There were two phrases I heard more than anything else growing up: “Go play outside” and “Use your imagination”. My family lived in Tulsa – still does – and my grandparents had a farm 15 minutes from town, 40 acres of land dotted with old boxcars and wooden barns that dated back to at least the ’20s. My cousins and I would run wild there every weekend, riding horses underneath the willow oak trees and swimming in a natural creek so clear it must have been spring-fed. Even now, when I need a moment of peace, I picture Oklahoma.
I’ve been summoning its wide-open skies more and more often lately. I turn 50 this February, meaning I’ve worked in fashion for 35 years, and I’ve been a sustainability advocate for more than 20 of those, but in 2023 I hit a wall, mentally and physically. I wasn’t quite at the point where I couldn’t get out of bed, but I couldn’t tell you how I spent my days. The news just felt relentlessly bad – environmental and otherwise. I knew that, if I was ever going to get back on my feet, I needed to find a more sustainable approach to sustainability work.
When I left Tulsa for Europe at 15, I thought I had landed on another planet. One minute my mother had signed me up for paid modelling classes where I learnt to pose like a mannequin in Midwest department stores, and the next I’d been scouted to work in Milan. Before I was even out of my teens, I’d moved to Paris, where I impulsively cropped my hair into a pixie cut in the apartment I shared with Shalom Harlow. That led to my first American Vogue cover with Arthur Elgort in 1993, wearing a white blouse and pinstripes, which led to my opening Tom Ford’s a/w ’95 Gucci show, which then led to the Prada campaign in 1997 where I’m floating on the Tiber river in a rowboat at twilight, and on and on… Life became a merry-go-round of runway shows, photoshoots, and much time alone and away from my loved ones, spinning faster and faster until I had lost my bearings.
After a while, I realised how intensely disconnected I felt. I needed to take several steps back, retreat from the fashion world. At 25 I got sober, I became a mother, and I moved to California, where I began to work with the Natural Resources Defense Council. I educated myself about the climate crisis, quickly realising that, while it’s no one’s fault specifically, it’s everyone’s problem to solve. Emissions produced by garment factories in Bangladesh, making clothes for the West, will pollute the skies not just in the global south but above the Eiffel Tower. If I model a polyester dress in Milan, the cost will be felt, in a roundabout way, in Tulsa, by the sandstone cliffs and scrub oaks on my grandparents’ farm. Despite what I may have thought at 15, there’s no such thing as separate worlds; they are one and the same, and they are at risk.
When I returned to modelling in my 40s, I did so with an entirely different perspective on fashion. I would never put myself on a pedestal – I’m so far from perfect – but I didn’t shy away from asking difficult questions either, looking for solutions and collaborators. In 2013, I founded Master & Muse, an online store to champion sustainable fashion production, and co-founded A Squared Films to make documentaries touching on everything from the harmful pesticides used to grow non-organic cotton to innovative ways of upcycling the huge amount of deadstock out there. Still, I knew it wasn’t enough. In the time I’d been away from fashion, there had been tectonic shifts in the industry. Social media “outfit of the day” culture, online shopping and fast fashion, especially, had exploded. People didn’t seem to understand that clothes weren’t disposable; more than 90 million tonnes of garments are being thrown away each year, around 60 per cent of which comprise of plastics. No matter what I or anyone in my orbit personally did, things weren’t slowing down at an acceptable rate.
Little by little, this led to positions, collaborations and invitations that ultimately had some positive impact within the fashion industry. I joined the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2021 as its first sustainability ambassador, working with young fashion designers, material science students and other departments related to careers in sustainable fashion. I even audited classes in biodesign and sustainable marketing to educate myself and connect with faculty and students alike.
That same year, I became Karl Lagerfeld’s sustainability ambassador, designing our first collection of Karl’s renowned K/Kushion bag in vegan cactus leather. We are about to launch our fourth this year. As exciting as it is to create beautiful and meaningful fashion, the important work that I have done in collaboration with KL – championed by its CEO, Pier Paolo Righi – has been to support the team’s overall efforts to make real changes within its supply chain and regarding its carbon footprint.
In 2022, at the United Nations in New York, I lobbied government leaders to protect our oceans from the harm caused by human exploitation and the climate crisis. While at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, I discussed the need for investment in sustainable fabrics onstage – purchasing carbon offsets every time I caught a flight. I was arrested multiple times alongside Jane Fonda during her Fire Drill Friday protests outside the US Congress demanding the end of fossil fuels and the transition to renewable energy.
If I had written this article 12 months ago, I might have quoted you statistics about CO2 emissions and deforestation rates, but you know that the numbers are bad. We all do. And we’re all overwhelmed by it. Paralysed by the scale of the issue. To move forwards, I’ve had to lean into the tenets that have guided me in my sobriety, and remind myself to take each day as it comes. It’s about working together to change our outlook. As counterintuitive – and difficult – as it may seem, we’ve got to shift our mindset about the environment from one of fear to joy and love, of sacrifice to enjoyment. It’s a relief to consume less, to no longer be burdened by possessions you never needed in the first place. Being still and present is a luxury. Every sustainable choice you make, however small, isn’t just good for the planet, but an act of self-care, repaid in whatever your equivalent of Oklahoma skies are. The fact that everyone and everything on this planet is interconnected isn’t a curse, it’s a blessing – and a source of infinite hope. Finding time to be quiet in this overly stimulated and noisy culture is a way to summon more peace within oneself and the planet.
And if you’re unsure of where to begin?
Go play outside, and use your imagination.
The January 2024 issue of British Vogue is on newsstands from Tuesday 19 December
Hair: Shingo Shibata. Make-up: Kanako Takase. Nails: Trish Lomax. Movement director: Eric Christison. Set design: Max Bellhouse. Production: Farago Projects. Digital artwork: Meredith Motley.
