In ELLE.com’s monthly series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we spoke to Marjon Carlos, the sought-after journalist—who’s written some of ELLE’s own cover stories—and newly-minted host of Your Favorite Auntie, an interview and advice podcast she first started as an Instagram Live series during quarantine. “I knew Instagram wasn’t a very stable place for it to live,” Carlos says. “It needed to grow in so many different ways.” The result is a seven-episode season that launched this month, powered by Cash App, and features creatives like Christopher John Rogers, Ira Madison III, and Jessel Taank from The Real Housewives of New York. “They’re very open, very vulnerable, very real,” she says. “We talk about pop culture, relationships, politics, growing up, all of it.”
But as for how Carlos combined her love for fashion, cultural criticism, and being an actual auntie—with two nieces and a nephew, it’s a role she takes “very seriously”—into a rising career? She breaks it all down, below.
My first job
I worked at Banana Republic at the North Park Mall in Dallas, Texas when I was 16. I was a sales associate; I folded sweaters, I rung people up. I was obsessed, because I was really into fashion, and for me, this was a way to be somewhat close to it. I had my little discount, I got my first paycheck, I was able to afford all the clothes I wanted. Nowadays, I’m always kind to sales associates when I go into a store. I try to do the job for them; I put things back where they’re supposed to be. There’s a lot of grunt work involved in being a sales associate, and we don’t know what they have been exposed to; everybody can come with different attitudes, high expectations, and be as rude as they want to be. I don’t want to make their day any harder.
What sparked my passion for writing
I had a newspaper column in high school, and I wrote about pop culture. In college, I had an op-ed column. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but at that point, print seemed so intimidating. So I went further into academia, and I remember having a professor who was like, “You should be a cultural critic. This is what you should be doing, because you’re obsessed with pop culture, and the way that you’re unpacking it, you’re looking at it from a very sociopolitical lens.” So I literally would write for Huffington Post for free back in the day. It was like the wild, wild west of digital media where you could just write an article, and it’d be up a couple hours later. I was like, I love this. This is so exciting. If I have an opinion, I can unpack it, and it reaches all these people, and they connect. Writing is very solitary, so you never know how people are going to respond. I was always blown away by the impact that writing could have on people. I guess I [have been] chasing that high for the remainder of my career.
The challenges of working in fashion
Obviously working in the fashion industry, you’re up against a lot. People have asked me, have you ever had a The Devil Wears Prada moment? And I’m like, in a way, I guess, if The Devil Wears Prada were intersectional. I always think to myself, I did twice as much work as my white counterparts, because I was also dealing with micro- and macroaggressions, and I was dealing with imposter syndrome and anxiety and sometimes bullying. Sometimes my experiences working in fashion have been pretty disappointing, and as much as it can be inspiring, it can be demoralizing. Some jobs in the fashion industry have been that way, and they left a mark.
On the importance of establishing boundaries
I’m very protective of my energy. I don’t necessarily trust authority, so I try to put myself in a position where I’m the boss, or me and the client know what the boundaries are, because I didn’t have boundaries before. If someone told me to do something at 3 A.M., I’d do it, because that was the name of the game. Moving forward, I am very intentional about the way that I walk into spaces. I’ve had to rebuild my confidence in certain areas. I’ve been burnt out from writing at certain points in my career, and I’ve had to rebuild my love for it.
Why I started Your Favorite Auntie
During COVID, I saw that everyone was going live [on Instagram], and I was like, “Why is everyone going live? How can you just talk to people who are responding to you in the comments?” It was just such a weird thing, but I gave it a shot, because lot of people were hitting me up in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and they were asking me all these questions, like, “Marjon, what do you do in a circumstance like this? What do you do in a circumstance like that?” I was like, okay, I will go live, and we will talk about all these issues. We talked about dealing with interracial dating during the time of a racial reckoning and how you handle racial violence in the news when then you have to go do your work at the same time. I was like, I’m going to turn this into an advice show and offer life advice that you would get from your favorite auntie, and it grew from there. I knew Instagram wasn’t a very stable place for it to live. I knew the show needed to reach a broader audience. It needed to grow in so many different ways, and I definitely wanted to do in-person interviews, so I was like, I’ve got to turn this into a podcast.
How I’ve seen the role of the “auntie” evolve over the years
It’s been a mounting rise, regardless of my show or not. It comes at a really interesting time in culture when women are making a lot of money—more money than our predecessors. Also, a lot of women are deciding, maybe I don’t want to have kids, or maybe I’m having kids later, and maybe being an auntie can be a different type of role in the family. It offers women another way of showing up for their family and showing up for their loved ones. I also think it’s really become a term of endearment, because everyone loves their auntie. She’s seen some things. She’s lived. So I do think that’s very interesting that it’s becoming a part of the regular cultural zeitgeist. People are like, this is my persona—like the rich auntie, there are so many TikToks about that. The auntie who goes and travels all the time. The auntie who’s at the barbecue, who’s just having the time of her life. I think it’s a role for an independent woman, and maybe we didn’t have the word to describe it previously.
The reason I fell back in love with writing
At one point in my writing career, I was doing 10 stories a week at least. I was depleted emotionally and creatively. Because of that, the work suffered. At a certain point, I went freelance, and that process allowed me to fall back in love with writing, because I wasn’t just writing a story because it was assigned to me. I was writing, because I was interested in the topic and the person I was interviewing. Working with really good, encouraging editors has also helped me. And obviously therapy. Therapy taught me to not think of it as a job but to think of it as a God-given skill and not feel burdened by it.
When I know it’s time to leave a job
If I’m not excited about it, or I don’t want to get up in the morning and do it. If it’s demoralizing and taking me out of who I am, and I’m kind of a stranger to myself, because I’m just a cog and doing the things I’m told to do, that for me is a sign. I don’t want to become the worst version of myself to maintain a job. But I also know people have bills and responsibilities and families, and sometimes you have to be in situations longer than you want to be.
I often think of this Toni Morrison essay that she wrote on work. She came home complaining about a job, and her dad was like, “Listen, you don’t live there. You live here. So go there, go do your job, do your work, get paid, and come home to the people that love you.” I think about that a lot.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
