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Austin’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival brings together industry executives across entertainment, media and fashion for a week of programming including panels, film premieres and workshops.
On 8 March, Vogue Business hosted a dinner for those in town, in partnership with the UK’s Department for Business and Trade (DBT), at Soho House Austin. Attendees across the fashion and beauty industries from companies including LVMH, Tapestry, Estée Lauder, L’Orèal, Vestiare Collective, Adidas and Unilever mingled with entrepreneurs and business leaders, before sitting down for a meal accompanied by a short talk with speakers Samata Pattinson, founder of cultural sustainability organisation Black Pearl, and Shelley Zalis, founder of media and experiential company The Female Quotient.
Following a short introduction from Jamila Saidi, head of commerce, culture and lifestyle at DBT, Vogue Business US reporter Madeleine Schulz sat down with Pattinson and Zalis as guests made a start on their meals. From their perspectives as leaders in sustainable fashion and business, respectively, Pattinson and Zalis shared their views on the industry shifts across their careers, as well as their ambitions — and hopes — for a more sustainable and equitable future.
Pattinson founded Black Pearl as a bid to get more people on board with sustainability, after working at the intersection of the fashion and entertainment industries, most recently as CEO of Red Carpet Green Dress (RCGD). “After years and years of this campaign [for sustainable fashion], I still found people saying, ‘I still don’t feel a connection to the subject,’” she said. Pattinson realised that a reason people feel disconnected from the conversation is due to the absence of cultural lenses. “We haven’t been saying: ‘How does sustainable fashion speak to someone who has less disposable income? How does it speak to someone who’s disabled? Or how does it speak to someone who’s in a rural place, or a village, or a city? How does it speak to people across youth culture?’” It’s about fostering understanding and making people feel welcome, she said.
Zalis, too, founded The Female Quotient a decade prior to make it clear that empowering women in business is good for business. The Female Quotient, the largest global community of its kind, unites more than six million professionals across 30 industries in over 100 countries. “When you add more women to any equation, it’s a return on equality,” Zalis said. “You need diversity of mindset and [for] the people inside to reflect the society and the consumers that we serve on the outside. It’s for growth, it’s for innovation, it’s for attracting and retaining the best talent.”
Both Pattinson and Zalis are in the business of amplifying and empowering diverse groups of women — a feat that feels increasingly hard to achieve, especially in the US as companies roll back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives off the back of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. How do these leaders remain confident in these strides and projects?
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Zalis expects that companies who recognise that diverse perspectives are good for business will stick to their guns. “If you actually believe in why you’re doing it, you’re not going to [move] away from it,” she added. “[There are] companies that are saying, ‘We have diversity and inclusion in our company because it’s good for business and it’s working for us and we’re not going to shut our eyes and disappear.’”
Once again, it’s about making the business case clear, Pattinson agreed, referencing the workshops and projects she’s worked on under Black Pearl. “Ultimately, if it becomes a bottom line conversation, we need to back it up with the bottom line figures,” she said. It’s also about leading with excellence. “One of the most insulting things about the pushback against DEI is this idea that it’s tokenism. It’s this idea that it’s for show — to meet a quota, to tick a box. When actually what we are seeing is that these specific representations are excellent and in fact often overqualified because they have to be.”
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