Do Not Apologize for Advocating for Your Dreams

On the moment a student stopped saying sorry (and what happened next)

She came in polite, thoughtful, and full of ideas.

She was designing her runway look in one of our after-school programs — working through silhouette decisions, fabric choices, the particular creative problem of translating something internal into something you can hold and wear and walk in front of people. She had opinions. Good ones. But every time she voiced one, it came with an apology attached.

Sorry for asking so many questions.

Sorry, I just can't decide.

Sorry...

I watched this for a while. Then I stopped the room.

I looked at her and said: Do not apologize for advocating for your dreams and speaking for yourself.

She paused. She nodded. Something shifted — one of those small, quiet shifts that you can feel in a room if you are paying attention.

By the end of class, she was still polite, still thoughtful. But she was also fearless. Her questions got sharper. Her decisions got clearer. She wasn't just designing a look anymore. She was defining something.

Do not apologize for advocating for your dreams and speaking for yourself.

Where Apology Comes From

Girls — and many adults who were once girls — are taught, in ways both explicit and ambient, that taking up space requires justification. That wanting something, asking for something, asserting a preference, is an imposition that needs to be softened with sorry before anyone will receive it.¹

This is not a small thing. It is the shape of a life, slowly formed. The habit of pre-emptive apology becomes the habit of pre-emptive smallness — of making yourself easier to overlook before anyone has the chance to overlook you on their own.

Fashion, of all things, is where this shows up with particular clarity. Because fashion is fundamentally about self-presentation. About the choices you make when you decide how to move through the world. And when young people — especially young women, especially those who have been told in a hundred ways that their aesthetic instincts are not authoritative — encounter a space where their ideas are taken seriously, something happens.

The apologies stop. Or they start to.

What Fashion Actually Teaches

When I say that fashion is our medium but not our message, this is what I mean.

The runway look is real. The design decisions are real. The skills — draping, construction, color theory, silhouette, the relationship between a body and a garment — are real and worth learning.²

But what we are really teaching, underneath all of it, is self-awareness. The practice of asking: what do I want? What does this choice communicate? What am I willing to stand behind? Decision-making under creative pressure. Agency — the experience of making something happen because you decided it should.

How can you chase a dream if you don't know what you want? How can you make intentional choices — in fashion, in anything — if you haven't practiced the act of choosing? How can you build a life that belongs to you if you have been trained to apologize before you take a step?

These are not fashion questions. They are human ones. Fashion is just the room where we practice.

Fashion is just the room where we practice.

The Questions That Got Sharper

What I remember most about that student is not the look she designed — though it was good, genuinely good, with the particular confidence of something made by someone who stopped second-guessing themselves halfway through.

What I remember is the quality of her questions at the end of class. They were different from the ones at the beginning. They were not wrapped in apology. They were direct, specific, curious — the questions of someone who has decided that her ideas are worth pursuing and that getting them right matters.

That is a transformation. Not a dramatic one — no single moment ever is. But a real one. The kind that compounds. The kind that, years from now, she may not even remember the origin of. She will simply be someone who asks for what she needs without prefacing it with sorry.

I will remember the origin. That is part of what this work asks of us — to hold the before and after for the people who are too busy becoming to track it themselves.

A World Where No One Apologizes for Shining

There is a version of the world I am working toward. I do not think I will see it finished in my lifetime. But I believe it is possible, and I believe that the work of building it happens in rooms exactly like the one I was standing in that afternoon.

A world where no one feels the need to apologize for being themselves. Where showing up with your ideas — your full, unqualified, not-yet-perfect ideas — is understood as the contribution it actually is. Where confidence is not a personality trait some people are born with and others are not, but a skill that can be taught, practiced, and passed on.

Fashion is one of the oldest languages human beings have. We have been using what we wear to communicate who we are and who we want to be since before recorded history. It seems right, then, that it is also one of the places where we can practice becoming more fully ourselves.

That student will not remember me stopping the room. She will not remember the exact words. But she will carry, somewhere, the experience of a space where her voice was worth something — and no apology was required.

That is what we do. Fashion is the tool. What we are really building is a culture where people show up as their best, most unapologetic selves — and shine their light bright.

Fashion is the tool. What we are really building is a culture where people show up as their best, most unapologetic selves.

References

1. On apologetic language patterns in women and girls: Tannen, D. (1990). You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow. Research consistently shows that women are socialized to use more hedging and apologetic language in professional and creative contexts.

2. On fashion education as creative and life-skills development: Hethorn, J. & Ulasewicz, C. (Eds.) (2015). Sustainable Fashion: What's Next? Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com

Priscila Teixeira is an award-winning community leader, passionate educator, fashion artist, and public speaker. She is the Founder & CEO of TalkingFashion Inc. and Columbus Fashion Academy, and Founder & Executive Director of The Fashion Community, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. With 40+ years in the fashion industry and a mission to transform waste into wonder, Priscila believes fashion is not a surface — it is a discipline that works from the inside out. She writes from Columbus, Ohio, where she has lived for over 25 years.