Hey, y'all, welcome back to Made It Out. Today I'm here with Lauren Chan, someone who, we've already recorded one. Are you telling them? We've hung out. We've hung out. We've recorded. Like, we've done this before. You're back. I want to start. We've hung out cross country in two states. We really have. Wow, we go way back. Totally. To December. I know the wife. I'm like, I'm in.

You do a lot of things.

How would you describe your career?

Like, what do you do?

Well, this is a question I get asked kind of often.

So now I just have a joke.

I just say I'm a public lesbian.

because it's like a lot to explain and then it's like well first I started here and then I started

here and this is my mission and da-da-da-da-da-da but like I'm a public lesbian now which is really fun

long story short is that I started as a plus-size model and what I really wanted to be was a fashion

editor and I kept those two worlds separate because at the time, all these years ago, fashion properly was not body-inclusive whatsoever. And they really lived on opposite sides of the industry. So eventually I did become an editor. I spent most of my career at Glamour, but I left the modeling behind,

and I really didn't want to talk about being the bigger girl in the room. I didn't want to be

othered in any way. And I did that for a while, and then I realized that, like, if I was going to be

in this space, I wanted to have something to say and something connective with people and something

more than just, like, selling jeans. And so I started talking about

plus size fashion and size inclusive representation and all that good stuff within fashion from the

inside. And it really took off and it gave me my voice and my passion as well. So I eventually left

my job as an editor and started a clothing line, which made luxury clothing, mostly suits and

outerwear for women's sizes 12 and up. It was really, really, probably the most fulfilling thing

that I've done. Hardest and most fulfilling, which, you know, I know you're there bigger like me,

like they go hand in hand. It's a high and it's a low. And then after I sold that business,

I became a public lesbian.

...