Brian Laird on WNYC, and now we'll continue our membership drive series on

finding your personal style with help from well-dressed people who think seriously

about what we wear and why.

You might say that today's guest set herself up for a kind of experiment.

Amelia Petroka, author of the Fashion and Style newsletter, Shop Rat,

describes her newsletter as one fashion writer's attempt to get offline,

go outside, and engage with style in real life.

Now, part of that has included something she called Repair Month, where instead of buying

something new, she focused on maintaining and fixing something she already owns.

So what happens to your sense of style when you stop consuming it as content and start experiencing it as lived reality.

Amelia joins us now. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for doing this with us.

Thanks so much for having me. And listeners, not a lot of time for calls here, but we can't squeeze in a

few if you think you're on point. Have you changed the way you think about style by paying more attention to real life,

the clothes you actually see people wearing outside your home,

rather than just seeing it on social media?

What did you notice and what is seeing somebody else,

actually wearing actual clothes in the actual

in real life world, uh, affected, you know, how it affected how you dress. 212-433 WNYC.

Call and tell us a story. 212-433-9692. Amelia, you want to start with the thesis of your newsletter, Shop, Rat?

What does that mean?

Sure.

So I was a staff writer on the Internet for a very long time and was tasked with writing many trend reports about trends that came up on TikTok,

...