Chloe’s creative director gets candid on how growing up in Uruguay shaped her understanding of the environment. From Mission’s Sustainability issue.
Listening to Gabriela Hearst is a treatise on both passion and purpose.
Whether it’s fashion, family, or the world we collectively inhabit, Hearst delivers her words in a way that is at once interesting, informative, and inspiring. Such was my instant impression at our first encounter in 2015 over lunch at Sant Ambroeus in Lower Manhattan. I was captivated.
With a successful, decade-long career in design already under her belt, Hearst was, at the time, readying the introduction of her namesake fashion label, a collection of ultra-luxurious, elevated, modernly elegant, and sustainable clothes. Her highest-quality, lowest-impact pieces were an immediate hit with fashion editors and consumers alike. The collection, which has since grown to include men’s ready-to-wear and accessories, earned her many well-deserved accolades, including the American Womenswear Designer of the Year trophy at the 2020 CFDA Fashion Awards and the British Fashion Council’s Leaders of Change Award for the environment at London’s Fashion Awards in 2021.
Since 2020, she’s also been making her mark as creative director of Chloé, the prestigious and storied fashion house in Paris. Needless to say, she is considered among the most important designers in New York.
During our lunch back then, it became immediately clear that Hearst isn’t just designing clothes. Hearst’s point of view extends above and beyond sartorial matters. Through her understanding of the perils of our climate crisis and the urgency to stem and hopefully reverse it, she has put positive social and environmental impact at the core of everything she does. It manifests itself in several ways, perhaps foremost in her firm belief in embracing a slower pace and process and to champion fashion with purpose, or, as she puts it, “honest luxury.”
“Until last year, there were luxury brands destroying [unsold clothing] in France. You’re extracting all these natural resources to then burn them. Doesn’t that seem crazy?” Hearst says during a Zoom meeting on a Friday afternoon in March. “We need to focus on three things: where we take our energy, where we are overproducing, and how we are pushing overconsumption.”
From the get-go, she has worked to address all these issues and then some. One only has to look at Hearst’s personal story to understand why she is so passionate about doing right by planet Earth. The designer was born and brought up in Uruguay on her family’s 17,000-acre ranch with horses, cattle, and sheep. She was raised with the idea of lasting craft as true luxury rather than seasonal trends and the barrage of merch we have been trained to expect from fashion—and that fossil fuels, overproduction, and overconsumption are a major hindrance to fixing the crisis we face.
“I come from a country where we don’t use fossil fuels because they are more expensive,” Hearst says. “We learned to use water as a source of energy, so in Uruguay, the energy comes from dams and hydro [electric power]. Ninety-three percent of Uruguay’s energy for production comes from renewable energy. I see the experience of my mother, who has the same land my family has had for 170 years. There have been two consecutive droughts in Uruguay, but because she never overgrazed on her farm, she has wildlife thriving. It’s rewilding, leaving the environment a space to heal itself. Is fashion a place where we will respect our natural resources? That should happen in every industry.
“We have solar panels and wind power, but these energies can’t take all of the demand,” she continues, “so we need transitional energies… hydrogen, fusion… and what I love about fusion is that it’s clean energy with very little waste. I don’t think the general public knows how close it is to being part of an actionable, scalable source of energy. It can be here by 2025, so we’re really at the tipping point of big changes for all industries.”
After educating herself on rewilding with the help of author and rewilding pioneer Isabella Tree, she brought awareness of the practice to fashion during last March’s Chloé show during Paris Fashion Week. With the lineup, Hearst envisioned what a better future will look like. The ready-to-wear and accessories shown in the city’s Parc André Citroën were in aid of Conservation International’s Indigenous Women Fellowship program.
“For each collection that we’re showing, we’re using our platform to bring [such issues] to a wider audience,” she says. “What are the possible solutions that we can start envisioning in order to get ourselves to climate success? I think it’s very important that we visualize this outcome. The collective consciousness can see the catastrophe very clearly, but we’re not seeing ourselves out of it. The only solutions to get ourselves out of this are here already; they’re not in the distant future.”
Hearst is indeed fashion’s number-one environmental pioneer and ambassador, and it shows in all aspects of her life and work. Her Madison Avenue flagship, for example, is free of synthetics or chemicals and was entirely built with natural, nontreated reclaimed oak, among other sustainable features, and 90 percent of the material waste used during the construction was recycled. Ditto her Norman Foster–designed boutique in London’s Mayfair, which used no new materials. She uses TIPA packaging, recycled cardboard hangers, and is completely plastic free, and, in 2019, she was the first designer ever to stage a carbon-neutral fashion show. Hearst spoke at COP26, the U.N.’s Climate Change Summit, and frequently earmarks proceeds from sales of her collections to important humanitarian work.
“I find my role is to investigate, to educate myself, to study, to raise awareness, and at the same time to make a product that is lower impact. That should be a given,” she says. “That shouldn’t just be special to Chloé or Gabriela Hearst. That should be the status quo for all brands. Everybody should be doing product with that mindful approach. We have a time issue. I talk to people from different sectors whose mission is to make sure we don’t go extinct, and we need to do this fast. I started from a micro point of view and knowledge, and as I’ve educated myself and still educate myself—because there’s so much more that I don’t know—I started to realize that the scale of the problem is bigger than our industry.”
Along the way, Hearst creates desirable pieces that speak to her environmental ethos. The designer diligently works to implement all the right things for environmental and commercial success. For the first Gabriela Hearst collection in 2017, she used deadstock materials. At Chloé, for example, she started reconsidering fabrics and favoring linens that don’t absorb as much water and weren’t treated with herbicides and pesticides. Low-impact wool blazers come with ceramic buttons made by hand versus commonly used plastic ones. The making of the widely popular Nama sneaker emits 35 percent less greenhouse gases and uses 80 percent less water than Chloé’s previous Sonnie sneaker, while the Woody tote, once a cotton canvas piece, is now made from linen.
“The first question with everything that we do is, how does this affect the environment? If it’s between an aesthetic choice and a sustainable choice, the sustainable choice is going to win, but it’s the job, as a creative or a designer, to make the sustainable attractive and desirable.”
Asked how Hearst sees the future, she acknowledges the continuing Great Resignation in the workforce, fueled by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and likely continuing to persevere as the world grapples with inflation, supply-chain challenges, and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Hearst, for her part, won’t fall victim to any of it.
“Because I have purpose, I’m very grateful I’m able to express myself creatively. With the state of affairs, it’s hard to justify working in fashion without a true purpose,” she says. “Great beauty, of course, is good for the spirit and the soul, and we need beauty, and I am definitely not disqualifying this. But I wake up every morning knowing that my kids are going to be able to say, ‘My mom did something right. She did not stand on the sidelines.’”
With the delivery of these words, her passion and her purpose—the ones I first experienced in 2015—are reinforced in the most powerful way possible, and Hearst is not one to ever give up. “I’m very clear on the outcome of what’s happening right now, what climate injustice is and the impact it has, and so I have to push forward without fear and with everything I can.”
Image from Chloé’s FW22 show.
