Gabriela Hearst knows what’s on the mind of luxury brands that charge $5,000 for a dress made from polyester, a fabric that costs “maybe a couple of euros” per yard.

“Margins, margins,” she said at the Columbia Fashion, Energy and Climate Summit at Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall during New York Climate Week on Monday. “A lot of money gets spent on marketing. My industry is in for a real reckoning partly because of that.”

But nothing else irritates the Uruguay-born, New York-based men’s and women’s wear designer more than seeing cheap fabrics marked up and passed off as high fashion, she told Sheena Butler-Young, senior correspondent for The Business of Fashion, in a fireside chat. Polyester, Hearst said, is a “dead material from another geological time.” If there’s one thing that needs to change on a burning planet, it’s the fashion industry’s—and, indeed, the world’s—addiction to fossil fuels.

Hearst credits growing up on a 17,000-acre ranch—where there were “maybe 15 other humans” and the nearest city was two and a half hours away, meaning “there was no place to shop”—with shaping her relationship to consumption and waste.

Source link