As a new season beckons, find inspiration and hope for a sustainable, equitable future from two trailblazing women.
Photo: Greg Adamski
For me, the month of September has always been the “true” New Year. Maybe it is something I inherited from my student years – when going back to school meant a new cycle, a new beginning. There is always a sense of optimism and renewed energy, but this year, I struggled to find either. The last two months have been so intense: extreme temperatures and extreme rains, terrible fires and scary droughts… More alarming signals of nature collapsing and a general sense of hopelessness about the fact that everyone seems to be more asleep than usual – maybe that is something to blame on AI and algorithms that have taken over our lives and our brains more than we realize?
In fashion terms, greenwashing has become so subtle and pervasive that I often found myself wondering what the point was anymore in working for a more sustainable industry. Every day, a new story comes out celebrating either social or environmental offsetting and fake news about brands doing incredible work or new technologies saving the world.
Bethann Hardison
Where do we go from here? How do we keep fighting? The eternal optimist in me got caught in despair. But as I was trying to figure out how I would find the passion to start a new work season, two events happened that gave me the fire I needed. The first was a screening of Invisible Beauty, a new documentary about fashion legend, activist, and radical thinker Bethann Hardison. She and Frédéric Tcheng co-wrote and directed the story of her incredible life, being at the center of major representational shifts in the fashion industry and showing her relentless fight for racial diversity. “In her lifetime, Hardison has seen the pendulum swing towards and away from the Black model,” notes a release about the documentary. “At every setback, she spoke up and rallied her colleagues and…
