The Stories That Gave Me Goosebumps

On the Columbus people I didn't know were changing the world until I saw it (or they told me).

I have been in the fashion industry for over 40 years. I have built businesses, run programs, curated archives, and produced runway shows. I have given speeches and written curriculum, and sat across from hundreds of students and asked them what they want to become. But the moments that stopped me cold were never the ones I planned.

They were the phone calls. The emails. The "I have to tell you something"; conversations that began years after an interaction I had almost forgotten. The student whose relationship with her body shifted after learning the history of a garment. The family that changed how they celebrated birthdays because of a single conversation about waste. The community member who started a neighborhood clothing swap now can't keep up with demand.

I didn't know these stories were happening. That's the part that gets me every time.
They were unfolding in the background;  quietly, privately, in the particular way that real
transformation moves, and I only learned about them when someone circled back to tell me. The stories that gave me goosebumps were never the ones I planned. They were the ones I didn't know were happening until someone told me years later.

What Goosebumps Mean (Neurologically Speaking)

There is actually science behind why certain stories give us a physical response. Researchers call it awe— the emotion we experience when we encounter something that expands our understanding of what is possible.¹ Awe has been shown to increase prosocial behavior, reduce self-focus, and connect us more deeply to communities larger than ourselves.

When I learn about someone whose life quietly shifted because of an encounter with conscious fashion, I feel awe. Not pride — that would make it about me. Awe. The kind that says: this is bigger than what I built. This is what happens when an idea meets a person at exactly the right moment.

The goosebumps are not decoration. They are data.
The Leaders We Don't Recognize as Leaders
The people in these stories are not famous. They do not have platforms, titles, or TED Talks.
They are Columbus people — teachers, parents, students, neighbors, shop owners,
grandmothers — living ordinary lives that turned out to be quietly extraordinary.

This is the kind of leadership our world actually needs more of: distributed, humble, rooted in community, and motivated not by visibility but by the simple recognition that their choices ripple outward.²

We are living inside an era of overlapping crises — environmental, social, psychological — and the dominant cultural narrative is either despair or spectacle. Either everything is broken, or someone extraordinary is going to swoop in and fix it.

The stories in Goodbye (Toxic) Fashion offer a third option. Ordinary people, in an ordinary city, make choices that quietly push the world toward balance. Not because they are heroes. Because they are human, and something woke up in them, and they listened to it.

Why I Had to Write This Down
For years, I held these stories in my memory, the way you hold things that feel too private to share — not because they're secret, but because they feel sacred. I started to realize that keeping them private was a disservice. Not to me, but to the people in
them. They deserve to be seen. Their choices deserve to be named as the acts of leadership they are. And the communities around them deserve to know that this kind of transformation is not rare — it is already happening, right here in Columbus, in the spaces between the programs and the runways and the archive and the workshops.

Goodbye (Toxic) Fashion is the book I had to write because these stories kept accumulating, and I finally understood they were trying to tell me something.
They were telling me that fashion — real fashion, the kind that starts from the inside and works its way out — is one of the most quietly powerful forces for human transformation that exists. I have the goosebumps to prove it.

References
1. Keltner, D. & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe is a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion,
17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
2. Brown, A.M. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html

Priscila Teixeira is an award-winning community leader, passionate educator, fashion artist, and public speaker. She is the Founder & CEO of Columbus Fashion Academy, Founder & Executive Director of The Fashion Community (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit), and Founder of TalkingFashion Inc., a circular fashion ecosystem rooted in Columbus, Ohio. 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.