Fashion, Business, and Human Rights Activism with Avery McCall
Avery McCall is a nineteen year old human rights activist, model, radio show co-host/podcaster who graduated from OHS in 2016. The Pixel Journal last interviewed Avery before her gap year, during which she interned with the Fashion Partnerships team at Instagram, continued her work merging modeling and human rights, and travelled globally. She is currently a freshman at Stanford University.
Before Avery started modeling, she had spent most of her life with her head in a book or in very policy heavy work. The fashion industry was a completely new sensory and intellectual experience - her favorite part of it has been “the creativity, ingenuity, beauty, and boundary pushing that is integrated into everything that’s done.”
Though it’s undeniable that ego-driven and destructive personalities like those portrayed in movies such as The Devil Wears Prada exist in the fashion industry, Avery asserts that “on the whole, fashion is a community of exceptionally kind people. By nature of what they are doing, the fashion industry is a group of people wanting to make their mark on the world and to make people feel empowered and beautiful.” Though she agrees that there needs to be a lot more representation of different kinds of beauty, and that there are serious human rights abuses that need to be dealt with, “there is a goodness present that often gets passed over.”
Reem Acra Show
Now that Avery is at Stanford, she doesn’t have the flexibility to travel and is less active in the fashion industry than she was at the OHS. However, she says that “being in the industry sparked a lot of ideas and interests that [she is] still thinking about and following up on today [...] being settled in a more academic environment has given [her] the chance to view the possible connections in new lights”. Some of her ideas include projects with organizations like Teen Vogue or partnerships that could more directly link the media and fashion houses with refugees abroad.
In fact, Avery recently spoke at the first ever Teen Vogue Summit. As a Featured Mentor, she led a discussion around her work merging human rights, fashion, and academics. “I have been so impressed with the magazine’s work for years, and it was a dream come true to watch it materialize in real life,” Avery said, “There were so many amazing discussions and thought leaders there, and the greatest part was that it was all focused on how to empower young people to be leaders in the world.”
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What does a day in Avery’s life look like? At Stanford, there isn’t really one typical day. She usually wakes up and heads to class throughout the day, and goes to office hours in the afternoons. Evenings are spent working on school assignments or other projects, attending meetings for groups she’s involved in, or hanging out with friends. She’s involved with Stanford Women in Business and the Handa Center for Human Rights. In the fall quarter, she started independently researching how refugee narratives are told and related to on social media.
Avery’s work in the fashion industry has led to her interest in the intersection of business and human rights. Currently, she thinks she will major in International Relations and take supplementary classes in the computer science department, the Business School, and the Design School. She’s also considering a minor in Comparative Literature because she enjoys looking at morality, society, and values through literature - an interest spurred by OHS’s English department!
Like other OHS alumni, Avery believes that OHS gave her excellent preparation for college. “If anything, my classes at Stanford actually felt easier than they were at OHS.” Still, she reflects that she was surprised about how real the “Stanford bubble” is. The abundance of resources and things to do at Stanford make it easy to get in a rhythm on campus and feel slightly disconnected from the real world. “It was a great thing my first quarter because I was just getting settled and was loving being on a physical campus again.” This quarter, it has motivated her to think of ways to become more involved in projects that take her off campus.
The best life advice Avery has ever received is to find wonder in every day. When we are busy and stressed - a norm for most OHSers - “It’s easy to be desensitized to the beauty in the world around us. We get focused on the work that we have to do or the colleges that we feel like we need to get into and forget to look up and actually see the world and the people in it.” Even if she can only find one thing to appreciate in a day, “taking the time to notice it helps put everything else back into perspective.”
If you’d like to read more about Avery, you can find Pixel Journal’s earlier interview with her here.