AE and Aerie are proud to celebrate Pride Month with limited-edition collection designed in collaboration with mxmtoon. Shop the Pride collection today (before it sells out!) and read on to meet our 2022 Pride cast of AE employees.
Plus, donate at checkout all June long to support the It Gets Better Project. Since we first partnered in 2017, you’ve helped AE and Aerie raise nearly $3 million for the nonprofit, helping to launch a new initiative called 50 States, 50 Grants, 5,000 Voices to empower, uplift, and connect LGBTQ+ youth through school-based projects across the country.
Trenita
AE Digital Design
“I color my own rainbow just by being myself and fully expressing who I am. Whether it’s my hair [or] the clothes I wear, I just want to be me. And I hope that representation is seen and that other people feel free to be themselves, too.”
Joshua
AE Visual Merchandising
“The three words that sum up Pride for me are past, present, and future. Past, because I think that as a queer community it’s important to know where we came from, and remembering all the advocates that came before us, especially trans women of color and how they paved the groundwork for everything that we have today.
Present because we’re able to live openly and freely in the world today and be able to love who we want to love. And future because there’s always more work to be done.”
Kieran
AE Learning & Development
“To me, community is knowing that you’re not alone, that there are other people in the world who share your experiences and that there’s even a name for it.
As someone who didn’t come out, even to myself, until I was in my early 20s, I think it’s really, really important to see yourself reflected in the world around you. Because I didn’t have that, it took 20 years of my life to realize that people like me existed and that who I was was even a possibility, and finding that community and that common language to describe those things I was feeling was what allowed me to finally actually start living my life as me.”
Caitlyn
AE Quality Engineering
“The three words to me that sum up Pride are: resilient, joy, and love… I color my own rainbow by trying to show up every day with kindness and trying to bring a little bit of optimism, even on my darkest days. Just thinking about all of those around me who are so loving and thinking about how I can pour back into my own community.”
