Why I started Everybody Loves Everybody.
- erika
- Jul 6
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
A letter to anyone who has ever felt like they were standing just outside the room where everything interesting was happening.
Hello loves,
I have been trying to write this particular entry for a while now. Not because I don't know what to say but because what I want to say feels almost too simple. Like it won't be enough to explain something I have been carrying around for most of my life.
But here it is. As simply as I can put it.
I have always had the itch to build a community that embraces everyone. A space that teaches. That expands how people see the world: through fashion, through culture, through food, through travel, through the particular kind of curiosity that makes you want to understand where something came from and who made it and what it means to the people it belongs to.
That itch did not start with a business plan. It started with a life.
I have worked in forty-five countries and forty-two states. I have sewn in ports and theaters and ship workrooms and bridal shops and costume departments on vessels crossing oceans I still can't quite believe I got to cross. I have sat in fabric markets where I didn't speak the language and understood everything anyway: because cloth is cloth and color is color and the desire to make something beautiful is not a language barrier.
Every place I have been has taught me something. About how people dress and why. About what food means to a culture and how it tells you everything about who they are. About the way travel changes you: not just broadens you, but actually rewires something fundamental about how you move through the world and what you notice and what you can no longer unsee.
"I kept thinking: I want to share this. Not perform it. Not post it for an algorithm. Actually share it with people who are curious, who are making things, who want to understand the world a little more fully than they did yesterday."
And I kept thinking about the people I wished had been in the room with me for all of it.
The sewist just starting out who doesn't know yet that her particular skill set is extraordinary. The person who loves fashion from the outside and has never been made to feel like that love was legitimate. The traveler who collects experiences the way some people collect things. The maker who learned in a kitchen instead of a classroom and wonders sometimes if that counts. The person who is just — curious. About everything. Who has never found one space that had room for all of it at once.
That is who ELE is for. All of the above. Every single one.
I did not start ELE because I had everything figured out. I started it because I had been everywhere and made everything and learned from everyone; and I wanted a place to bring all of that back to.
A place where we talk about the fabric market in a port city I will tell you about soon. Where we get into the real history of a garment and what it meant to the culture it came from. Where someone can ask a beginner question without embarrassment and get a real answer from someone who remembers being a beginner. Where we argue about craft and care about process and celebrate the finished thing and then start over again.
A place that is genuinely, structurally, built for everyone.
Because everybody loves everybody. Or at least that is what we are going to practice here.
I am so glad you found us.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
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