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.
