'Humanize My Hoodie' Goes to New York's Fashion Week

Jason Sole is a professor of criminal justice at Hamline University. Sole and his business partner, Andre Wright, recently participated in Fashion Week in New York. What do those two statements have in common? The fact that fashion can revolve around more than an extravagant purchase; rather, it can trigger a movement.

Sole wore a hoodie every day while teaching class one semester. His goal? To challenge his students' perception of hoodies and the people who wear them. When Sole's friend Andre Wright saw him wearing a hoodie that read "Humanize My Hoodie" on Facebook, the fashion designer saw an opportunity. The two of them have turned the social experiment into a fashion movement and were able to bring it to Fashion Week in New York. On a recent visit to the Almanac studios, Jason Sole talked about how he hopes fashion can lead to social change.

Original Royal Refugee fashion designer and painter Mohamed Hersi draws inspiration from his childhood spent wandering the streets of New Delhi, where he grew up, and the pre-civil war-torn Somalia he's never gotten to experience. Get the origin story on his brand, Original Royal Refugee, in this story from our Somali Community Digital Storytelling Project.

Can we find better ways to communicate after police-involved shootings? Good question. In a recent episode of Almanac, Philando Castile's mother Valerie Castile, his uncle Clarence Castile and Ramsey County Attorney John Choi discussed how they pioneered a toolkit as part of a task force aimed at improving communication in the wake of tragedy.