustainability, and manifesting your dream life all have in common? Macy Eleni! Michael Melamedoff sat down with his friend and collaborator – a TV show is in the works! – to discuss how thrifting can help empower your individuality, Macy’s conscientious decision to share her journey of finding gratitude while living with anxiety and depression, and the launch of her book!, and how you should create a vision board before the start of 2025.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
MICHAEL MELAMEDOFF: I am so thrilled to be chatting with you today, Macy. You just put out your first book, Second Chances: The Ultimate Guide to Thrifting, Sustainable Style and Expressing Your Most Authentic Self. I just love that title. And I'm curious – when it comes to thrifting, where does it empower us to better understand our true selves?
MACY ELENI: I feel like when that kind of idea came into my mind, it was truly because I found myself in the thrift store when I was a teenager. I felt like I didn't belong anywhere else. And when I walked through those squeaky red Salvation Army doors, it was truly like everything went quiet and I could just express myself. I think because I'm someone who was so pulled to fashion and seeing how clothing could be such a vessel for storytelling – whether it's TV and film or literally just our lives and telling the story of who we are – that sparked me in the thrift store right away. It was this feeling that I didn't get in any other retail store. You walk into any other retail store, you're bombarded with all these images of, this is how you should style this. And these are the kind of people that should be wearing our clothes, and it creates this divide where people don't feel like they can wear those things. In the thrift store, that doesn't exist. And that wasn't something I necessarily knew other people resonated with until I started making my videos.
When I started making videos about thrifting, the comments I would get! I loved seeing that my videos about thrifting were helping people to express their most authentic self when so much of the fashion content online was like, dress like me to be cool, buy what I'm buying to be cool. I've kind of carved out my own little fashion corner of the internet where, yeah, you can't buy what I'm buying. You're probably not going to find exactly what I'm finding. But it's led to me having this audience that is so f***ing cool and diverse. I love that my followers don't all look like me because it shows me, yeah, they're expressing their true authentic selves through the clothes and they're just getting the inspiration to do so through my videos.
So I think thrifting honestly allows you to break all the rules because there are no rules at the thrift store. Anyone can buy anything, anyone can pick anything. They're not telling you how to style it. You can wear a shoe, you can make a shoe into a hat if you want, like it literally doesn't matter.
MELAMEDOFF: It's something that's so interesting to me. I was thinking about how different your YouTube and TikTok videos are than say, a typical influencer doing a Shein haul. Those haul videos feel just so disposable, you know? But also because, you're right, nobody's going to watch your video and then go out and find the same pair of chunky Prada boots that you found at an estate sale….What do you think it is that pulls people into your stories and your storytelling then, if they can't find and replicate your looks?
ELENI: I mean, what I hear in the comments is just that I make people feel good about themselves. And that makes me so happy! Like, it's all I've ever wanted to do. I grew up feeling so less than all the time, whether that was from my upbringing, or the way that my depression and my anxiety made me feel, or how I felt at school with not a ton of friends. I always felt really alone and TV and film and the fashion within those things and fashion magazines made me feel like I had all of these sparkly things to look forward to in life. And that was, I think, a form of manifestation at the time. So when I started making my videos, I said, we don’t need another fashion creator on any of these apps, telling people that they need to lose weight and look like them or like just be skinny and fashionable and buy what they're buying. It's just so unrelatable.
I know people – especially on social media – use the words relatability and authenticity like nobody's business. But I do feel like I'm someone who, if I'm not showing up as my authentic self, I'm just not showing up. It's too hard for me to put together a perfectly perfect video. I don't wear makeup most of the time. My hair, I'm not really doing it most of the time. I'm someone who, if I'm just gonna show up, I'm just gonna show up as me. That's the only way for me to be consistent, and I think that people see that in my videos. I like to think that it's fashion second, people first – that's how it is. And that's how I run my platforms. We're obviously here to talk about the clothes, but I hope that you leave with so much more. I try to get people in with the flashy things and then, you know, try to drop good knowledge bombs on them about everything that I've been through and how I've become the person they're seeing today.
I’m very positive and happy online and that's not someone I've always been. Probably until my mid-20s I was incredibly glass-half-empty, the most negative person on the planet. I literally just heard Trisha Paytas talking about this the other day. She was like, “I was so negative for so long. And then I started speaking kindly about myself and other people and things started changing.” And that's been my experience. Positivity for me is a daily practice. So I like to share that with my audience in hopes that one person can have one less bad day than I had for so long. Because it's so hard to be nice to yourself. It's something that's kind of encouraged in a toxic positivity kind of way, but if you're someone with depression or anxiety you don’t have tangible tips on how to get there unless you go to therapy, which isn't something that was accessible to me for so long.
So I think just me sharing my journey – where I'm at and how I've gotten to where I am, my journey to positivity and kindness to myself – it's all blended. As much as thrifting is a part of my journey and like any success I'm having now, I think it's equal parts me working on myself and being honest about what that looks like. I know growing up [it would have helped] if I would have seen one of the fashion It Girls I looked up to be like, Hey, I actually have depression and I've had it since I was six, and I had this upbringing that made me feel like shit about myself, but it doesn't mean I don't get to be happy and that I don't get to live a happy life. I think I try to put that out on my platforms every day because it's what I need every day to keep going.
MELAMEDOFF: It's funny to hear you talking about this just because one of my notes heading into this talk was that your videos always possess this deep sense of gratitude. Just like a joy at the opportunity and excitement at having found a really incredible piece of clothing and a sense of opportunity. And it's lovely that it's such a conscientious thing.
Speaking of conscientiousness, one of the things that I love about thrift and vintage is that it's obviously a more sustainable way of shopping. We talked about disposability earlier. How much do you think about sustainability when you're going through an estate sale or in your daily life? And how do you think about messaging about it in a way that doesn't feel preachy or uncool?
ELENI: I found sustainability through thrifting. But, even as people have written articles and stuff about me and referred to me as an activist, I'm like, well, I don't know. I don't know if I know anything. I just am doing what I've been doing my whole life. And when I was younger, it had nothing to do with sustainability. I just wanted cheap, cool clothes. It wasn't until college that I started to really understand the global climate crisis – I was finding out and really starting to understand the working conditions of these women in our country and all over the world. And I do so deeply care about women – I was raised by a woman in a fully female household, most of my audience is women. It's such a problem in the fashion industry that people preach caring about and supporting women, but not women that don't look like them or are doing these jobs in these countries that they have put out of sight out of mind.
I love the fact that I can make my videos just as fun – even more fun – than a fast fashion hall, than a luxury hall of firsthand things. And it's all secondhand and it's all used. But I don't think when I first started doing it, I was like, oh, like this is a digestible, fun way to get people into sustainability. This is how I've been shopping forever. This is how I think about things. I am a really sensitive person. I think people think a lot of people that are in fashion are vapid and airheads. But I really care about people. And I really care about the people that follow me, and what the younger generation is going to do, and what's gonna happen to our planet, and what's currently happening to the human beings that are making the clothes.
I just launched this series on my TikTok called Thriftmas – I'm thrifting just whatever my followers want for the next 15 days. And it's so fun and exciting because I get to give them gifts, but also nothing new is being produced in the process. And that's me trying to somewhat offset the idea that you need to buy everyone in your life something new. And now, especially with the book being out, I'm like, okay, but like what more can I do here? I just want people to understand that it's about more than the cute clothes – they can really do some good with thrifting.
MELAMEDOFF: [laughs] Well speaking of gifts, if somebody did want to give a gift right now, your book is really beautiful and one of the things that I loved when I first picked it up is that it just gives off a vibe in terms of sort of the glossy printing that speaks to my memories of like ‘90s Cosmo and also at the same time like the original VICE online. I'm curious what were the influences for you when you were putting the book together, not just writing it but actually designing the layout and the pages?
ELENI: Literally that. It makes me so happy every time someone tells me the influences that my book reminded them of. I grew up just like facedeep in fashion magazines, my literal walls were covered in pages from fashion magazines. In Dayton, Ohio, that was how I could see things and I loved it so much. I love physical media so much. I collect DVDs and VHSs and CDs from the thrift store and of course my magazines. I think physical media is so important. When I got my book deal, the first thing I thought of was how I wanted to make it feel like a fashion magazine, like the ultimate fashion magazines, but for the thrift girls because I never had anything to look at that really talked about thrifting or reusing things in such a normal way. So for me, it was very, yeah, old Interview, old Cosmo, old Seventeen and Teen Vogue, the Teen Vogue fashion handbook – which was huge for me back in the day.
I wanted everyone to be able to see a piece of themselves in it or feel nostalgic from it or feel hopeful from it. My people at Simon & Schuster – their idea was that it was going to be more like a written how-to book with an illustrator to do some doodles. And I was like, no, no, no, no, I got to bring my best friend on to shoot it. We got to have like a million photos, I have to actually have my hand in laying out every single page – a 200 plus page fashion magazine with every page being different, basically. My designer on the book at the end of it thanked me for pushing them because she'd mostly done cookbooks, like celebrity cookbooks, like Giselle's cookbook. So it was a lot. And as a Virgo I’m still not fully happy with every single page, but I had to give that up at a point, which I think is good practice for my future. I was definitely very hard on myself about it because it was my dream. I don't know, in my mind, it was just like my dream first project – biggest break so far type of vibe. So I felt so grateful for the opportunity to be this vessel for the thrift community and make this first of its kind book – I just wanted to make a splash and show everyone how fabulous it could be.
MELAMEDOFF: So you continue to put out really incredible video content on YouTube and TikTok. Your book is out now. You and I are working on a really cool TV show together. And I'm curious, you talked about how much of your life was organized – and I believe still organized on some level – around vision boards. For people out there building their own vision boards right now, is there any advice you'd give people in terms of putting plans into motion and transforming something from a big visual idea into a reality?
ELENI: Oh my gosh, so many tips! Because I feel like my whole life has been a manifestation and I didn't even know it. When I had an excerpt of my book come out in Teen Vogue, I looked back and I had this vision board from 2013 on Instagram that I literally put a cutout from Teen Vogue and was like, this is my style Mecca, like this is the Bible. But I think I had no idea what that was then. But I was seeing these images that made me feel something and made me feel hopeful. So do your vision board. Shoot for the stars. Literally take a day and do your vision board and put anything you want in the world on it. But then you have to believe in yourself and you have to believe that those things can come true, which is very, very hard. So where I start is my positivity practice. I gratitude journal every single morning. And whenever I fall off of it, I swear I start feeling my depression. And I start feeling just icky. And then I have to get back into it. So make your boards at the end of the year. Go crazy. But then also, I make a little list in my Notes app of my big goals that I want to happen for the year since my vision board is just pictures. I like to write out a list. And the year before I met you, I basically had you on the list.
MELAMEDOFF: Oh wow! [laughs]
ELENI: I literally will make the list the background on my phone for the year. And so I look at it every single day. Words have power. And when you look at them every single day, it reminds you that you have to go out and get it. And I write it in my journal every day. I call it my gratitudey booty journal, and I write things as if they've already happened to me. And, it works. I think it works because it makes you put it into motion. And no one's just going to give you things that you don't say out loud. I've been saying since the day I was born, I'm going to be famous. I'm going to be a star. I'm going to be on TV. And everybody laughed at me in Ohio. But now I'm truly working towards those things tangibly. And it only happened because I believed in myself. So if you want something truly it all starts with believing in yourself and believing that you can do it – believing that it's already yours. Putting that energy out there, putting that kindness out there, and just working your booty off towards your dreams.
MELAMEDOFF: Yeah, I think it really does come down to when you say something out loud, you make yourself accountable to it.
ELENI: Yeah, like claim it as your own! And it feels really silly, and sometimes it feels like you're naked and afraid in front of an audience when you're first doing it. But then it starts to feel even crazier when the stuff starts coming true. When I got reached out to for my book deal from my editor, I felt in that moment – and I felt the same way when we started working together and when I met you and you fully understood what this was and believed in it and saw a spark in me – I truly had moments where I sat there and was like, this is what I've been speaking out loud my entire life. You just have to let the Universe take its time. Because you'll think opportunities are disappearing from you because they're not working out. And then you totally, totally see why you weren't supposed to sign that contract or you weren't supposed to work with that brand or you weren't supposed to say yes to these producers because X, Y, and Z. Go with your gut and believe in yourself.
MELAMEDOFF: Awesome. And do the work. And with that, thank you for answering these questions.
ELENI: Oh my God. Of course. It was so fun to just chat.
MELAMEDOFF: We'll do it again soon.
ELENI: Fab. I'll see you later. Bye!
