Transcriber: Natalia Segovia Reviewer: Taher Koja
Hello. I'm extremely happy to be here. I consider myself a troubled area.
We are in trouble, so I'm super happy to be here.
I'm going to tell your story as everybody else did and the best story
I know it's my story. So it's a story from luxury to real luxury.
And you will understand why.
So I started my career
having first I went to Los Angeles,
I worked in the film industry and then I had a chance my family was in
the textile industry. Actually, I'm dedicating this TED talk to my father,
Rudi, who's sitting here tonight, and he's the best father in the world.
So I had a fantastic chance,
and I had my own collection and I had a great time with it shows twice a year.
We had shops and it was really creatively a fantastic, fantastic journey.
So I had also the chance to work with amazing photographers when they were at
the beginning of their careers so I could afford them.
So my first the photoshoot, what was David LaChapelle?
I worked with Mario Testino, Javier Valera,
Enrique Baudelaires and many others,
and so I had a fantastic chance to recognize talent when it was starting out.
And I still do that and I'll explain this with this beautiful mannequins that
I have behind the. I also worked in the real luxury world,
so I've been a senior design consultant for Ferragamo Prada Mumu.
And then if you get actually see the dates,
there's a gap between 2007 and 2017 doesn't look good on the curriculum.
But it was a good gap for me because I got to a point when I was working
for a massive, massive luxury firm.
And we were discussing the length of a skirt for three hours.
They're like, I can't do this anymore. Sorry, get to get out of here.
I needed to do something that belonged to me.
I needed to do something good for the environment and for the people.
And I knew there was a lot of good to be done in the fashion industry.
So I did something that I suggest everybody does,
which is ask the cosmic energy. She will answer eventually.
So I asked and asked and asked,
Please let me do something that will resonate with me. Resonate with my ideas.
Let me do good through what I know how to do.
And it happened, so my life turned into this,
which was and is the joy of my life,
which is working with artisans all over the world.
I became the creative director of
the biggest fair trade organization in Europe.
And I was traveling the world working with all these amazing people.
A lot of them, especially in Nepal, were social entrepreneurs.
Social entrepreneurs do something that I find is brilliant,
and it's somewhere between capitalism and pure communism,
which is they do business. They do it fairly.
They pay the right amount, the workers they don't pollute.
But then they dedicate a part of their profits to make the community
a better place. So some of them had schools for street children.
Others thought that microcredit for the artisans and I was keeping, you know,
keep on meeting these heroes and these amazing, amazing people.
So my heart was and is so happy when I get a chance to meet people like this.
This is a beautiful project I did in Tanzania, in the north of Tanzania,
where the Maasai women, because they're so poor,
they cut every shrub and every tree around their villages
so they can turn them into green charcoal that then they sell at the market.
So this NGO from Italy that operates in that area was kind of thinking,
How do we stop this? This is the defying completely.
And they realized that all the Maasai have sheep, they have goat,
they have a few cows and they sell them at the market.
But they hide the leather gets chucked the way.
So they're like, Wait a minute,
what if we set up a little place where we can treat the leather?
We ask a designer me to design a beautiful, you know,
line of bags and accessories.
And so we did, and the community stopped cutting trees and actually creating
a cottage industry. They gave money and skills to a lot of people in Tanzania,
and the Maasai are one of the most amazing people and fun to be with.
So the word got around and
a lot of brands started calling me to do collaborations in order to do, you know,
something sustainable in their operations. So here is with Moschino.
They wanted to do a collection that was inspired by Africa.
So I sampled wax print materials in Ghana for them,
and we ended up buying 25000 meters of this wax print.
Or when Pico called me, I was working at the time with Franca Soltani.
She was the director of Vogue Italia for 30 years.
We were good friends and Tinker wanted also to do something in Africa.
So Frank and I worked for Fashion for Development,
which is a U.N. organization that wants to bring development through fashion
in emerging economies. And I decided to get inspired by population in
the Omo Valley. They do body painting, and from that body painting,
I extrapolated these bags that have these lines on them.
We brought the work to Ethiopia because we produce 45000 bags in
a small factory in Ethiopia that had to hire more and more people.
And we also devolve money to the tribes that inspired us.
And now, thank God, there's a lot of amazing start ups,
I had the fortune to work with this one studio 189.
It's Rosario Dawson and her friend,
the actress and activist and her friend Aubrey Marois,
who do this beautiful collection in Ghana and also again through
the U.N. We work with them, we help them.
We did the first show and now the up and running and doing fantastic.
I work with the U.N. a lot with the two projects in Egypt that were fantastic.
One was with organic cotton and the second year we did recycled denim,
pro-consumer fabric, recycled yarn.
What happens is in a cutting room when you cut clothes,
15 percent of the fabric falls on the floor.
So we decided that let's get that pristine fabric.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's free consumer and goes through the recycling process and create
a new yarn. So nothing gets wasted. That's part of my mission.
For all of this, I got a very nice recognition at
the U.N. Apprised Women Together award in New York.
My father was there was a beautiful moment.
And they've also done a beautiful retrospective of all my best pieces at
the most prestigious fair for yarns for designers in Florence.
So I'm getting to all this because there is a pressure from Gen Z and Gen Y,
so the millennial and the Z generation,
because they really want the world to change.
My kids who are basically in this area always come to us and me
and my husband who say it's not fair and I'm like, What's not fair?
You lived in the 80s and I'm like, Yeah. And so then it was fun.
I mean, you messed it all up for us. Now we have a world that's going to hell.
And you know, we will not buy things that are made in not
a transparent way that are made that causing pain to people and
the environment. So we have to address this and this is our hope for the future.
In this wave, there's a lot of sustainable designers there are sprouting
up all over the world, they're doing fantastic creative things.
This is an English designer, Bethany Williams.
She basically cuts little strips of magazines,
very colorful magazines and then puts them on a loom
and makes fabric out of them. And she does it in a place.
There is this textile workshop in a place that it's
a community to recuperate kids that have drug abuse problems.
So this is a social and environmentally viable collection.
Marsh Marsh is a beautiful collection from Peru.
She works with artisans in Peru,
doing beautiful fabrics and doing something that I find brilliant,
which is natural latex. And it's an alternative to leather.
So it's basically the rubber that comes down from the trees.
She then puts it on these sheets of organic cotton,
and they glue together above big fires where they get smoked.
So this for me, it's fascinating.
My husband and I have a dream,
which is to do this project called fashion with a mission where we go
and film all this beautiful new designers
and we document their relationship with the tradition of their country.
So artisans and designers creating this synergy that is working beautifully.
Lucy to John is a beautiful brand from Argentina,
and they also do a leather like material.
It's called kombucha, and it's made by ferment, 18t, yeast and sugar.
And you get this gel that then dries down and it looks like leather
and nobody got killed. And it's biodegradable.
Chain is another beautiful collection from Argentina, all in organic fabrics.
But you might ask all these beautiful brands, where can they sell?
I mean, it's like a beautiful exercise of style.
They're sustainable, but who's going to sell them?
So start ups like the canvas in New York are amazing places.
This kid that you see in the middle there with his partner, David Gilmartin,
has started this profit sharing idea, which is in August in New York,
in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. All these commercial spaces that were empty.
And he went to the landlord and said, Listen,
you're not doing anything with this face. Give it to me. I'll fix it.
I'll put in designers from all over the world. There are sustainable.
And then we do a profit sharing.
We're not going to pay rent, but everything we sell,
you'll get a portion of it.
So we'll get the canvas and so we'll get the designers.
So there's new ways that are opening up for these new designers.
And the sky is the limit, literally.
So I really believe in education, I'm a professor and I've taught in many,
many very important institutions among which, of course,
Southern School of Design.
And I'm very happy to say that this week we did a workshop here in Shevaun where
the students were asked to buy shirts, second hand shirts,
men's shirts and to come up with beautiful creations by these assembling
this man's shirts. And coming up with incredibly creative ideas.
So we did this in two and a half days, which to me is absolutely fantastic.
These are my students.
These are the real Gen-Z. They're going to save us. One last thing.
I also represent a movement called Fashion Revolution.
Fashion Revolution was born on the 24th of April 2013,
when an industrial complex collapsed in Bangladesh, causing 1138 deaths and many,
many injuries. So this movement started in London for most of the Castro
and Kerry Summers. Our hashtag is who made my clothes.
So we ask justice for the 17 million garment workers,
the work today in the world of which mostly women and mostly get paid below
the poverty line. When mother and father don't get paid enough
and don't bring dinner home, the kids have to go to work.
So unfair payment and the refusal of the payment of a living wage is
the cause of child labor. So what I'm saying is that. There's so much to do.
And every day I do events, I talk, I teach, I design.
Everything I do is because I think fashion could become
an example of sustainability and example of fairness.
And I will leave you with a video of fashion revolution,
which has won many awards and it sums it all.
Yet while
she.
Thank you. So we can all start a revolution today right now and find
the true luxury which is working fairly, respecting people and environment.
Thank you very much.