Trail blazer

Gabriela Hearst compares operating a Parisian womenswear brand with a sustainable ethos to making an Italian Caprese salad. ‘You need to be working with the best ingredients, great tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella,’ she explains. ‘Before I joined Chloé, there was an oversight in the ingredients being used to create its final product.’

Before the Uruguayan designer became creative director of Chloé – a brand associated with For Hearst, who applied for the creative director position with a 92-page presentation, Chloé presented an exciting opportunity to work on a larger scale. ‘I wanted to see if we could apply the research and development practice from Gabriela Hearst, a smaller brand with a lower environmental impact, to a larger one,’ she says. First, she focused on Chloé’s ‘lowhanging fruits’ – materials that could be immediately eliminated from its supply chains, such as galvanised metals and semi-synthetic viscose. She also refused to do cotton T-shirts – a mass-produced commercial hit for many luxury brands that requires around 2,500 litres of water per piece – except for a deadstock cotton jersey iteration, in collaboration with Unicef. ‘There was a lot about the materiality process that we were able to change really fast,’ Hearst explains.