“I couldn’t make peace and reconcile with this sort of odd feeling inside of me that I wasn’t super content with fashion.”
By Gabby Shacknai.
Amber Valletta’s youth was, in many ways, typical of a child of the ’70s. She listened to nine-tracks, played kick-the-can with the other kids in the neighborhood, and visited her grandparents’ farm on the weekends—but unlike her peers, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, native spent a considerable amount of time attending protests and organizing against environmental threats, namely the erection of a nuclear power plant on First Nations lands.
“I saw my mom, along with my uncle and their friends, fight it for years, and I remember going to my first protest at like six or seven years old and just having so much fun screaming at the top of my lungs,” Valletta recalls. “Obviously, we noticed how dangerous it would be, but there was also the issue of native lands, and of course, the many environmental and health concerns.”
But the influence of her mother’s grassroots activism didn’t stop at the local power plant—which, by the way, was ultimately prevented from being built. Instead, growing up around such passion for humanity and for the world helped Valletta realize how important it would be to bring some of that into her own life. “I understood very early on that there was this need to speak out against injustice, stick up for your community, and take care of the planet,” she explains. “And that was coupled with this childhood spent in nature and being constantly told to go outside and play and the love that I had for nature as a result.”
When Valletta started her modeling career, at the tender age of 15, being a part of the fashion industry didn’t seem to be at odds with her growing passion for environmentalism. There was no fast fashion or mass middlemen in the production line, nor was there an insatiable demand for instant delivery. “I mean, there were still mom-and-pop brands and localized craftsmen and then the high-end, luxury brands,” she says. “When I first started, I did feel a lot of disconnection internally because of the way girls were treated at work and the beginning of sweatshops, but it wasn’t because of the environmental impact.”
Then, roughly two decades ago, when Valletta was at the peak of her career, appearing on covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Allure, starring in international campaigns for Prada, Chanel, and Gucci, and dipping her toes into the acting world with movies like Hitch, she noticed a major shift in the industry. “I couldn’t make peace and reconcile with this sort of odd feeling inside of me that I wasn’t super content with fashion,” the model remembers. “It felt like I was working, but I wasn’t working from a value place.” So she decided to reevaluate her priorities and focus on the things that mattered most to her, and studying the environment was one of them. Valletta enrolled in a class at NYU, but even outside of the classroom, she began hearing more and more about new scientific developments about the environment and humanity’s relationship to it.
After having her son in 2000, Valletta took more of an official break from modeling, moved to California, and started working with a handful of NGOs, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceania, and the World Wildlife Fund. “I started slowly putting the pieces together as fashion was expanding into these huge global conglomerates, and I realized there was a big disconnect with how we were producing, designing, and sourcing our clothes,” she says.
But rather than give up all hope on the industry she knew so well and had essentially grown up in, Valletta was convinced there was a way to bridge the gap. “I knew that if I was going to go back, everything I did needed to matter to me and make me feel like I was really contributing something,” she explains. “Human rights and the environment were my top priority, so I just started figuring out how to make that my priority in my work too.”
Although this reckoning happened only after many years in fashion, Valletta truly feels like it’s something that’s been with her all along, starting with her adolescent screams protesting the nuclear power plant. “I think I’ve felt discomfort since I was a little kid, and I always felt like I needed to be of service and used for good and be a part of something that is changing the world for the better,” she says. “There’s just this internal compass that keeps guiding me.”
This guiding compass has led her to ask the tough questions of the brands and partners she works with, whose answers are often shrouded in opacity and difficult to ascertain. But when it comes to environmental practices, Valletta firmly believes the perfect should never be the enemy of the good. “It’s tough at times to hold both the activism and having to make a living, but obviously, no one is perfect,” she says. “And if what [the fashion industry] is doing is good enough and making some progress, then I can validate the money that I’m going to make from it.”
Valletta is happy that the industry has finally started to embrace environmentalism, whether it’s out of genuine concern or simply to meet growing demand from consumers, but she thinks it will take real change—both in policy and in our culture—to truly shift the needle on sustainability in fashion. “Unfortunately, what we’re up against today, and what we’ve been up against for many years, is corporations, and they’re the ones giving millions of dollars to political campaigns to steer policy,” she explains. “So I think that’s the conversation that needs to be had: We’re not battling two sides of the aisle; we’re battling corporations who are only concerned about the bottom line and don’t have people or planet in their best interests.”
And the model thinks that with the right approach, waging this battle could actually be possible. “I think the big thing is that we demand transparency and that we change our mindset from fast fashion and instant gratification, and the legislation will follow,” Valletta says. “There are so many great minds working on this issue, and I believe that ultimately, we’re creatures of evolution, so we’ll continue to evolve on this too.”
