This article is part of our Vogue Business membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to our weekly Sustainability Edit, which contains Member-only reporting and analysis, sign up for membership here.
Late last month, VF Corp announced British designer Christopher Raeburn as the first global creative director of Napapijri, following a successful stint in the same role at Timberland. Alongside elevating the brand’s creative vision, Raeburn has been tasked with causing “good trouble”: embedding sustainability practices with the same provocative energy his eponymous label is known for.
VF Corp isn’t the only company seeking creative directors with sustainability prowess. Chloé is fresh from a turnaround that saw it become fashion’s first luxury B Corp with Gabriela Hearst at the helm. Mother of Pearl has completely rebranded to put sustainability first since creative director Amy Powney took charge as co-owner. And Patrick McDowell is three years into their tenure at Pinko, in the newly minted role of sustainability design director.
“At the end of the day, fashion is a creative pursuit, especially in luxury,” says McDowell. “The vision of the brand comes from the creative director, so whatever they prioritise is how the brand moves forward, be that a colour, silhouette or sustainability play.”
Fashion’s latest creative director hires have been white men plucked from an exclusive pipeline. Vogue Business speaks to recruiters, talent scouts, designers and diversity experts about how to move the needle.
Many creative directors remain unaware of their potential as sustainability changemakers, because this isn’t generally what they’re hired for. But the role has massive influence on how brands progress towards their sustainability goals, which many in the industry are currently on track to miss.
Sustainability-minded creative directors can curb emissions and environmental impacts by choosing better materials, opting for more timeless and less trend-driven designs, supporting artisans and slow production, and shifting aspirations. McDowell and Raeburn are among the creative directors using pilot programmes to test and learn before scaling sustainability through the main collections. At Chloé, Gabriela Hearst focused on making the biggest impact with the smallest changes, tackling “volume drivers” like tote bags and denim. On the flip side, creative directors have the potential to shut down attempts at sustainability, acting as a gatekeeper to progress.
Practising sustainability often means rethinking what it means to be a creative director: expanding your remit outside the design team, ruffling feathers in a bid to advance targets, and flipping the power dynamics that underpin supply chains. Experts agree that ultimately, suppliers are the most important voice at the table when it comes to sustainability reform — so having and building those relationships is a crucial step that’s often overlooked.
“In apparel, the filter is usually: what is cool and interesting? But innovation is always aesthetic,” says Elizabeth Giardina, who held design roles at Proenza Schouler and Derek Lam 10 Crosby before joining New York-based B Corp brand Another Tomorrow as creative director in 2022. “As a creator, I’m really satisfied by the ability to have other considerations — moral considerations — in my design process. It’s way cooler to me to start with asking: what is the right decision to make? Who are the right people to source materials from in terms of environmental practices and ethics? It’s incredibly challenging to design within limitations, which I like.”
Hiring the right creative director at the right time is a delicate alchemy. Who will be able to push creative boundaries while respecting the brand heritage? Who can balance creativity with commercial success? Who can rally the team behind a new vision without undermining the existing brand story? Add sustainability into the mix, and it gets even more complicated.
Finding the right fit
In recent months, the conversation around creative directors has turned to just how many of them are white men. From Matteo Tamburini at Tod’s to Seán McGirr at Alexander McQueen and Alessandro Vigilante at Rochas, the industry’s vision of a creative director seems increasingly narrow. This lack of diversity has a knock-on effect for sustainability progress, experts say. Without diversity, teams often get stuck in the same ways of thinking, blinkered to new ideas and constrained to outdated paradigms.
Fashion’s habit of ridding newcomers after as little as one season if they fail to gain immediate commercial success, and critical acclaim, does not help. “If you want to have an original point of view in this industry today, think long-term,” said Gabriela Hearst at the Vogue Business Fashion Futures event in November. “Everything is so short-term. If you think long-term, the path is clear and you can stay true to that.”
But fashion’s revolving door of designers means many creative directors don’t have the luxury of long-term thinking. Serhat Işık and Benjamin A Huseby departed from Trussardi after two years; Rhuigi Villaseñor lasted a year and a half at Bally; and Ludovic de Saint Sernin left Ann Demeulemeester after just six months.
Every creative director has the potential to become a sustainability changemaker if they have a supportive ecosystem around them, says Silvia Onofri, the new president of Napapijri responsible for Raeburn’s appointment.
Onofri has set up a “creative council” at the brand to support Raeburn’s creative vision, she says, consisting of the heads of marketing, product and development. “A brand needs to be prepared to welcome a creative director. We have certain competencies in the team that we hadn’t invested in, so it’s about re-educating people now.” The process Napapijri is just starting mirrors the changes Raeburn made in his previous role at Timberland, bringing back an in-house makers’s space and upskilling the design team in craft production.
But those internal support systems are often lacking, and sustainability-minded creative directors can struggle to find roles that don’t promote overproduction or greenwashing. “Before I found Another Tomorrow, I wanted to align my values with my work, but I didn’t know that was an option for me,” says Giardina. At Another Tomorrow, an in-house sustainability expert focuses on R&D, so Giardina can focus on design.
Shifting the power dynamic in supply chains
While it’s important for creative directors to start taking responsibility for the social and environmental impacts of their creative decisions, there is a bigger change needed, says Kim van der Weerd, intelligence director at Transformers Foundation and host of the Manufactured podcast. “Creative directors certainly have a lot of power and influence. But we need to challenge our assumptions about who and what drives change.”
In her previous role as a factory manager in Cambodia, van der Weerd says her team never got to deal with creative directors, which is part of the problem. “We were dealing with procurement people, maybe product development people, who were translating the visions of the creative director into a technical design,” she explains. “But the current situation is that order cancellations are still happening, prices are going down instead of up, and the brand-supplier relationship is more skewed than ever. So the question of how garments are made is almost more important than what is made.”
Instead of top-down decisions dictated by creatives, executives and even legislators with little experience or knowledge of how supply chains really work, the sustainability agenda should be shaped by the people actually implementing changes: suppliers.
“Many suppliers operate in some of the places most vulnerable to climate change, and they directly employ some of the people most vulnerable to climate change,” continues van der Weerd. “If it were up to them, we wouldn’t only be talking about decarbonisation, we would also be talking about adaptation and resilience.” In its November report on climate action, Transformers Foundation found just that, advocating for a bottom-up system, where producers and suppliers have more of a voice in shaping agendas and approaches. “The most powerful way for creative directors to become sustainability changemakers is to have the humility to stop being solution-prescribers and start listening to their supply chain partners.”
This means reframing the conversation around sustainability to put suppliers first. Instead of asking “how effectively do I control what someone else does?”, brands, retailers and their creative directors should be asking “how does my behaviour impact you?” Here, the potential of creative directors gets more interesting, says van der Weerd. “Can you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say with certainty that nothing you did incentivised or motivated unethical behaviour? Can you say that you shared the risk of products not selling, which currently sits disproportionately with the supply chain?”
In order for creative directors to ask these questions, they need to understand their supply chains, shifting the dynamic from one where their creative vision is realised out of sight to one where the supply chain governs the creative process. This starts with increased transparency, which many brands are now pursuing in light of incoming sustainability legislation.
Giardina says working in this way has placed useful constraints on her creative process. “We design two seasonal collections instead of four, so you get more breathing room,” she explains. “We make everything in Italy and Portugal and I’m there every four to six weeks for at least a week. Those relationships are incredibly important. We don’t just find a factory to help us hit margins, these are relationships with makers and factories aligned with our philosophy. That’s been really profound for me — thinking about apparel as an agricultural product and working directly with farms.”
Flipping the supply chain on its head often means being open to new creative ideas. One season, Giardina wanted a bright green dye but ended up with a faded chartreuse. Instead of having a consistent colour across silk, knitted wool and woven wool, she ended up with three different shades, prompting her to pivot the palette of the entire collection. “In a normal brand’s development cycle, that would be really challenging,” she says.
For future creative directors to think in this way, change needs to happen at the education level. “There has been a shift in how we educate creatives, especially since we started offshoring production in the 1990s. Instead of focusing on technical design, courses now focus on creative vision and direction,” says van der Weerd. “Something we continuously advocate for is the need to really understand how your products are made, what production processes are involved. It’s hard to have a conversation about how to make something better if you don’t understand how it’s made in the first place.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
The EU is taking on fashion’s open secret: Destroying unsold goods
