Designer Gabriela Hearst On Her Vision For Making Fashion Better – And Greener
‘I am Latin, there is nothing sterile about me,’ Gabriela Hearst says, recounting the parent-teacher meeting she just had at her nine-year-old son Jack’s New York City school. ‘It’s a strict school, and my son is obviously an artist. He’s half-Latin, so there’s nothing sterile about him, either. And I’m like, “Today’s textbooks are boring,”’ she says, with a mix of conviction and humour, from her office in Chelsea, Manhattan, where she sits surrounded by notably less boring books of all shapes, sizes and subjects.
There are volumes about neolithic history, including Marija Gimbutas’ The Living Goddesses. Hearst is particularly interested in the roles women played during that period. In today’s male-dominated world, all of us – both men and women – could do with manifesting our inner female energy more, she says. ‘I think that is correlated to how we are treating the Earth.’
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She then shows me an excellent cross-stitched artwork of the female reproductive system with the slogan ‘Grow a pair’, before picking up a hardback tome titled Queens, which chronicles 3,000 years of the most powerful women in history. ‘I make everyone open it and see which queen they are,’ she says, looking regal and effortlessly cool in white tailoring and antique Cartier earrings. Which one is Hearst? ‘I think we have a bit of all of them inside of us. But I’ve always said that Gabriela Hearst, the brand, identifies with Athena,’ she says, citing the goddess of wisdom and military victory.
That tracks. Hearst, the woman behind the successful sustainable-luxury brand and former creative director of Chloé, has a fearless, commanding presence. It fills rooms and screens over the course of a series of talks, interviews and Zoom calls we have throughout the spring. Underpinning it all is a warmth, optimism and witch-iness (she famously carries her own tarot cards) that strips away any air of intimidation.
It’s a unique alchemy that makes her particularly well-suited to both fashion design and climate advocacy. Her work in the two areas has made her the designer of choice for world leaders and celebrities with substance, such as Lily Gladstone, Jill Biden, Meghan Markle, Zoë Kravitz and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.
Likewise, Hearst commands a power that goes beyond the world of clothing. I imagine that, in another life, she could have been one of the neolithic goddesses she is so drawn to. ‘Whatever access I have to speak truth to power, I will take,’ she says. As a result, she is a highly sought-after speaker and thought leader: she has already appeared at two COP meetings, extolling the power of fusion energy as a solution to the climate crisis and, this year, received the Time magazine Earth Award.
‘You know, I was nervous at the Time Awards,’ she says. Hearst was in a room full of celebrities, heroes and luminaries: Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Jodie Comer; the list goes on. But it was Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader from a remote Amazonian region in Ecuador, who rendered her starstruck.
‘There were all these famous personalities. But I was like, “Nemonte is here!” We have a voice with ancestral knowledge speaking in front of all of us.’ She was in awe. ‘There is always this mentality of looking down on indigenous people, but they know more than any of us. And I think that we have to understand our past to really understand where we are going.’
Hearst was there to receive an award for her work in fashion, where she has spent her career pushing for sustainability in an industry that produces up to 10% of the world’s carbon emissions. Climate advocacy in the business is notoriously tricky. The needle moves slowly, with global brands making promises to reduce their emissions in one breath, while increasing their output in the next. Hearst is a rarity in that she has driven change, at pace, from the two poles of fashion: she built her successful namesake brand around an environmentally sound model, and has led an iconic house to B-Corp status (making it the first luxury brand to earn the social and environmental certification) during her time as Chloé’s creative director. (She was also the first Latin-American person to take the helm of a French house.)
Hearst left the role last year after transforming the company’s practices, achieving growth by applying all the learning and development she gained while building her eponymous brand to a maison that is more than seven decades old. ‘I know what can be done. The changes I’ve seen take place in the last10 years have been rapid,’ she says. Now, Hearst is focused on building the sustainable brand of the future. But her work is intrinsically linked to the past.
Hearst has a cinematic origin story that begins with her family’s 17,000-acre ranch, Santa Isabel, in Paysandú, Uruguay. When I sat down with her to talk about her life and work for an event hosted by the US Ambassador Jane Hartley at her residence, Winfield House, in April, Hearst’s stories of growing up surrounded by sheep, cattle and horses transfixed the room. ‘I was conceived in a forest,’ she’d said, with a wink. Her childhood reinforced an awareness of nature. ‘Growing up, I didn’t know I was going to work in fashion. I came from a ranching family, so there was no concept of something like that,’ she says. But she understood luxury to mean things that were well-made and built to last.
Now, fashion is in a state of flux, with the biggest e-commerce players in decline and many of its most prominent brands trapped in crisis mode as the carousel of rotating leadership spins ever faster. As I write, there is an unfolding story in the fashion-trade press about the industry’s corporate climate – how it has deprioritised creativity in pursuit of bigger profits, to the detriment of the product.
‘From my perspective, it’s as if you have [a choice between] Kraft macaroni and cheese and Annie’s macaroni and cheese,’ Hearst tells me back at her office. ‘It’s feeling like a supermarket product. If I see another tote with the name of a maison on it... We can do a little better, right? We’re designers, we can do better. I feel that they’re taking the piss out of the consumer, the client. All the big logos – why should I pay to wear that? As far as I’m concerned, if I’m going to wear a logo, you’re going to have to pay me. That’s called sponsorship. A friend of mine recently said that we are commercially viable artists. You know, we can still make a business. But we can do better [creatively],’ she says. ‘There are designers out there that I really, truly admire in the sense that they’re advocating for creativity, and not just copying and repeating. It’s about pushing yourself. It’s what I miss about Vivienne Westwood: her activism, her work, her imagination.’
Hearst describes longevity as a point of pride, introducing me to the close-knit group of women who work in her atelier, many of whom have been with her since the beginning, including her head of production, Adishree Kumar; head seam-stress Shirley Zheng; and co-founder and head of marketing and communication Stephanie de Lavalette, her friend of more than 20 years. (‘Steph is my most successful relationship.’)
‘We’re a tight business,’ Hearst says. ‘A team of 50. My head seamstress can do the job of 10 petites mains. Each of my team members is worth 10 people. Because they’ve been with me for such a long ride, they understand the passion that we put into our product. And the clients are following us through all of these changes, because they know we’re not duping them. We love to make beautiful things. That’s our North Star. And we may not be a massive, multibillion-dollar business, but we’re building something that I know to be solid and strong. It will pass the test of time. Because at the end of the day – going back to those neolithic times – beauty has always been a part of who we are.’
She pulls out one of her old journals and shows me a colourful series of shoe sketches she did at the age of 16, many of which would still be relevant today. ‘I used to draw so much. I saw drawing as my entertainment. I would draw corset dresses – very period pieces. I still design in a similar way,’ she says.
If one were to distil the look of Gabriela Hearst to a shape or silhouette, it would be long, lithe and fluid. Think regal midi and floor-length dresses, full skirts, languid tailoring and easy outerwear, with a touch of the folkloric. ‘My twin daughters are my biggest muses, because they keep me in the now,’ she says of the 16-year-old girls, Olivia and Mia, that she has with husband John Augustine Chilton Hearst. (In true Gabriela Hearst form, all three of their children are Geminis.) Her clothes are also future-facing and scientific, including jackets lined with anti-cellular-radiation material, to protect reproductive organs, and aloe-treated linen.
It’s all very ‘female gaze’, which is notable at a time when luxury fashion is becoming increasingly dominated by male creative directors. ‘If you look at France after World War II, a lot of the designers were women, from Madeleine Vionnet to Elsa Schiaparelli and Gabrielle Chanel. A lot of women. No one knows a woman’s body better than another woman,’she says, before listing the nuances. ‘We have water retention, our bodies change. I know exactly what a woman my age or older wants to cover up. I know that no woman has a problem with their shoulders. It’s usually a safe place to be. Then you have the neck and arms – how can you empower them? And how can you do it with all the pressures that we know society puts on the female body? One of the biggest compliments I love to get is: “It makes me feel strong to be in a Gabriela Hearst suit.”’
At the time of writing, her name is circulating as a contender for the top job at Chanel, following the exit of its creative director Virginie Viard. With Hearst’s impressive track record of driving rapid environmental change, I can’t help but wonder what she could accomplish at an even bigger house.
Beyond the stellar tailoring, Hearst’s work is best known for using sustainable materials of the highest quality, including the softest cashmere and linen. ‘I use velvet that has no viscose – it’s pure silk.It’s hard to find things that are pure. When I used deadstock in my first show nine years ago, people looked at it as a dirty word. Now, you see deadstock everywhere.’ She says the change in the landscape of environmentally friendly fabrics is one of the things that excites her most. ‘We have materials that we didn’t have before. It’s all so much more accessible now.’
Nuclear-fusion energy is another source of optimism. She took to the stage at COP27 and COP28 to discuss why it is a promising solution to the climate crisis, and made it the subject of her spring/summer 2023 Chloé show. ‘If we’re talking about sustainability, we’re talking about energy. We need scaled energy to replace fossil fuels. I have a unique position, because I’m not a scientist or a politician. I’m a mother and a creator who believes this is a solution that can really help the survival of our species,’ she said at COP28.
Her face lights up when she talks about the community of women she has met through fusion. She grabs her phone, where there is a group chat. ‘A gang of fusion women are getting together. I told them to please make sure that I am included,’ she says, with a smile. ‘We’re forming a tribe.’ Athena would be proud.
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