It’s the second half of August which is when we prepare for back-to-school and NYFW –and the one thing they have in common is the idea that you “need" something new.

Around Black Friday last year, on No Kill’s Instagram we asked,

“How would you shop differently if you couldn’t return things?” Amazon’s frictionless returns make impulse buys that much easier, and its influence has pressured other retailers to adopt more lenient return policies as well.

But imagine if we really couldn’t return things – those impulse buys and gifts for others that they might not really want – would be less likely to happen

I’ve recently read Tansy E Hoskins latest book, Charity Shop World and now I’ve gone a step further in my thinking: forget about not being able to return things.

Now I ask myself: what if everything I buy going forward I have to keep for the rest of my life?

The drugstore sunglasses purchased in a pinch when I’ve misplaced my favorites. The trousers that are a bit meh but are appropriate for the occasion. These would definitely not make the cut!

But they’re the sort of things we buy because we know we can easily get rid of them by packing them off to charity shops – let other people have our used cheap sunnies and meh trousers. Even writing this I feel a bit sheepish when I think of my unwanted castoffs foisted upon a charity shop without a thought. Now I think, if I didn’t want that, why would someone else–and now in worse condition?

I’m not saying donations are inherently bad. But let’s imagine we only bought things we absolutely loved. First, it would transform shopping into something else altogether. Perhaps we’d be much more selective and slower to make a decision. We’d take the time to be really clear in what we wanted and uncompromising…or sometimes have an impulse buy because we unexpectedly found the perfect thing we weren’t even looking for but tried on and yes - had a coup de coeur as the French say. We fell in love.

Coats seem to be the particular item that I find swoon-worthy (and one of the many many reasons I could never move to LA) One of my favorite rituals is unzipping the garment bag each autumn and letting them hang freely in the front closet, waiting for a day cool enough to wear them. If I were to donate them, I would feel good about passing on these amazing garments.

Okay, not everything can be the perfect coat –I digressed a bit. The point is how much less we’d consume and how much better the quality of our donations would be, if we really cherished what we own. And this latter point, as I learned in Charity Shop World, is critical.

Tansy E. Hoskins was a volunteer for over a year in a charity shop and the resulting book is a fascinating read that weaves together a narrative of the day to day life in the shop –from itemizing donations to creating a community– with a wider look at the role of charity shops within our cycle of consumption.

There are things that, if you’re in the sustainable fashion world, you might already know – like how the clothes that are deemed unsalable in the shop are bundled into massive bales and sent to the global south to presumably be sold there. This is where “away” is when you donate something so it “goes away”. It is our waste –a practice now called waste colonialism. * **

For Hoskins, the sheer amount of goods entering the shop each day, and the amount that had to simply be tossed was overwhelming. She described sorting goods in the back room as a losing game of Tetris: never-ending and something one could be buried under.

There are moments of lightness in the book as well, particularly when she talks about how charity shops are an important place for community and how they can be seen as Queer spaces by offering possibilities and discoveries outside of mainstream shopping. There is a lot to be gained by shopping secondhand.

The shop itself could be considered the microview but Hoskins zooms out to a macroview that is really an indictment of capitalism as it is now: extractive, ruthless and inhumane.

She references both writer/sociologist Saskia Sassen and political theorist Achille Mbembe as she connects how we dispose of our stuff and the way we treat people.

I found this particularly thought provoking when she writes,

“Political theorist Achille Mbembe writes of people being transformed into ‘border-bodies’, who are forced to migrate around the world but who are unwelcome in the Global North. Mbembe describes people – with chilling similarity to the treatment of stuff – as becoming part of capitalism’s waste, which is evacuated ‘from the ordinary spaces of life’.”

We’ve been taught to see everything as disposable and the amount of goods that are donated is the tangible proof. And Charity Shop World asks you to see this larger picture. I had a great conversation with Tansy about all of this and write more about it here. And I encourage you to order the book here.

Too often, we get stuck trying to improve the current situation into something slightly less bad but what we need to do instead is to reimagine alternate possibilities.

Which is a lovey segue into the back-to-school part for me. No Kill: Project Planet, the educational arm of No Kill, is beginning to work with Pratt’s fashion department on an upcycled fashion competition – because if there was one major takeaway from Charity Shop World it’s that there is too much damn stuff in the world. So what if designers could only work with clothes that already exist?

That’s my fashion fictions question. And Brooke Garner in the fashion department had a similar idea so now we’re working on bringing upcycling more formally into the curriculum. The strongest looks will be selected for a judged show, with a mentorship for the winning look as well as coverage of the entire process in No Kill Mag. So stay tuned for updates on our progress.

With the CFDA so firmly in bed with Amazon we need alternate visions of what fashion can be. My hope is that this serves as a pilot for something much larger and I welcome any thoughts on how we might broaden this into something more.

* “Max Liboiron wrote in their book Pollution is Colonialism (2021), the ability to expel waste to another country is predicated on colonial access to that ‘other’ country.” -Charity Shop World

**Buzigahill / Return to Sender is a very clever African brand that creates clothes from our discards and sells them back to us.

One of the things I’ve learned through my sustainability journey is that, for all their marketing, most large corporations do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. How else do we explain years of putting chemical flame retardants on children’s pajamas or artificial red dye in M&M’s?

And while I’ve shared my thoughts on synthetic clothing here, here, and here—TL;DR: not a fan—it was only recently that I became aware that applying chemical dyes and finishes to natural fibers may not be much better.

Fortunately, there are already people addressing this.

In my second article on Brands People Doing Things Differently, I want to introduce you to AIZOME Textiles. I recently spoke with cofounder Michel May about how the company is doing things differently—and better—for people and the planet.

Michel describes AIZOME as a textile health company rather than simply a bedding or apparel brand. That’s the sort of phrase that brings out my inner skeptic, but he explained that it changes the question the company starts with.

“We do not ask, ‘How do we make a nicer bedsheet or shirt?’ We ask, ‘What should be in a textile that touches the human body for thousands of hours?’”

That question first came to him when his mother was being treated for cancer.

“My mother developed dark sores on her skin during cancer treatment. Her oncologist suggested that the dyes in her bedding might be contributing to the irritation. I was skeptical, but we changed the bedding, and the sores disappeared,” he explained, while adding that this was not a scientific experiment or proof of causation.

Still, it sent him down the rabbit hole of color and chemistry in textiles.

What Is Actually in a Bedsheet?

Is there anything more basic than a bedsheet? It’s a large piece of fabric made from cotton, linen, polyester, or some combination of fibers. The label tells us what it contains and where it was made. If it’s cotton, it may tell us the thread count.

What else is there to know? Quite a lot, apparently.

A sheet may be labeled 100 percent organic cotton while telling us almost nothing about what was used to bleach, dye, soften, or finish it.

Packaged food has a nutrition label. Cosmetics have ingredient lists. The absence of anything comparable for textiles gets discussed in sustainable fashion circles, but I don’t think it’s something most people consider while shopping for sheets.

AIZOME created what it calls a Textile Health Facts label to change this. The label is inspired by that familiar Nutrition Facts panel used on food packaging. And you may have seen a version online by Peter Gorse. AIZOME worked with Peter on perfecting their label. It goes beyond fiber content to include the coloration method, important processing and finishing inputs, substances deliberately excluded, relevant testing, manufacturing origin, and traceability.

Its products also carry manufacturing dates and batch numbers connected to information about the cotton, dyeing records, and construction. This is normal in food and medicine, where a manufacturer may need to trace a problem back to a particular batch. It is considerably less normal for a pillowcase.

“Our ambition is not to keep this proprietary forever,” Michel told me. “The real success would be other textile companies adopting the same level of transparency.”

Organic Cotton Is Not the Whole Story

It might surprise you that buying organic cotton doesn’t guarantee chemical purity. Organic describes how the cotton was grown, but not what happens to it next.

We don’t think about this very often, but our clothing is highly chemically engineered. Products go through a crazy amount of processing before they arrive at our doorstep.

They can be bleached, dyed with synthetic colorants and treated with optical brighteners, fragrances, formaldehyde wrinkle treatments or PFAS.

So while buying organic cotton is not meaningless, it doesn’t tell us the complete story of the finished textile.

AIZOME starts with organic, unbleached cotton and tries to keep everything that follows as simple as possible. It uses plant dyes instead of conventional synthetic dyes wherever coloration is required and avoids finishing treatments, along with synthetic antimicrobial coatings, PFAS, formaldehyde wrinkle treatments and optical brighteners. Just learning about what they don’t do made me realize how much is normally done to textiles without our knowledge.

Michel is careful not to suggest that anything natural is automatically safe or anything synthetic is automatically dangerous. The real difference is that AIZOME wants to know exactly what has gone into the textile and why it is there.

Considering how many hours our sheets and clothes spend pressed against our bodies, that does not feel like an unreasonable standard.

How Do You Dye Cotton With Plants?

When I think of natural dyeing, I imagine something fairly low-tech, done next to the plants in the garden—as seen regularly in my Instagram feed.

AIZOME’s process is closer to a laboratory than a garden.

The company uses sonochemistry, applying ultrasonic sound waves to help plant compounds penetrate cotton fibers. Because botanical color is difficult to achieve evenly and make last, this allows AIZOME to avoid many of the synthetic fixatives and other chemicals typically used to produce depth and consistency.

In simpler terms, sound energy does some of the work that additional chemistry usually would.

AIZOME creates blues with indigo, pink and rose tones with madder root, and greys with gallnut. (It also offers undyed cotton.) The result is sheets, duvet covers, towels and clothing designed to be washed, worn and lived with like anything else

Products People Actually Want to Use

For all the innovation involved, the most important part of the equation is still people.

“Bedding was the natural starting point because we spend roughly a third of our lives in bed. But our community kept asking the obvious next question: why can’t I have the same philosophy against my skin during the day?”

That led AIZOME to expand into clothing, which it calls Healthwear.

“Health may be why someone discovers it,” Michel told me. “Comfort is why they keep wearing it.”

This seems obvious, but it’s something responsible brands occasionally forget. A T-shirt can have a flawless origin story, but if it is heavy, stiff or scratchy, it will spend its life in a drawer. Sheets can avoid every unwanted treatment imaginable, but they still need to be something you look forward to getting into at night.

But What Does “Textile Health” Actually Mean?

If all AIZOME did was combine organic cotton with plant dyes, it would be great but not especially unique.

AIZOME has gone further by conducting or commissioning testing related to chemical residues, skin irritation, and antimicrobial and antifungal performance. Their bedding, towels and Healthwear are manufactured within the company’s FDA Class I medical-device establishment registration and device listing framework.

But this is an area where the wording matters, so I want to quote Michel directly:

“We conduct and commission testing on specific properties of our textiles and plant dyes, including antimicrobial and antifungal performance. Those results tell us what was demonstrated under the conditions of a particular test. They do not automatically prove that a textile will prevent, treat or cure a disease in a person.

“Likewise, FDA establishment registration and device listing are not the same as FDA approval, clearance, certification or endorsement. They do not mean that FDA independently tested AIZOME or validated every health claim we make.

“For us, the value of operating within a Class I medical-device framework is the discipline it creates around documentation, traceability, manufacturing and claims. Where we have data, we should say exactly what was tested. Where evidence is still emerging, we should say so. And where something has not been demonstrated, we should not imply that it has.”

I find this more convincing than the usual wellness-brand approach of taking one promising fact and stretching it until the product practically claims to change your life.

Instead, AIZOME is helping define what “better” textiles might actually mean.

What If This Became the Standard?

What interests me most about AIZOME is this idea that we have the right to know far more about anything designed to remain against our skin for hours at a time – and know that it isn’t harmful.

The company is showing that bedding and clothing can be made with fewer unnecessary inputs, greater traceability and more honest claims—without forgetting that the products still need to be beautiful, comfortable and practical.

The real measure of AIZOME’s success may not be how many people buy one of its sheet sets. It may be whether more textile companies are eventually forced to answer the same question:

What, exactly, are you putting against our bodies?

I was recently at brunch with a friend of a friend from LA. She’s a lovely person in many ways, but not only does she not know where her clothes come from, who made them, or whether the materials are toxic—she pointedly told me she doesn’t care. And this is beyond my comprehension. “How is that possible?” To borrow a phrase from Kar, who is continuously dumbfounded by other people’s behavior.

At some point, she also mentioned that she gets Botox every three months. The Botox itself is not the point. What struck me was the specificity of the commitment: the appointments, the expense, the sustained attention to what happens to her face—and the complete absence of curiosity about what she puts on her body.

I’ve long since stopped assuming that other people share my values. Look, I get it. I am not a fan of children as a general category. I think if you’re anxious, you should probably scroll less and move your body more. And I will never declare my pronouns or announce whose ancestral land I’m standing on. I’m not exactly trying to win sainthood.

But this is different. We are having one of the hottest summers on record, on a planet we all share, and that heat is driven in large part by the oil industry and by too much damn stuff. There is now more human-made mass on earth than living biomass. Connecting the dots between how much gets made and what the planet can survive benefits everyone. Non-binary, anxious, or still a child.

So if you can commit to quarterly Botox, perhaps you can also give some sustained attention to how you shop? Transform your retail therapy into something that serves more than just you. Support the brands that aren’t greenwashing and are actually doing things differently.

I’ve been meaning to write about a handful of them. But the interesting part of a good brand never fits in a paragraph, so I’m taking them one at a time, beginning with a small one –FOUR Objects– because small is where the thinking is clearest.

SIXTEEN OBJECTS, FOUR YEARS

To simplify: FOUR Objects is a capsule collection for discerning humans who value what they wear.

I met co-founder Karuna Scheinfeld at our Climate Week panel last September at Another Tomorrow. This spring, she invited me to the showroom, where I could see and touch the pieces, because that is still how you understand clothing.

“When you order everything from an image, how do you know you’re going to love it?” Karuna asked. “How do you know it’s going to get better with age?”

It’s not a small question when so much clothing is designed for the few seconds it takes to make a sale rather than for years of wear.

FOUR Objects is built around a deliberately finite premise: four new pieces a year, one every three months, for four years. At the end, there are sixteen. The brand is now in its fourth and final year of introducing new designs, although the core pieces will remain available as they slowly evolve the collection. You can subscribe as a Collector and receive each new piece, or buy one individually.

“There’s a deep kind of knowledge and a set of practices around quality that have been lost,” Karuna said. “Our core mission is that you don’t need that much. You need things you love, that fit you beautifully and are made beautifully.”

Aesthetically, I would describe the clothes as Brooklyn—specifically Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights. When I moved to South Park Slope, I noticed that the women had struck a balance between style and comfort I hadn’t seen elsewhere. They weren’t trendy. They had a certain je ne sais quoi, not unlike French women, but somehow Brooklyn.

That same casual elegance personifies FOUR Objects. Think a chunky sweater made unexpectedly light by alpaca and silk. An impossibly soft indigo chambray workshirt. A jacket whose shape feels familiar without looking like something you’ve already seen everywhere. The clothes don’t shout for your attention; their appeal reveals itself in the way they feel and fit.

THIRTY YEARS IN THE MAKING

Behind the sixteen objects are two women who have been in creative conversation for thirty years. Karuna and Mae Fatto met in 1994 as teenagers at a Parsons summer program. Mae followed fine art; Karuna stayed in fashion. In 2017, they began building something together.

Karuna had spent twenty-five years as a designer and design leader for brands including Ralph Lauren, Alexander McQueen, Woolrich and Canada Goose. She didn’t always connect with the industry’s culture, but she loved making beautiful, high-quality products.

“If you make a great product, even if it isn’t the cheapest one on the market, there are people who want it and love it,” she told me. “And when people discover that, it changes the way they purchase.”

For Karuna, none of the environmental or social work matters unless the product itself is desirable. “The first thing we have to do is make something beautiful that people love,” she said. “But while we’re doing that, we might as well use certified organic and traceable materials. We might as well use the best mills in the world and work with people who love what they do.”

Mae arrived through a less linear route. She studied fine art, earned an MFA from Bard and spent years abroad while working as a concept designer for heritage brands in the United States and Japan. Throughout that time, she kept a folder of everything she loved, labeled “Me?”

When she finally reviewed it, twenty years of clippings had converged around the same few silhouettes. She brought the folder to the table when she and Karuna began sketching the sixteen objects. After the Rabbit Jacket shipped, Mae enrolled in FIT’s sustainable design program because she wanted to know more about where the fabrics came from.

WHO MADE IT—and HOW?

Those concerns are central to everything FOUR Objects makes.

“For us, it’s really important that we’re doing this in a way that supports the human family,” Karuna said. “Where are the materials coming from? Who’s making them? Are they being paid a fair wage? Are they being treated with respect?”

More than half of FOUR Objects’ clothing is made in New York. Fabrics come primarily from Japan and Italy; fine tailoring is done in Portugal, while alpaca and cotton pieces are made in Peru. One Peruvian partner is a woman-owned mill with a nonprofit foundation operating within the company.

FOUR Objects also directs four percent of its profits back to the communities making its clothing, supporting childcare, elder care, legal services, domestic abuse services and healthcare. Structuring that commitment has proved administratively annoying in a way that reveals how unusual it remains. “Everyone gets confused when we explain that we are giving money back,” Karuna said.

That attention to people and process shapes the garments themselves. Their seamless merino sweater is knit in Brooklyn from extra-fine Italian wool on Shima Seiki whole-garment machines, emerging fully formed. The designers must work within the technology’s possibilities and limitations.

The Rabbit Jacket is shaped by a different constraint: its fabric can be made only in the quantity one eighty-something-year-old weaver can produce. Rabbit Goody wove the cloth from Italian wool and silk, with linen and cotton on the face. There is a hard ceiling on her yearly output, so the jacket is now offered only to Collectors.

Its pattern came from vintage indigo hanten jackets—the kind that are repaired repeatedly, remain in use for a century and eventually end up in museums. The scarcity isn’t manufactured to create FOMO. It is the literal capacity of one person and her loom.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

“And what happens when somebody isn’t using it anymore?” Karuna asked.

While many brands added resale later, Karuna and Mae built it into their platform from day one so FOUR Objects can take everything back.

“We have customers whose bodies have changed,” Karuna said. “Maybe they got bigger or smaller. There’s pregnancy, GLP-1s, menopause—everything. We are not one size, nor do we stay the same.”

Send a piece back and, depending on its condition, you receive credit while FOUR Objects resells or recycles it. The company’s responsibility doesn’t end when the credit card clears.

“Most of our clothes you could just bury in the ground, and they would biodegrade,” Karuna said. “But before that, we want to keep them in circulation.”

The ideal sustainable garment isn’t the one you can compost after wearing it twice. It is the one you love enough to wear, maintain, repair, resell and pass on long before anyone begins discussing decomposition.

THE REAL COST OF CLOTHING

All of this explains why Karuna is unbothered by criticism of the prices.

“My argument is always: I’m not going to exploit people,” she said. “If you want my prices lower, that means I’m exploiting somebody in my supply chain.”

FOUR Objects is a Certified B Corporation. It is womxn-owned, womxn-led and self-funded, with no venture capital and no particular interest in acquiring any. Which means the whole thing is harder than it needs to be, and also entirely theirs.

Sixteen pieces. Four years. Love what you keep.

fourobjects.com

Next in this series: Aizome—what happens when you decide the dye is the problem.

FYI: None of these features are sponsored. None of the brands paid to be here or knew I was creating this series.

This arrived in my inbox recently: a save-the-date for the 2026 CFDA Fashion Awards.

I stared at it for a while. Not because it was surprising, exactly. But because it was such a perfect, almost comically precise portrait of everything wrong with fashion.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America is announcing what it calls “American fashion’s biggest night.” Amazon Fashion is returning as presenting partner for the fifth consecutive year. The nominees and honorees have not yet been announced. And yet the first thing I see is not a designer working, a remarkable garment, an atelier, an emerging talent, or an example of the “artistry, craftsmanship and vision” the CFDA says it intends to celebrate. I see Kim Kardashian air-kissing an award trophy.

The current version of the announcement on the CFDA website uses a photograph of A$AP Rocky, the 2025 Fashion Icon, rather than Kim — which means the problem isn’t really Kim Kardashian. The problem is that celebrity has become the default visual language through which the organization sells American fashion.

Innovation, or Just Selling?

And as we all know celebrity sells. How else to explain the success of SKIMS when Spanx, which covers the same territory, already existed? Yet in 2022, SKIMS received the CFDA’s inaugural Innovation Award presented by Amazon Fashion.

Which had me wondering: what’s so innovative about shapewear?

Then I read CFDA’s description of its Innovation Award. It includes innovation in branding, marketing, social media, customer engagement, and the way people shop. In other words, the institution has expanded the definition of fashion innovation to include the ability to sell fashion more effectively.

And perhaps that is innovation, from a commercial perspective. But in the middle of a climate and waste crisis, shouldn’t one of the most powerful fashion organizations in the United States be asking a harder question?

Is fashion finding better ways to make clothes—or merely better ways to sell them?

Much of SKIMS’ signature products are composed overwhelmingly of synthetics. Shapewear requires stretch, obviously. But when an industry in a materials crisis uses the word innovation, I want to ask whether it means building a less extractive future—or simply creating another highly successful category of plastic-based clothing.

And Then There Is Amazon

Amazon is not a quiet benefactor whose logo appears discreetly at the bottom of an invitation. No, its name is in the title of the event, positioning it as the patron of American creativity, design, and craftsmanship.

Meanwhile, Amazon has been expanding its own ultra-low-price shopping business. Amazon Haul offers products—including fashion—for $20 or less, and last year Amazon promoted a Haul shopping event featuring $1 and even 11-cent deals. This is the same race-to-the-bottom retail logic that has allowed ultra-fast fashion to flourish: remove friction, lower the perceived value of products, and turn shopping into a form of constant entertainment.

It was built, openly, as the answer to Shein and Temu—and it has since expanded to more than twenty-five countries and regions, trading as Bazaar in some markets, with its own dedicated app. U.S. product selection has grown by more than a thousand percent since launch.

And can we discuss the name: HAUL?

That word did not come from fashion. It came from us—from the internet, from the video genre where a person empties a shopping bag onto a bed and holds each item up to the camera, one after another, until they are buried by their own pile of stuff. The haul video is the native art form of over-consumption: a performance in which the quantity is the point and, presumably, the pleasure.

Amazon took that word and made it a storefront.

And then, in case anyone missed the thesis, it built the pricing to match. Scroll the Haul homepage today and a banner runs across the top on a loop: Free shipping on $25. Save 5% on $50. Save 10% on $75.

Under their structure, buying one item you actually need is the financially irrational choice. You are penalized—with a $3.99 shipping fee—for restraint. Buying nine items you don’t need is the deal. The cart, not the garment, is the product. The math has been arranged so that the correct answer is always more.

Nobody has to be persuaded to over-consume. The system simply makes any other behavior cost more.

The CFDA + Sustainability

The dissonance becomes even harder to ignore when you look at the CFDA’s own sustainability work. The organization operates an extensive Sustainability Resource Hub, producing guides on materials, ethical sourcing, transportation, logistics, repair, reuse, and end-of-life. It has stated plainly that fashion is not currently sustainable—that it is depleting natural resources and exploiting people.

The CFDA understands the problem. It has published the problem. It has created educational materials explaining the problem. And then, when it comes time to stage its most visible event, sustainability is relegated to a resource section of the website while Amazon gets the marquee.

That is the part I find so depressing. This is not ignorance but greed overtaking any shared sense of humanity.

A Sponsorship Is Not a Gift

I understand that events cost money. I understand that emerging designers need scholarships and institutional support. The CFDA has described the awards as its biggest fundraiser, benefiting its Scholarship Fund, and that work matters.

But sponsorship is not a gift without an exchange.

Amazon receives cultural legitimacy, access, and the glow of association with creativity and craftsmanship. The CFDA receives funding. That doesn’t automatically make the partnership indefensible, but it should require far more accountability than a few celebratory quotations about “championing talent.”

Where is the public accounting of Amazon Fashion’s environmental footprint? Where is the transparency around the third-party sellers operating across its marketplace? Where are the requirements concerning worker protections, product durability, returns, unsold inventory, and supply-chain disclosure? Why isn’t this sponsorship being used to fund repair, local manufacturing, material transition, and the people who physically make clothes?

The Photograph

Which brings me back, finally, to the photograph—and why it matters.

Kim Kardashian received the CFDA’s first-ever Influencer Award in 2018, at the Brooklyn Museum. It was Tommy Hilfiger’s idea. Kolb told WWD at the time, with a candor I have to admire, that connecting to someone with that reach would bring more attention to what the CFDA was doing—there was value in acknowledging her, value for the event, value in the exposure. Vanessa Friedman asked in the Times whether the prize was about Kim’s influence on fashion, or about using her influence to make people look at fashion for a moment. Probably the latter, she concluded.

Eight years later, the CFDA answers Friedman by accident.

To announce this year’s awards they re-posted a picture of Kim winning said Influencer Award nearly a decade ago, credited to her Instagram account. They didn’t even commission it.

This is not an argument against Kim Kardashian. She did not lobby for that award; a board invented it and handed it to her. She showed up, wore Rick Owens, made a joke at her own expense, and posted the photo. Blaming an individual woman for an institution’s values is the oldest, laziest move in fashion criticism, and I am not making it.

I am saying the picture and the sponsor are the same decision, made twice. Both times, it chose the manufacture of wanting over the making of things. Both times, it chose the mechanism that moves the most units. An organization that takes the presenting money of an over-consumption engine and announces the news with a screenshot of an influencer is not being inconsistent. It is being perfectly, legibly coherent. It has told me exactly what it values.

What Do The CFDA’s Choices Reveal?

That celebrity is more useful than design. That visibility is more valuable than craft. That selling is treated as innovation. That sustainability can be discussed at the edges of the organization while an engine of accelerated consumption occupies the center.

And for one final flourish, the entire celebration will take place at the American Museum of Natural History. An extractive industry, gathering inside an institution devoted to the natural world and showing us what has become extinct, underwritten by one of the most powerful consumption machines ever built.

You really couldn’t make it up.

I don’t want another awards-season conversation limited to who wore what. I want to know who made it. From what. Under what conditions. How long it was designed to last. And whether the institutions claiming to lead fashion are willing to confront the economic system that makes those questions inconvenient.

The fashion industry says it wants transformation. But when it has the chance to show what it truly values, it still reaches for the same things: Celebrity. Scale. Corporate money. Spectacle.

The CFDA has told us what it values.
It’s time to build a new stage worthy of fashion.

Sources: WWD and FashionNetwork on the 2026 CFDA Fashion Awards announcement; CFDA press materials; Amazon’s own Haul storefront and aboutamazon.com newsroom for pricing tiers, cart discounts, selection growth, and market expansion; Digital Commerce 360, CNBC, and the Associated Press on Haul’s launch and positioning against Shein and Temu; the U.S. Senate HELP Committee report “The ‘Injury-Productivity Trade-off’” (December 2024) and its July 2024 interim report; the Strategic Organizing Center, “Failure to Deliver” (May 2025); Amazon’s public responses to both; CFDA and The Hollywood Reporter on the 2018 Influencer Award; Fashionista and The New York Times on the response to it.

I first heard of the latest Stella McCartney x H&M collab on Instagram. Which for better &/or worse has become one of my first sources of information. The post I saw from the Clean Clothes Campaign focused on the Advisory Board and how it didn’t include any workers.

It’s really clever and worth checking out. I “liked” the post and went on with my day. I really spend very little time on social anymore so I didn’t see more posts but as someone who was an early advocate of Stella McCartney this kept bothering me — more even than her lip injections, which will be tabled for another day.

I am not someone with a wardrobe of high-end designers but I do own some Stella pieces. A silk dress I bought on the Outnet in 2016 for my nephew’s wedding in Italy. Only one left and non-returnable, the drapey almost cocoon-like shape made me feel safe that it would fit — it did.

Two pairs of flatform shoes from the Real Real and a massive Falabella bag that I just bought full stop. All of these are “statement pieces” — not just because of their price points but because they’re unique, and pieces that I intend to wear for the rest of my life. But part of the attraction for me was because they were STELLA pieces — meaning they were from a successful sustainable brand, bought when sustainability was less known in my social group. I was genuinely excited to share how Stella McCartney made things better.

At that time I naively thought if people knew better…they would do better. Now I know better.

…and now this. Stella’s collection for H&M. She wants her brand more accessible. But at what cost? I almost didn’t want to say anything about it. I have been teaching this semester in an MFA fashion program and I asked the students to read a report called “Extraction Fashion: Unequal Exchange and Degrowth Explored,” by journalist Tansy E. Hoskins and ecological economist Morena Hanbury Lemos, published by Research & Degrowth International and War on Want. I’ve read plenty about the issues with fashion but this report — which showed how fashion corporations like Zara, and yes, H&M, are essentially the new colonizers — felt more pointed and revelatory.

In 2021 alone, the land required to satisfy EU fashion consumption amounted to over 226,000 square kilometers, roughly the entire island of Great Britain, and almost none of it within Europe itself. That land in Africa and Asia grows cotton instead of food, diverts water that communities urgently need, and sustains poverty across generations.

The report is unambiguous on one point: not a single major fashion brand pays living wages in its supply chain. I thought sharing this with my students would get us all “on the same page.” Big fashion — fast or otherwise — colonizes, overproduces, and is simply not a good look. So where do we go forward?

But what I did not foresee was that when you have students from India, China and elsewhere you no longer have a shared worldview.

While some students agreed with me others did not. One, who is –perhaps ironically– a social influencer in China with over 100,000 followers, pushes back on any suggestion that she put people or the planet first. She understands the reasoning but it just isn’t practical. People in China are just becoming middle class and they will not pay extra for ethical consideration — any more than western consumers. Thus as a designer, she argues, she cannot consider them either.

I don’t know what to do with this pushback — not just from this student, but from anyone who tells me sustainability is too expensive. I want to ask: is truly buying better and buying less not worth it? Using safer materials and paying people a living wage?

And yet here is Stella McCartney, who has built a career on exactly that argument, offering up a capsule collection at H&M. Her reasoning, that she's "always struggled with the fact that the majority of people who love my stuff can't get my stuff because of the price point," is the kind of thing that sounds generous until you think about it for thirty seconds.

If she genuinely wanted to solve that problem she could have built a secondary line on her own terms, with manufacturers she chose, answerable to standards she set — committed to it season after season rather than handing it off to H&M for a quarter. Because the people buying this collection are not buying it because they finally have access to Stella McCartney’s values. They’re buying it because it’s a cute skirt and it’s inexpensive.

The ethics are never really part of the transaction at H&M, and the idea that consumers will only buy the Stella pieces — read: the “good” pieces — and not anything else that catches their fancy is not supported by how humans actually shop. What it will do is give H&M a very good quarter and give Stella a lot of press. Which is what it is. But let’s not dress that up as *”infiltrating from within.”

*In the H&M press release McCartney says “I've always believed in infiltrating from within to move the industry forward.”

So yes. I take sunscreen seriously.

What I didn’t take seriously enough, for a long time, was what was actually in it.

The American Sunscreen Problem

My original favorite sunscreen was Supergoop’s Unseen Sunscreen — the one that melts into your skin and feels like nothing. Elegant, makeup-friendly, dermatologist-endorsed. I loved it. Then I started paying closer attention to ingredients and learned that avobenzone — the UVA filter in nearly every US chemical sunscreen, including Unseen — begins degrading the moment it’s exposed to sunlight. Which is, to state the obvious, the entire context in which you’re using it.

The industry fix is to pair avobenzone with octocrylene, a photostabilizer that slows that breakdown. Which works, sort of, except that octocrylene has its own growing concerns around skin sensitization with long-term use. So you have an unstable filter being stabilized by a problematic one. This isn’t Supergoop’s fault exactly — they’re working within the limits of what the FDA has approved, and that list of permitted filters hasn’t meaningfully changed since the 1990s. But the premium price implies innovation that isn’t really there on the protection side. What you’re paying for is texture and marketing, not a better filter stack.

For context on how premium Supergoop has become: the brand is now majority-owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. The “indie” brand that built its identity around making sunscreen cool and accessible is now part of a private equity portfolio.

The Mineral Detour

When I started connecting the dots on chemical filters, I did what a lot of people do: I switched to mineral. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide sit on top of the skin rather than absorbing into it. They don’t raise the same hormone-disruption concerns. They felt like the principled choice. I worked through several expensive options and eventually landed on EltaMD UV 46, the one every dermatologist seemed to recommend. My whole extended family started using it. I felt like problem solved.

Then Consumer Reports published results that efficiently dismantled that confidence. Their testing found that mineral sunscreens as a category failed on a critical real-world metric: adherence. Sweating, touching your face, normal daily movement — mineral formulas rub off. The protection number on the bottle assumes the product stays on your skin, which it doesn’t as reliably as chemical formulas do. EltaMD UV 46 scored 55 out of 100.

I felt like I’d been doing the right thing and hadn’t been. I went back to chemical.

Biore and the Formula Bait-and-Switch

Biore UV Aqua Rich had strong ratings and a reputation for a lightweight, hydrating texture — the kind of Japanese-beauty-inspired formula that beauty editors describe rapturously. I ordered it but after a few weeks it left my skin feeling like sandpaper.

What I didn’t know yet: the Biore available in the US is an entirely different product from the Japanese original. Because sunscreens are regulated as over-the-counter drugs in America rather than cosmetics, any formula sold here has to use FDA-approved filters. So the US Biore runs on avobenzone, octisalate, and octocrylene — the same filter family I’d been trying to move away from — plus homosalate, a UVB filter flagged by the EWG and endocrine researchers as a potential hormone disruptor. The FDA has questioned whether homosalate has been adequately studied at the concentrations commonly used in products. It’s present in a significant percentage of US sunscreens. Most consumers have no idea.

I had bought an American product in Japanese packaging. The Japanese formula I was actually trying to access wasn’t legally available to me.

When I ran the ingredients through the EWG database, this came up:

“This product contains chemical active ingredient(s) that the FDA does not have enough health safety data to classify as safe and effective: AVOBENZONE , HOMOSALATE, OCTISALATE, OCTOCRYLENE. This product should not be used on kids younger than 3 years old.”

These are the ingredients in almost all chemical sunscreens in the US Including Coppertone Waterbabies SPF 50. Not safe for children under 3.

Just sit with that for a minute.

…and then there’s The Skin Cancer Foundation

The Skin Cancer Foundation’s Seal of Recommendation carries serious weight with consumers — it reads as independent scientific validation, the kind of third-party credibility that cuts through marketing noise. What the packaging doesn’t mention is that the seal is only available to companies that have paid a $15,000 annual Corporate Council membership fee. You cannot even apply without paying first.

The Foundation does require third-party laboratory testing data reviewed by a volunteer committee of dermatologists, so the products have to actually block UV rays. But the criteria say nothing about ingredient safety. A sunscreen with every filter the FDA has flagged as inadequately studied can carry that seal without issue, as long as the SPF holds up in testing. It answers one narrow question — does it block the sun — while consumers reasonably assume it’s saying this product will not cause cancer. Not we don’t know the long-term effects of the ingredients.

The FDA Problem (Which Is Also a Corporate Problem)

The official explanation for why American sunscreens are stuck with a 1990s filter palette is bureaucratic: the FDA classifies sunscreens as OTC drugs rather than cosmetics, new filters require a more rigorous approval process, and the agency has been underfunded and slow. That part is real.

But the corporate interest angle is hard to dismiss. Consider who actually owns these brands. EltaMD — the dermatologist-beloved sensitive skin SPF — was purchased by Colgate-Palmolive in 2018. Yes, the toothpaste company. Coppertone was acquired by Beiersdorf (which also owns NIVEA, Eucerin, La Prairie, and Aquaphor) for $550 million. Supergoop is a Blackstone portfolio company.

These and other major players in US sunscreen have spent decades building supply chains and formulations around the existing approved filters. Reformulating around new ones is expensive. There’s no strong financial incentive for them to push for reform that would require them to spend money catching up.

Meanwhile, the regulatory gap between the US and Europe on cosmetic safety broadly is staggering. According to Janet Nudelman, Director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, quoted in Newsweek in September 2025: as of 2004, the EU had banned or restricted 1,100 chemicals from cosmetic products while the FDA had only banned or restricted 11. By 2025, the EU has bans on over 2,500 chemicals and restricts another 790. The US has added 22 more to its list in that same period.

The EU operates on a precautionary principle — restrict if there’s credible reason for concern. The US requires proof of harm. By the time that proof arrives, a lot of skin has absorbed a lot of things.

Why I’m Now Ordering Sunscreen From Korea

South Korea, like the EU, has approved a much wider palette of UV filters than the FDA. The Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun — which costs about $12 and is available through Korean beauty retailers — uses four filters: Uvinul A Plus, Ethylhexyl Triazone, Tinosorb M, and Diethylhexyl Butamido Triazone. None of these are available in US-market sunscreens.

Tinosorb M is worth understanding specifically. It’s a broad-spectrum filter with exceptional photostability — it doesn’t degrade in sunlight the way avobenzone does, research suggests it doesn’t penetrate the skin the way many US chemical filters do, and it hasn’t raised the hormone-disruption concerns associated with homosalate or oxybenzone. The EU has studied it extensively and permits it at up to 10% concentration. The FDA hasn’t approved it, not because of safety concerns but because the approval process has been functionally stalled for thirty years.

The Beauty of Joseon formula also contains no ethanol, no fragrance, and no homosalate. It’s one of the most thoughtfully formulated sunscreens I’ve encountered in this entire search, and I had to order it internationally to get it.

That’s the part that should embarrass the US sunscreen industry.

The most sophisticated, skin-friendly option I found at the end of a months-long investigation costs less than a drugstore impulse buy and requires circumventing American retail entirely. The problem isn’t a lack of better ingredients — they exist, they’ve been in use in Europe and Asia for two decades, they’re well-studied. The problem is a regulatory system that hasn’t caught up, enabled by corporations that benefit from the status quo.

If this reads like a departure from my usual territory, it isn't really. The same system that keeps toxic dyes in your clothes and greenwashed certifications on fast fashion hangtags is the one keeping inferior sunscreen filters on American shelves. Same song, different verse.

In 1997, Mary Schmich wrote a column — later immortalized as a Baz Luhrmann song — built on a single premise: "If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists." It became shorthand for the one piece of advice you could actually trust. Turns out even that is more complicated than advertised. Wear sunscreen. Just maybe not the American kind.

I’ve struggled with writing lately – especially about fashion. There are two reasons. And they’re both tied, in different ways, to the weakening of our democracy and the rise of fear-based rule. The first is what’s been happening in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is my hometown. It’s where I came of age, and it’s where much of my extended family still lives.

Like many Minnesotans we have Scandinavian roots (Oslo and Trondheim Norway specifically) but over time we’ve become American. And what I mean when I say this is that the background of my extended family is Norwegian. And Irish. And Hispanic. And East Asian. And Black –also Catholic, Buddhist and Jewish.

My grandmother used to delight in what she called her own “rainbow coalition”.

My younger sister works as a hospital translator. She told me recently—before the killings in Minneapolis—about a man ICE brought in for medical treatment after he had been badly beaten. She translated for the doctor exactly what the agents had done to him, listening to his fear, trying to remain steady, feeling utterly powerless. All the while, two agents stood like sentries outside the door, waiting to take him away.

Unlike the ICE agents in the media, these two wore no identification and completely blended in. My sister told me hospital staff have learned to recognize unmarked cars circling the building. Some of the white hospital workers have started driving new mothers home themselves—quietly, without being asked. The women and their newborns crouch down in the back seat.

This is what’s happening in our country. This is what resistance looks like.

…so there’s that.

The other thing is the uphill battle against the (F)ashion INDUSTRY feels steeper than ever. Legislation meant to curb fast fashion and protect the environment is being rolled back or quietly sidelined. Non-profits advocating for garment workers’ rights are folding. Jeff Bezos is underwriting the Met Gala—alongside rumors that Amazon is interested in acquiring Condé Nast. The message is not subtle. Profit still comes first, no matter how carefully the language is dressed up.

…and yet.

I agreed to teach in the new Fashion + Communication MFA program at Pratt Institute. This alone has kept me in conversation with fashion. With better fashion. With what the medium can still be.

And fortunately, you don’t have to look very far.

Copenhagen Fashion Week just wrapped, and—unsurprisingly—the Scandinavians know how to put on a show. CPHFW was the first fashion week to introduce minimum ethical and environmental requirements back in 2020 and it became stronger because of it.

In this climate, a platform that still asks brands what they’re actually doing feels almost defiant and if you want to see fashion’s potential there is no better place to begin.

Here are a few designers and brands from the AW26 CPHFW shows who are genuinely doing things differently—and better.

Stem

Sarah Brunnhuber’s Stem operates on a principle that sounds almost too good to be true: zero-waste woven garment production. The Copenhagen-based brand, founded in 2021, has developed a proprietary weaving, cutting, and sewing technique that eliminates production waste entirely. Shape, pattern, and function are embedded directly into the fabric during the weaving process, leaving seams and fringes visible as evidence of the garment’s construction. For autumn/winter 2026, Brunnhuber titled the collection To Wool—both an ode to the fibre and a verb suggesting action. The innovation at the heart of this season was Elastic Wool, a high-twist yarn that behaves like stretch fabric without synthetic additives, developed over several years and now translated into industrial production. The wool itself was sourced from a Danish shepherd and spun locally. The colour palette—navy, off-white, brown—emerged from the deadstock yarns available in the required quality and quantity, a constraint Brunnhuber embraced rather than fought. Form follows technique here, and the results are exquisite.

Taus

Founded in 2024 by Freyja Taus and Juho Lehiö, Taus approaches fashion as dialogue rather than novelty. The Copenhagen studio produces ready-to-wear and demi-couture pieces rooted in craftsmanship and slowness, with each garment hand-sewn in their local atelier over a period of months. Their commitment to upcycled materials is rigorous: the autumn/winter 2026 collection incorporated discarded home textiles turned backside-up for texture, as well as suits from Lehiö’s late grandfather.

Aesthetically, the collection channeled darkly romantic femininity and unapologetic self-expression, drawing inspiration from early 20th-century queer history in Berlin—particularly the progressive communities that existed before their destruction by the Nazi regime.

Bonnetje

Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Hansen founded Bonnetje after graduating from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, bringing experience from Cecilie Bahnsen and Maison Margiela respectively. The brand’s concept is deceptively simple: cut up old suits and reassemble the pieces into new silhouettes. In practice, this means sleeves appear where collars should be, buttons migrate to unexpected locations, and menswear is transformed into feminine, avant-garde forms.

For autumn/winter 2026, the designers leaned into surrealism, studying how artists like René Magritte and Max Ernst employed repetition and strange symbols. A dress constructed entirely from white tank tops. A gown fashioned from shirt cuffs. Pumps adorned with vintage keychains that jingled against the presentation’s live piano soundtrack. Despite the conceptual complexity, the silhouettes remain wearable—classic shapes relocated.

Paolina Russo

Paolina Russo continues to prove that responsible production can coexist with joy, color, and exuberance. For autumn/winter 2026, they presented a collection inspired by the first school trip taken outside one’s hometown—that feeling of possibility when the world suddenly expands. Uniforms became a vehicle for individuality rather than conformity, with pleated skirts, rugby stripes, and collegiate crests reimagined in clashing pastels and neon pops.

I’m a fan of the brand’s material commitments: the collection featured mono-fibers (100 percent wools, 100 percent cottons) and graphics laser-etched directly into denim and corduroy rather than printed. More significantly, they collaborated with local artisans in Peru through Maison Anaychay, a French Peruvian creative studio that connects designers with craftspeople specializing in ancient embroidery and crochet techniques. This partnership provides women with living wages while allowing them to work from home caring for their families, sustaining traditional skills into the future.

Nazzal Studio

Sylwia Nazzal made history at Copenhagen Fashion Week as the first Palestinian designer to show at the event. Her brand, Nazzal Studio, exists at the intersection of fashion, ethics, and activism, with Palestinian heritage and resistance at its core. The autumn/winter 2026 collection, Al-Najah (Survival), drew inspiration from Bedouin traditions—the knowledge of how people survived and found purpose in some of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes. Working alongside contemporary artist Jad Maq, Nazzal incorporated Bedouin tattoo motifs and Palestinian Tatreez symbols using natural henna dye. Buttery leather and undyed natural latex—fabricated by the designer and her collaborator themselves—formed lofty, Bedouin-inspired silhouettes. An elaborate braiding technique requiring days to complete a single piece added texture to hooded jackets and relaxed tailoring.

At the heart of the process was community: Palestinian refugee women hand-wove macramé pieces resembling traditional jewellery, scaled up dramatically. Staged at The David Collection, home to Scandinavia’s largest collection of Islamic art, the presentation honored heritage while championing the economic empowerment of displaced artisans.

SSON: One to Watch

Swedish brand SSON made its Copenhagen Fashion Week debut as a One to Watch—a designation for emerging labels not yet screened against CPHFW’s minimum standards but introduced to the framework’s expectations. Co-founded by creative director Yulia Kjellsson and Ellinor Håkansson in 2024, SSON works exclusively with secondhand materials, sourcing from charity shops that cannot sell their overflow of donated textiles.

The autumn/winter 2026 collection, titled The Fortunate Ones, confronts this excess head-on. A mountain of discarded clothes dominated the presentation space, a literal monument to over-consumption. The garments themselves emerged from this abundance. Some pieces were constructed intuitively from intact garments; others followed traditional pattern methods. This tension between instinct and system mirrors the broader uncertainty around sustainability itself.

SSON offers no easy answers or performative eco-purity—just the discomfort of acknowledging fashion’s waste problem while still producing. The resulting pieces, however, feel considered, functional, and genuinely wearable.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of designers at Copenhagen Fashion Week—but it is more than enough to remind us that real imagination, material intelligence, and ethical ambition are still very much alive. I’ll be attending NYFW selectively this year, writing only about shows that rise to this level.

All fashion images above ©James Cochrane, courtesy CPHFW

In the early 2000s I ran a street style blog called StyleDefined NYC. For six years it chronicled queer nightlife and scrappy art students long before street style entered Vogue’s pages.

At the time, the few existing blogs either spotlighted the wealthy (who could essentially buy style) or the genetically blessed 20-somethings whose beauty obscured the fact that their outfits weren’t necessarily why people were looking. (How else to explain ugg boots with shorts, leggings with anything, or whatever trend you personally despise?)

What was missing were the older people, the broke art kids, and everyone in between—those inventing style without a limitless budget. StyleDefined NYC was full of what we’d now call upcyclers, people making couture gowns from garbage bags and chainmail tops from safety pins, showing up on the edges of Fashion Week in homespun masterpieces before Instagram existed. They believed in the transformative power of fashion even if fashion didn’t yet believe in them. (Rumor has it Anna Wintour once called them “tent fleas.”)

I eventually sold StyleDefined NYC and went to work for a fashion start-up. It happened to be sustainable, which was new territory for me. I learned about supply chains, workers’ rights, and the havoc the industry wreaks on the planet. I also realized how thoroughly fashion publications ignored these issues—and when they didn’t, the lens was usually beige/green/mommy-yoga/goopified. Not my people. Where was the publication for them?

So I started No Kill Magazine. Among other things I was excited to show people how they could shop better.

But here’s the flaw: the premise of “shopping better” as a solution is itself problematic.

Shopping isn’t just an activity—it’s an American pastime. We invented mall culture. We coined “retail therapy.” * After 9/11, our leaders told us to “go shopping” as an act of resilience. From Dallas and Dynasty to the Kardashians, consumption is baked into our national identity. To consume is to be American; opting out feels subversive.

Thus solving our environmental problems via shopping feels like a logical progression. Except you can’t buy your way into a better planet, no matter how “ethical” those $200 jeans claim to be. (And for anyone scoffing at the price, there are plenty of unethical jeans that cost just as much or more.)

This isn’t to say shopping more responsibly is pointless but simply telling people where to shop wasn’t enough—and sites like Good On You are built for that.

I want us to interrogate fashion itself and rethink the entire system.

This is why we shifted No Kill into a non-profit—so we could move beyond shopping guides and build awareness campaigns that challenge the industry’s biggest blind spots.

Which led us straight to luxury.

Chanel. Balenciaga. Louis Vuitton. We’re told these are the pinnacles of value, and the price tags seem to confirm it. But beyond cost, why do we believe they’re valuable? Because an ad told us so? Shouldn’t something on a pedestal—something with a five-figure price tag—be not only beautiful and exquisitely made, but crafted from materials that don’t harm the planet and by people paid a living wage? Why do we allow corporations like LVMH to dictate what luxury means?

And luxury brands are powerful. They shape culture, set standards, and define aspiration. When heritage houses use polyester—the same cheap plastic as fast fashion—they normalize disposability at the highest level.

That choice ripples outward: into landfills, into our food chain, into our lungs. Polyester is oil in disguise. Every wash releases microfibers into waterways. Every gown or suit made from it is destined to outlive us in a landfill. And every marketing campaign that calls this “timeless” or “sustainable” is quietly betting we won’t ask questions.

So with a wonderful team, we created a campaign that launched this September in New York City.

It started with the simple question: What is a Luxury Item? which quickly evolved into Who Defines Luxury? and for this initial launch it culminated in a panel discussion at Another Tomorrow featuring a group of people who collectively have a vision for the future of fashion that inspires me.

At first, we thought this would be a one-off. But some questions refuse to leave. Who Defines Luxury? is one of them. Because what’s beautiful should also be benevolent—made with respect for people and the planet alike.

And maybe that’s why this newsletter is six weeks late. I needed a minute to digest this shift—not away from spotlighting upcyclers, new materials, and what’s working, but toward a nonprofit that can also interrogate fashion’s value system with more clarity and force.

So here we are, at the beginning of whatever comes next.
I’m curious, energized, and a little terrified in the best possible way.
And I’d love to hear how you define true luxury.
It’s a conversation I want to keep having—because it’s shaping where we go from here.

*Mary Schmich coined the term in the ‘80s

In my social feeds this summer, I’ve seen:

• Your basic flip-flop sandals by The Row for $690 (sold out on their website).

• A striped cotton beach towel by Prada for $1,050.

• And Balenciaga?

Their latest cult buy is the Marché Packable Tote—a scruffy, crinkled plastic bag in all but name, available for pre-order at a mere $995.

It’s made from Dyneema, a material often described as bulletproof—which is exactly what I look for in a tote bag, said no one ever.

Originally developed for industrial use and commonly found in tents and high-performance gear (glamping, anyone?), Dyneema is still a plastic—specifically, a petroleum-derived polyethylene that’s notoriously difficult to recycle due to its specialized processing.

This isn’t even new territory for Balenciaga. The brand has been running this bit for a while. For those in the #IYKYK crowd you may remember the $1,790 "trash pouch" from 2022? Or the $2,145 leather riff on the iconic Ikea shopping bag from 2017?

We are living in an era where luxury has become performance art, where visual discomfort signals cultural capital, and where the more mundane—or deliberately hideous—the item is, the more cachet it holds. As long as it’s wrapped in irony and served to those who get the reference, it’s considered chic.

Perhaps no moment captured this shift better than Vetements’ 2015 debut of the now-infamous DHL logo T-shirt.

Priced around $300, it sold out instantly and set off a wave of think pieces and Instagram takes. Was it satire? Critique? A prank on the fashion elite? Perhaps any of those.

But mostly, it was product. A product that launched Demna Gvasalia into the spotlight and paved the way for his appointment as creative director at Balenciaga — where he scaled that same ironic, self-referential playbook into a full brand identity.

Now, luxury brands are doubling down. They’re selling shoes that resemble hospital slippers, bags that look like garbage sacks, towels priced like rent. The items themselves often carry no craftsmanship, no heritage, and certainly no practicality—but that’s not the point. The point is the message behind the purchase. You’re not buying something beautiful or well-made; you’re buying access. You're proving you get the joke.

And so, inevitably, comes dupe culture.

Scroll through social and you’ll find endless lists of so-called perfect dupes—affordable lookalikes of high-end pieces, many mimicking the same absurdity or calculated blandness as the originals. There’s the Walmart Birkin. The $20 version of a Loewe tank. Knockoffs of the flip flops, the bags. These dupes are not just about affordability. They’re about fluency—about knowing what to copy, and why. Wearing one doesn’t say “I wish I had the real thing.” It says, “I’m fluent enough to play the game on my own terms.”

But here’s the thing: the game doesn’t change just because the price does.

Dupe culture, for all its air of rebellion, mirrors the very system it pokes fun at. It thrives on the same references, the same hunger for status-through-style, the same gatekeeping-through-aesthetic.

Whether it’s the original or the copy, both run on the premise that style is a code—and value comes from being understood.Meanwhile, the cost—environmentally and ethically—remains unchanged. Whether it’s $690 flip-flops or $7 knockoffs, it’s often the same exploitative labor, the same synthetic materials, the same pipeline of environmental damage. The price shifts. The impact? Not so much.

What we’re witnessing is luxury in its emperor’s-new-clothes phase. A culture so deeply self-referential that a plastic bag becomes a status symbol—as long as it’s accompanied by a logo and a wink. Everyone claps because everyone’s afraid to say they don’t see it.

There is no real critique here. There is only product.

If there’s a way forward, it doesn’t lie in choosing the dupe over the designer, or vice versa.

It lies in stepping outside the cycle altogether—in asking not what something costs, but what it offers, in refusing to applaud simply because we recognize the punchline. It’s the equivalent of walking away from the cool kids’ table, realizing, as Gertrude Stein once put it, that “there is no there there.” Because whether we spent $20 or $2,000, if all we’re left holding is a plastic bag, the joke really is on us.

And yet, beyond the cascade of trends and outside the irony economy there exists something else.

People building something else entirely—designers working in true collaboration with artisans, not just to borrow steal their aesthetics but to share credit and profits; material innovators crafting fibers that regenerate the earth rather than pollute it; and a generation of young creatives who refuse to mine virgin resources when there is already so much beauty to be salvaged, reshaped, and reimagined.

They’re not trying to get in on the joke.
Instead they’re designing a future that doesn’t need a punchline –with more beauty and less bullshit.

If I said the word sweatshop and asked you to name what comes to mind, chances are you’d say fast fashion. Or maybe Shein. H&M. Zara. It’s baked into our collective understanding now: cheap clothes come at a high human cost.

But you wouldn’t think of Loro Piana.

In fact, unless you read Vogue Business or scroll Net-a-Porter with purpose, you might not even recognize the name. Unlike brands relentlessly advertised like Chanel and Michael Kors, Loro Piana has built its image on discretion. It’s positioned as the pinnacle of quiet luxury—a brand revered for its rarefied materials, meticulous craftsmanship, and an ethos of understatement so controlled it feels almost sacred. And of course: sweaters that cost thousands of dollars.

A recent Who What Wear piece gushed over the celebrities and influencers who wear it, calling Loro Piana “the Uniqlo for billionaires.” The phrase is designed to stir FOMO just before the affiliate links drop. The message? If you know, you know. And if you can afford it, you belong.

Acquired by LVMH in 2013, Loro Piana has inspired near-religious devotion among fans who covet its knitwear made from baby cashmere and vicuña. Its garments aren’t just expensive. They’re marketed as untouchable—crafted with such care and natural beauty that they seem to transcend trends, seasons, and even scrutiny.

This is the mythology that has defined Loro Piana for decades—luxury as a kind of modern fairy tale, spun from rare fibers and whispered status. But myths, like fabric, can unravel.

Recently, I came across a news story of allegations of abuse that stopped me cold.

“In a factory on the outskirts of Milan, a Chinese tailor spent the last 10 years sewing jackets for just under $5 an hour. He worked 13-hour days without a single day off. Late last year, he stopped getting paid at all. When he complained, his employer beat him so badly with an aluminium and plastic tube that he had to go to the emergency room.”
— Sarah Kent, Business of Fashion, July 2025

This wasn’t a supplier in Dhaka or Guangdong. This was in Italy—working for Loro Piana. Loro Piana. The brand that trades on purity. On the idea that if you pay enough you’re buying into a better world.

While researching this piece—intending at first to interrogate the false divide between fast and luxury fashion—I found another thread to pull: a 2024 Bloomberg Businessweek exposé about vicuña sourcing, conservation, and the Peruvian communities who make Loro Piana’s ultra-luxury garments possible.

If the sweatshop story was a rupture, the vicuña story was the slow unravel.

Vicuñas are wild camelids native to the high Andes, closely related to llamas and alpacas, and are known for producing the world’s finest natural fiber. Their ultra-soft fleece can only be shorn every three years and must be hand-collected under strict conservation protocols, making it exceptionally rare and valuable.

Vicuñas were once near extinction but have been protected and brought back through conservation, and respectfully sheared by the communities that have lived alongside them for generations. A rare, delicate fiber gathered without harm. A symbol of fashion aligned with nature and culture and a process that seemingly benefited everyone.

That’s the narrative Loro Piana sold. And if it were true, this could have been a model for how fashion might support ecosystems, livelihoods, and beauty in balance. Instead, it’s become another cautionary tale. Because beyond the price of the sweaters it carries a cost rarely accounted for. Not necessarily in how the animals are treated, but in how the people behind the fiber are forgotten. In Lucanas, Peru, local herders round up and shear wild vicuñas each year in a centuries-old practice known as the Chaku.

Yet, according to Bloomberg, “In New York, Milan or London, the fashion house Loro Piana sells a vicuña sweater for about $9,000. The Indigenous community of Lucanas, whose only customer is Loro Piana, receives about $280 for an equivalent amount of fiber.”

These communities live in poverty-like conditions, while the brand profits off land many say was never meant to be privatized. Even the most “natural” luxury can slip into exploitation when brands see land and labor as resources to mine rather than relationships to honor. Of course, Loro Piana/LVMH denies wrongdoing. But denial doesn’t equal accountability.

If these facts make anything clear, it’s this: the assumption that luxury holds itself to higher standards than fast fashion no longer holds. So we have to stop letting brands tell us what luxury is. Their version is increasingly akin to the Emperor’s new clothes—all surface and status, with nothing of real substance beneath.

We need to reclaim the word LUXURY.

How do we do this? We start by refusing to let branding define our values. We start by asking harder questions—not just of the Guccis and LVMHs of the world, but of ourselves. About what we choose to elevate, what stories we buy into, and what kind of system we’re silently endorsing every time we get dressed.

Luxury should mean:

• natural, regenerative materials

• transparent and ethical sourcing

• deep respect for the people and ecosystems involved

• garments designed to last—not just physically, but culturally

• and a sense of enoughness that stands outside the churn

If fashion wants to claim the language of beauty, it has to be honest about where that beauty begins—and who it belongs to. And if that means tearing down long-held assumptions and building new definitions in their place, so be it.

Because the future of fashion—and of real luxury—isn’t stitched from illusion. It’s built on integrity. And that’s something that ultimately can’t be faked.

As the editor of No Kill Mag I haven’t been immune to the allure of AI - or specifically chatGPT. Want to tell the world about the dangers of microplastics? You can spend a day researching and writing about it or…”outsource” it to Chat. Or pick any other topic you want easily digestible. So easy. So convenient.

But like fast fashion and fast food we need to ask: At what cost?

In a recent New Yorker Article Kyle Chayka shared the results of a M.I.T. Media Lab experiment where students were asked to write essays and split into three groups: One group relied on their own brain, the second could use Google Search and the third was allowed to use Chat GPT. Their brain activity was monitored during the process.

The result? “Subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory.” Chayka shared.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I fed a chapter of my unfinished novel into ChatGPT for edits: it smoothed descriptions, sharpened dialogue—at first thrilling. But soon the voice wasn’t mine and more critically, there was no flow state –that blissful feeling that only comes from deep concentration. This was the writing equivalent of eating a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

Returning to the New Yorker article Chayka wrote “Of course, a writer can in theory always refuse an A.I.–generated suggestion. But the tools seem to exert a hypnotic effect, causing the constant flow of suggestions to override the writer's own voice.”

The Brain as Soil

Picture writing before computers. You sit at your desk with nothing but a pen and paper, the way farmers once walked their fields at dawn, pressing soil between their fingers. The first lines are perhaps awkward. You keep turning them, letting oxygen reach buried notions. A week later you open an old book—poetry or insectopedia—and foreign spores drift in. Drafts pile up like compost; heat builds; rotten phrases break down into rich humus. Finally, a paragraph appears that was never on any map, unmistakably your own harvest.

Only then do you pick up the spade of technology to check a fact or trim a hedge. The machine is an implement, not the seed. You are still the farmer, steering the plow, deciding what stays, what gets mulched, what new crop follows. Importantly the soil—your neural network—grows deeper for the labor, ready to nourish the next season of thought.

Ultra-Processed Food, Ultra-Processed Thought

That early farmer mentioned above was replaced by the ever efficient Industrial farms that swap diverse rotations for mono-cropping, then pour on synthetic fertilizer when the soil goes sterile.

A diet of ultra-processed food correlates with obesity, metabolic disease, even structural changes in the brain’s reward centers. Likewise, readers (and editors) acclimate to AI’s flavorless output: tidy lists, padded transitions, safe pivots.

When we use ChatGPT—or any AI—to write, we commit a similar offense as Big Agriculture against the “soil” of our brains. Instead of producing writing akin to those ugly, misshapen but wildly flavorful tomatoes from a farmers’ market, we produce bright-red, uniform industrial thought-tomatoes devoid of taste and nutrients.

The Hypnosis of Convenience

Tech convenience dulls our instincts: Grubhub deliveries erode cooking skills; AI drafts erode stylistic muscles. I’m not anti-technology—I’m anti nutritionless convenience. When we cede our own thought to AI we sacrifice the crucial neural cross-talk that sparks original thought, just as fields lose fertility under industrial regimens.

So next time the blinking cursor tempts you to click “Rewrite with AI,” remember the cardboard tomato, the metabolic fog after a fast food binge. Then plunge your hands back into the messy soil of your own ideas. Thought can’t be rushed. It can’t be hacked. Discovery, innovation and creativity are the byproducts of taking it slow – strengthening your literal brain power in the process.

How is this working with No Kill Mag? We’re ensuring our articles are written by humans and about humans. Below are a few recent ones worth reading as well as a documentary worth watching.

When Cancel Culture Bleeds into Sustainable Fashion

Olivia Baba asks whether demanding perfectionism is helping or hindering the movement

Preserving Cherry Grove: Parker Sargent on Queer History, Drag Activism, and Fire Island’s Enduring Legacy

In this wide-ranging interview, Sargent shares what the Grove has taught her about drag as protest, the politics of chosen family, and why queer sanctuaries still matter now more than ever.

From Fleece to Fashion: Susan Skalak on Slow Style, Sheep, and Sustainability

We’ve all heard of slow fashion before. But what does it really take? In an article by Arola Oluwehinmi, we follow the journey of Susan Skala creating a place for herself in the world of sustainable fashion by not only ensuring her textiles are ethically sourced, but every step of creating a piece of clothing is completely Earth friendly.

Not on No Kill but Worth Watching: Dressed to Kill

Take a look in the mirror… do you like what you see? From biotech labs to beaver ponds, from New York Fashion Week to Chile’s textile graveyards, Shane unravels how the trends we chase to fit in and stand out leave a lasting mark on our planet.

Part of PBS’s Human Footprint series with biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, Dressed to Kill goes beyond the usual fast fashion exposé to explore the broader links between fashion and nature. It’s available to stream now on PBS.org and the PBS App. Catch new episodes of Human Footprint every Wednesday night through July 30 on PBS.

As the saying goes, “History is written by the victor”—which is another way of saying some truths were deliberately left out. If you’re not taught the full story, how can you be expected to know it?

Janelle Sessoms wrote on No Kill:

“I, as a Black woman, had no idea about this monumental moment in Black history. I, as an American woman, was completely unaware that this event happened in American history. At six years old I knew when the Mayflower landed. I knew when America became independent from England. I even knew George Washington’s birthday. But I was 18, a freshman in college, when I learned the true date when all enslaved people were freed.”

Because “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

…But now we do. And now we can go deeper. I put together a reading list to broaden my understanding and dig into the parts of American history we were never meant to forget—but were never really taught. While so much of history is being literally erased before our eyes it’s on us to keep it alive.

Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. Let it also be a commitment to truth.

On Juneteenth

By Annette Gordon-Reed

Blending personal history with deeply researched storytelling, historian Annette Gordon-Reed traces the origins of Juneteenth in her home state of Texas and reclaims its significance for all Americans. She connects the announcement of emancipation in Galveston to the wider story of Black life in Texas—from slavery to freedom and through the long aftermath of segregation. Intimate and incisive, this short volume is an essential primer on what Juneteenth means, how it came to be, and why it matters now more than ever.

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Gates examines the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, asking why full freedom for Black Americans remained so elusive after emancipation. Through historical analysis and visual culture, he reveals how white supremacy surged after Reconstruction, giving rise to Jim Crow laws and the systemic disenfranchisement of Black citizens. This book is both a sobering account of America’s racial regression and a tribute to the intellectual and cultural resistance that flourished in response.

We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy

Edited by Natalie Baszile

A stunning anthology that weaves together essays, oral histories, poems, and photographs to document the legacy and resilience of Black farmers in America. From post-emancipation land ownership to today’s movements for food justice and agricultural sovereignty, Baszile amplifies the voices of those who have remained rooted in the land despite systemic barriers. It’s a celebration of survival and tradition, and a powerful reminder of how land ownership and food systems are deeply connected to justice and liberation.

A Black Women’s History of the United States

By Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

This sweeping and intersectional narrative centers Black women in the telling of American history. Through stories of resistance, leadership, and survival, the authors reveal how Black women have shaped the nation’s culture, politics, and communities—often while being overlooked by mainstream history. From the earliest days of slavery to contemporary struggles for justice, this book illuminates the lives of activists, artists, rebels, and visionaries who paved the way for generations to come.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

By Isabel Wilkerson

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson traces the stories of three individuals who fled the South in search of better lives in the North and West, part of the six-million-strong Great Migration. Their personal journeys reflect the broader movement that reshaped the nation’s cities, labor force, and cultural landscape. Richly reported and beautifully told, this modern classic explores the costs of leaving home and the hopes that drove millions toward freedom and opportunity.

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

Edited by Kevin Young

This landmark anthology spans centuries of Black poetic expression, from the colonial era to the 21st century, showcasing the depth, diversity, and radical power of African American verse. Editor Kevin Young brings together voices both canonical and overlooked, weaving a tapestry of poetic resistance, beauty, and transformation. The collection includes early voices like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton, the fire of the Harlem Renaissance, the thunder of the Black Arts Movement, and the contemporary resonance of Cave Canem poets. Young presents a historical archive and cultural celebration—an essential volume for understanding how poetry has always been a vital form of resistance, remembrance, and renewal in Black America.

The Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Colson Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal subterranean train network ferrying enslaved people to freedom. At its center is Cora, a young woman fleeing a Georgia plantation, whose harrowing journey across state lines reveals the shifting face of racial terror in pre-Civil War America. With each stop on the railroad, Whitehead unearths a different facet of brutality, complicity, and resistance, offering a sweeping yet intimate account of survival. Historical fiction that serves as an allegory for the nation’s unfinished reckoning with its past—a novel that forces readers to confront the layered violence of slavery and the enduring legacy it left behind.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

By Frederick Douglass

This powerful autobiography traces the incredible life of Frederick Douglass—from his birth into slavery to his rise as one of the most influential voices in American history. Written by Douglass himself, the book chronicles not only his personal journey to freedom but also his tireless advocacy for the abolition of slavery and civil rights. His eloquence and moral clarity remain as resonant today as they were in the 19th century, offering firsthand testimony to the cruelty of slavery and the unbreakable will to be free.

Just Harvest: The Story of How Black Farmers Won the Largest Civil Rights Case Against the U.S. Government

By Greg Francis, with a foreword by Mike Espy

This eye-opening account tells the story of the historic Pigford v. Glickman class-action lawsuit, in which Black farmers sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for decades of discriminatory practices—and won. Greg Francis, a lead attorney in the case, reveals the legal battles, personal losses, and systemic racism that shaped the case. This often-overlooked chapter in civil rights history underscores the importance of legal recourse and the enduring fight for economic justice in Black rural communities.

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery

By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

Through over 150 historical photographs, this groundbreaking visual history offers a vivid portrayal of Black life during and after slavery. The images—from posed portraits to candid scenes of family and labor—tell the story of emancipation not only through text but through the faces and expressions of those who lived it. The book challenges assumptions and provides a visual archive of a people in transition, struggling toward freedom and dignity in a deeply unequal society.

Every June, we’re reminded of how visible queerness can become—and how quickly it can be erased.

For years, Pride month has followed a familiar rhythm: rainbow logos splashed across storefronts, playlists curated for “love is love” campaigns, fast-fashion tees screen-printed with borrowed slogans and sold to the masses. It was never liberation, but at least it was loud. This year, the silence is noticeable.

Major sponsors such as Mastercard, Citi, Pepsi, PwC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast, Diageo, Target, Visa, Walmart, and others have either pulled out or reduced their support for Pride events and festivals. Brands that once lined up to prove their allyship now seem to be quietly excusing themselves from the conversation. And queerness, once commodified for its aesthetic and its edge, is treated like a liability.

The same thing is happening in the climate space. It wasn’t long ago that every brand scrambled to tell you how green they were.

Pride and climate were packaged, polished, and sold as lifestyle.
Queerness became rainbow socks.
Climate action became capsule collections.
Content, not commitment. And when the temperature rose—social or literal—they left.

Business of Fashion wonders aloud if people are “tired of sustainability.” ESG departments are quietly being dismantled. In today’s political climate, even mentioning the environment is suddenly seen as a risk.

The irony, of course, is that queerness and sustainability have always belonged together. They challenge systems built on dominance—whether it’s gender norms, extractive capitalism, or aesthetic conformity.

They both ask: What could this look like if it weren’t built to serve profit first? which disrupts the fantasy that the industry can continue as it is, with slightly better packaging.

And they both offer something deeper: a chance to remake the world in a way that honors life, creativity, and community.

This is personal for us. We are queer. We care about fashion. We care about the planet. We started No Kill because we believe fashion can be a site of resistance and renewal.

We believe in beauty that doesn’t come at the cost of exploitation.
In expression that doesn’t rely on conformity.
In style that doesn’t leave a trail of waste behind it.

Queerness has always been a creative engine. From ballroom to protest fashion, from zines to gender-defying silhouettes, it’s a space where style pushes boundaries and survival becomes beauty. Queerness is where some of the best fashion has always come from.

And when sustainability is done right—when it’s more than marketing copy—it carries that same energy. The best work isn’t coming from the top—it’s coming from the margins. In the hands of those who mend, remake, and teach. In the designers saying no to plastic even when it costs them. In people who know that climate justice is textile justice is labor justice.

You can see it in the work of Fibershed, reconnecting textiles to soil, to farmers, to seasons. In The OR Foundation’s tireless organizing in Ghana, where they’re naming the violence of global waste and reimagining systems of value and repair. From those calling out greenwashing and pushing legislation forward.

So if the brands are done—fine. Let them go beige. Let them step aside. Because we’ve got work to do. Clothes to repair. Legislation to pass. Futures to stitch from scraps.

To those making the radical choice to keep going: We see you. You are the real face of Pride. You are the climate movement. You are the antidote to a world built on disposability.

This month—and every month—we’ll keep spotlighting the people, designers, movements, and materials that matter. We’ll call bullshit when we see it but focus on the ones doing the real work: the drag artist in the banned books gown, the activist models, the designers pushing material innovation, the youth finding empowerment on the runway, the brands that are really doing things not just differently but better.

Because the future isn’t made by algorithms or ad campaigns. It’s stitched together in back rooms and kitchens, under streetlights and over dye pots, through chosen family and collective action.

Queer culture and sustainable/slow fashion practices aren’t trends. They’re blueprints for survival—and for building something more beautiful in their place.

Katya Moorman + Karen L Dunn, co-founders No Kill Magazine

A week ago I went to Lobby Day in Albany for the Fashion Act. If you’ve never lobbied before, here’s what it looks like: you get about 15 minutes with a state senator or assemblyperson’s aide—sometimes even the aide of the aide—to try to convince them why they should support your bill. You do this in small groups so you’re not just a lone voice—and to give the conversation multiple entry points.

And your group isn’t the only one. (It is called Lobby Day for a reason.) For digital natives, you can think of it like TikTok IRL—sans the dances. Here comes the LGBTQ+ group… here’s the right-to-die-with-dignity bill… here come the Girl Scouts (not sure why)… and yes, here comes the Fashion Act group. All of us with a bill we want passed, hoping to get buy-in.

We have their attention for what seems like a nanosecond. And then like a swipe of the thumb, they’re on to the next. We asked one aide—who looked all of 12 years old—how many groups she’d seen so far that day. She just smiled and said, “I don’t count.” It was only noon.

In retrospect, we should’ve led with a TikTok dance. Or at the very least, jazz hands. In every meeting, we opened with: “What do you know about the Fashion Act?” Most had never heard of it. Some didn’t even know what fast fashion was—let alone that H&M or Zara count as fast fashion.

If you live inside the sustainable fashion world, like I do, it’s easy to forget how small it really is. There’s a sense that these conversations are everywhere—but they’re not. Not yet. And that disconnect can feel startling, even disheartening. It’s like being awake in a room where most people are still dreaming. And yet—this is how change happens. Not with viral posts, but with small conversations. Quiet rooms. People showing up. We talked to aides who hadn’t heard of our bill but were open to learning. We shared why this matters—not just to us, but to the future of fashion and the people and ecosystems impacted by it every day. We know change doesn’t happen by posting a reel. Likes do not equal better legislation. The work happens through discussions that lead to laws that are then implemented. And right now we need your help.

If you live in New York the Fashion Act Coalition is asking for your help.

This is a CRITICAL WEEK for the Fashion Act in NY. It's do or die. This week, our mission is:
A. Get the Fashion Act passed through the Consumer Protection Committee in the Senate
B. Get the Fashion Act prioritized in the Assembly so it’s added to their Consumer Protection Committee agenda

We are being told that the Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins is parroting opposition talking points and is "concerned about tariff implications and that the bill would raise costs." The Senate Majority Leader needs to hear from as many of us as possible today to counter this false narrative (518) 455-2585.

Below is a sample script you can use and if you want more facts you can find them here.

Hi, I’m calling about the Fashion Act, S4558.
The fast fashion lobby is spreading misinformation—we need to set the record straight. According to McKinsey, fixing the environmental harm of fashion would cost just 2 cents on a $5 T-shirt. Meanwhile, toxic chemicals like lead and plasticizers are showing up in clothes marketed to young and marginalized communities, risking their health. This is Gen Z’s cigarettes. The Fashion Act is common sense—it protects health, creates NY jobs, and holds polluters accountable. We need the Majority Leader’s support. Thank you.

Earth Day is around the corner and, if I’m being honest, I had no desire to write about it. Not because I don’t care (I do, deeply), but because it’s become so predictable. Expect the usual reels: burning planet, cute baby animals, calls for collective action... cue existential collapse.

But then I told myself: get over it, Katya. What do you actually want to talk about?

I want to talk about fashion—the space I live in and believe in—and the companies that are actually doing the work. The ones that give me hope. Who are solving for waste, redesigning systems, and showing that fashion can be beautiful, functional, and good for the planet.

So for this Earth Day, here are 5 U.S.-based companies innovating in bold, meaningful, scalable ways. Not for a campaign. Not for Earth Day. But for every day.

SXD – New York, NY

Waste is a Design Flaw. I first heard this from William McDonough, one of my personal heroes and co-author of the seminal book Cradle to Cradle, along with Michael Braungart. They popularized the idea that design should start with the end in mind…and that shouldn’t be a landfill or the shores of Africa!

For the most part the fashion industry seems to have missed that memo. There are, of course, zero-waste brands like JRAT and ZWD but they’re indie and bespoke. Not scalable. Great as individual companies but not for solving industry level problems.

So I’ve been excited to discover SXD.

SXD is a zero-waste design tech company using patent-published AI to eliminate material waste before it starts. (And yes, I also feared AI was just going to replace human models... not help fix fashion’s biggest design flaws.)

Founded by Shelly Xu (who is also a zero waste designer), SXD partners with brands and designers to transform traditional production into one that is smarter, cheaper, and drastically more sustainable. Their AI platform reengineers garment patterns to use every inch of fabric—scraps, deadstock, off-cuts—reducing material use by up to 46% and emissions by up to 80%.

But SXD isn’t just about optimization; it’s also about justice. They currently employ 60 seamstresses who are climate refugees—primarily women displaced by rising sea levels—and pay 2–4 times the local wage. These are real livelihoods created by real savings from a smarter system.

The fashion industry currently landfills or burns the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles every second. SXD is proving that waste is a design flaw—not an inevitability—and that the tools to eliminate it already exist.

SUAY Sew Shop – Los Angeles, CA

SUAY is a community-built upcycling and repair house located in LA’s Frogtown neighborhood that’s quietly become a circularity powerhouse. Founded by longtime garment worker advocate Lindsay Rose Medoff, SUAY diverts post-consumer waste—like hotel linens, damaged garments, and off-cuts—from landfill and transforms it into new clothing and home goods, all while paying a living wage and operating with radical transparency.

To date, SUAY has diverted more than 3.7 million pounds of textiles from landfills and extended the life of another 2 million pounds through their signature Community Dye Bath™ and repair services.

When wildfires swept through parts of California, SUAY became a vital resource, offering emergency textile care and donation processing. And they’re now working with The Or Foundation to support Kantamanto Market in Ghana, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world and a dumping ground for the Global North’s waste. You can support this effort directly by Sponsoring a Bag here.

SUAY isn’t interested in small gestures or feel-good messaging—they’re building a local, resilient ecosystem for circular fashion, one that could be replicated far beyond LA.

unspun – San Francisco, CA

Unspun has a goal of eliminating global garment waste—starting with jeans. Their approach flips traditional fashion logic on its head: instead of mass-producing garments that may or may not sell, Unspun makes jeans after you order them. Using a quick body scan from your phone, they generate a digital pattern and create your jeans on demand, creating a custom fit with zero waste. This personalized approach makes it extremely size inclusive as well.

But Unspun’s ambitions go beyond denim. At the heart of Unspun’s innovation is its proprietary Vega™ 3D weaving machine, which weaves entire garments directly from yarn, bypassing rolls of fabric entirely. How insane is that? With this technology is the ability to eliminate a huge section of the supply chain. (take that tariffs!) They’ve already partnered with Pangaia, H&M, and other global players to scale this tech.

Unspun’s vision is radical but entirely necessary: a world where nothing is made unless it’s needed. And they’re building the tools to make that future possible.

FABSCRAP – New York, NY / Philadelphia, PA

I’ve been a fan of FABSCRAP for years, and as they grow, they just keep getting better. If you’re unfamiliar, FABSCRAP is a nonprofit tackling one of fashion’s most overlooked problems: pre-consumer textile waste. That’s the bolts of fabric, swatches, and trims that brands discard long before a garment is made—and until FABSCRAP came along, there wasn’t a real system for dealing with it.

Today, over 800 brands—including Eileen Fisher, Marc Jacobs, and Oscar de la Renta—send their excess fabrics and notions (buttons, zippers, etc.) to FABSCRAP. Their smart two-tier system ensures proprietary materials get shredded for insulation or industrial use, while everything else is resold or donated to designers, students, and artists.

But FABSCRAP is more than a recycling service. Through workshops, educational programming, and a thriving volunteer network, they’re turning waste into inspiration—and building a hands-on culture of circularity. Over 1 million pounds of textile waste have been diverted from landfill and incineration, and their expansion from NYC to Philadelphia shows this model is ready to scale.

FABSCRAP is proof that real solutions often start behind the scenes—and that the infrastructure is just as important as the aesthetics.

NFW (formerly Natural Fiber Welding) – Peoria, IL

NFW is another personal favorite—I’m obsessed with materials, and they’re creating what I truly believe are the textiles of the future. Their recent collaboration with Another Tomorrow on a limited-edition MIRUM® moto jacket sold out almost instantly, proof that the demand for plastic-free, high-performance alternatives is real. (My go-to backpack from Lost Woods is also made from MIRUM, so I can vouch for both the aesthetics and durability.)

NFW is a material science company developing high-performance fabrics from renewable plant-based sources—no plastic, no petroleum, and no greenwashing. Their technology doesn’t break natural fibers down and rebuild them with chemical binders. Instead, it enhances those fibers at the molecular level, essentially “welding” them together to improve strength, stretch, and moisture management—preserving the integrity of materials like cotton, hemp, and flax while dramatically improving their performance.

Their two flagship materials are MIRUM® and CLARUS®. MIRUM® is a natural, compostable alternative to leather made from ingredients like cork, rubber, coconut husk, and plant oils—completely free of PU, PVC, or plastic finishes. CLARUS® strengthens and enhances natural fibers to offer the kind of durability and stretch typically reserved for synthetics, but without shedding microplastics or requiring fossil fuels.

These innovations are already being used by brands like Stella McCartney, Pangaia, Allbirds, Reformation, and Ralph Lauren, whose RLX Clarus Polo delivers synthetic-level performance from natural materials. And importantly, NFW’s technologies are designed to integrate with existing supply chains, making it possible for brands to scale without reinventing their production infrastructure.

In short, NFW is building the blueprint for a regenerative, circular textile system that leaves toxic synthetics behind.

These are just a few of the companies giving me hope right now—not through performative green marketing, but through real innovation, material intelligence, and systems thinking. Earth Day may be once a year, but the work of re-imagining fashion happens daily. Let’s stay focused on the people and ideas actually moving the needle.

it’s been a while. Between trying to make sense of tariffs (or Congress’s lack of spine to stop them) and getting hit with Covid again (and yeah, I thought that was so last season too), everything’s been a little behind.

No Kill Mag has always been about shifting the conversation around fashion and the planet. But at this point, do we really need another explainer on why fast fashion is bad? If you’re reading this, you already know. So we’re not ignoring it—we’re just evolving the conversation.

This next chapter is all about materials.
What’s bad. What’s good. And what might actually be better.

Polyester ≠ Luxury

This past week on Instagram, we called out something that’s been bothering me for a while:

How can we call something “luxury” if it’s made of polyester?
The price tag might be high—but if the material pollutes the planet and the garment is destined for a landfill, can it really be considered luxury?

We think not.

Thankfully, some brands agree. In a follow-up post, we spotlighted Another Tomorrow, whose Moto Jacket is made from MIRUM by NFW—a fully plant-based, non-toxic, and actually luxurious alternative to plastic-based leather.

The No Kill Shopping Guide Is Coming

This tension—between fashion’s image of luxury and the reality of what it’s made from—is exactly why we’re building a comprehensive Shopping Guide.

Because redefining style means rethinking the systems behind it.
And that includes how and where we shop.

As a preview, we’ve launched a new Brand Spotlight series highlighting leaders in the space including:

Reprise Activewear – Stylish, plant-based activewear without plastic

unspun – Custom-fit denim with zero inventory, now weaving clothing using 3D tech and zero-waste design

But It’s Not Just About Buying New

What’s it really like to rent a designer outfit for a major fashion event?
Writer Anne Whiting shares her full experience using peer-to-peer rental app Tulerie in prepartion for a dinner honoring Ruben Toledo—from choosing the look to mingling with fashion icons like Lynn Yaeger.
Read the review →

We’ve also got an in-depth interview with designer Jakarie Whitaker, founder of Hikari No Yami, conducted by Zara Korutz.

He opens up about creating from the margins, questioning the system, and how the legacy of Virgil Abloh has influenced his path.
Read the interview →

Book Recommendation: To Dye For by Alden Wicker

If you want to go even deeper into the toxicity behind fashion materials, To Dye For by Alden Wicker is a must-read. It’s a page-turner, packed with jaw-dropping truths—and one of my all-time favorite books on fashion and health. Highly recommend adding it to your list.

Thanks for being here and for demanding better, always.
More soon.

—Katya

You’ve probably seen articles about the upcoming economic boycott—and maybe, like me, you’re skeptical about whether it will make a difference.

But here’s the thing: Is it really that hard to refrain from shopping for a single day? Could it actually have an impact? The backbone of this country is capitalism, and collective financial action has power. If enough of us participate, it sends a message that can’t be ignored. If it works, we’ve made a statement. If it doesn’t? Skipping a day of spending won’t hurt—but what if it does shake things up?

Let’s find out. Pledge to sit this one out. Share this with a friend. The more of us who join in, the louder our voices become.

I’m happy to report: yes! There were plenty of designers who inspired me, but here are three lesser-known names you need to know.

Janelle Abbott / JRAT

If you read No Kill Mag, you’ve probably seen our past coverage of Janelle Abbott. Based in Seattle, Janelle grew up in a garment factory—literally. Her parents were in the rag trade, and here’s young Janelle at her sewing machine.

Janelle was an early adopter of zero-waste design, creating garments that use every inch of fabric. But she takes it further: all of her materials are secondhand clothes, which she deconstructs and reconstructs into something entirely new. One of her signature techniques involves cutting garments into strips and sewing them into a self-made textile—honestly, I don’t even know how she does it, but I love the results. See here. And here. And here.

Her DIY energy reminds me of German knitwear designer Tati Haupt or the early days of Chopova Lowena, when their skirts were made from Hungarian tablecloths (before CFDA influence turned them into $1K+ polyester versions, because mass production will do that to you).

Janelle’s show took place in Bushwick—aka the 21st-century East Village. A complete pain in the ass to get to, but it was Janelle. And I promised my friend Kate we’d sit together (yes, very junior high, but nostalgia is nice). The show was so worth it.

Beyond her designs, Janelle offers “wardrobe therapy,” transforming beloved but unworn pieces into something new and wearable. It’s next-level upcycling. I adore her.

Grace Gui / Grace Wang

You might be surprised to learn that Grace Gui is a farm-to-fashion brand. What does that mean? In an era where "sustainability" has become an empty buzzword, Grace Wang actually walks the walk. She handcrafts every piece in her Brooklyn studio, using fibers exclusively sourced from independent female farmers. She even felts fur from her own pet Angora bunny—how cute is that?

She also raises silkworms, a tradition passed down by her grandmother in China.

Her FW25 collection, Will You Carry Your Inheritance Forward?, explores the unspoken struggles within Asian American families—especially the expectations placed on women and the quiet difficulty of asking for help.

The collection itself? Stunning. Delicate ombré knits, corset-like structures, keyhole details—each piece unmistakably Grace Gui. Saying “I can’t wait to see what’s next” feels cliché, but I genuinely can’t wait.

Leblanc Studios / Yamil Arbaje & Angelo Beato

I first knew of Yamil Arbaje when he was an undergrad at Parsons and was already impressed. Now, alongside Angelo Beato, his creative partner based in their native Dominican Republic, they’ve made their official NYFW debut with Other People’s Money.

The models walked on a runway of salt rocks, each scooping salt from a vessel and letting it slip through their fingers as they walked. A reference to economic disparity? Absolutely. As Yamil put it:

"The word ‘salary’ comes from salt being traded as currency in the ancient world. Stepping on salt while dropping some yourself speaks to how shamelessly we feed into cycles of economic disparity.”

Leblanc Studios approaches fashion not just as clothing, but as cultural critique. The collection played with historical silhouettes, reimagined for a speculative near-future. Think: double-hemmed trousers, unfinished collars, and elastics at the cuffs—intentionally raw, resistant to polish. Some pieces featured round patches from La Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, a subtle nod to the historical role of women in grassroots activism.

But their community focus isn’t just conceptual. 95% of their samples, 85% of their denim, and 100% of their tailoring is made in the Dominican Republic. Everything else comes from factories with high sustainability standards. (Contact me if you want details, but you get the point.)

Other People’s Money isn’t just fashion—it’s a statement about who gets to participate in the system at all.

The Fashion Act is Expanding

No Kill Mag has been a strong supporter of the Fashion Act, and we’re thrilled to announce that it has been reintroduced in New York and officially introduced in California.

The bill would require fashion companies making over $100M in revenue annually to take accountability for their environmental and labor impacts. If passed, it would be a huge step toward real systemic change. More updates to come.

WTF, Fur?

Is it just me, or is there a direct correlation between the resurgence of fur and the orange man in the White House? Yes, Mafia Wife has made it trend again, but the whole “it’s okay to be cruel” mindset that fur represents feels especially timely right now.

And no, secondhand fur doesn’t make it okay. Kids, stop wearing fur. It’s not cute or clever.

Until next time…

It’s the beginning of fashion month—NYFW kicks things off, followed by London, Milan, and Paris. Or is it Paris and then Milan? Either way, here we go.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how sustainable fashion needs a rebrand. I tried "responsible fashion," but it didn’t land. My latest contenders? Intelligent fashion or better fashion. Or, as Tara St. James wisely put it: Why label it at all? Why not label everything else TOXIC FASHION?

Here at No Kill Mag, we’re all in on this idea. What do you think?

Another thing on my mind: The Upcycle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. You might know them from Cradle to Cradle—if not, add it to your reading list. Honestly, these two should be rockstars, and The Upcycle should be required reading for anyone who makes, designs, or dreams of creating.

Consider this quote:

Human beings don’t have a pollution problem; they have a design problem. If humans were to devise products, tools, furniture, homes, factories, and cities more intelligently from the start, they wouldn’t even need to think in terms of waste, or contamination, or scarcity. Good design would allow for abundance, endless reuse, and pleasure.

Let’s sit with that last part

Good design allows for abundance, endless reuse, and pleasure.

When I asked my Fashion and Communication class what comes to mind when they hear "sustainable fashion," the responses were… predictable: boring, crunchy granola, and beige. Quelle surprise.

But what if we flipped the script? If we embraced McDonough and Braungart’s thesis—designing better from the start—we wouldn’t need to talk about "sustainable" fashion. We’d eliminate TOXIC FASHION through intelligent, beautiful design. Better, right?

Discovering the people and materials that embody this is a personal obsession.

One standout: Lucy Tammam, a London-based designer who seamlessly fuses purpose and passion. Known for her ethical approach, Lucy blends artistry with activism to tackle global issues head-on. Her latest project, One Dress: PLANET, raises awareness about ecocide while reimagining what it means to own couture. Check out my interview with her.

And in a partner piece, writer explores:

What’s Ecocide and What Does It Have To Do With Fashion?

Unbelievably, the mass destruction of nature—threatening humanity’s very future—isn’t illegal. Enter Stop Ecocide International, founded in 2017 by Jojo Mehta and the late Polly Higgins. Their mission is simple yet revolutionary: make ecocide—the deliberate destruction of nature—an international crime. Benson unpacks what this means and how it can bring positive change.

That’s it for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the above. Otherwise, stay tuned for my post-NYFW reflections.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a newsletter. We were having issues ‘authenticating our domain’ with our mail server, which meant anything we sent would go into your spam folder. -No beuno- and then there always seemed more pressing issues than sorting out the server issue.

That led me to decide to try Substack instead. There’s alot going on with No Kill behind the scenes that I’m excited to share (including a new non-profit No Kill: Project Planet -there will be a separate note for that later in the year) but first I want to acknowledge we’ve entered an extra precarious time now that Musk-A-Trumpo is in the White House. By my definition, we are not living in a democracy right now.

But here’s the thing: to exist in a constant state of fear, anger, or despair is to let them win.

It also makes us discount today –living in a state of fear or anger means you’re focused on the past or future. Don’t discount your moment-to-moment life.
As Alice Walker reminds us,

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

So, this is my strategy for the next four years:

1. Breathe. Long, deep breaths. Or the 4/4 breathing technique favored by Navy SEALs. This simple act grounds me and calms my racing mind.

2. Focus on my locus of control. I can’t control anyone else—not my friends, neighbors, or strangers online, and certainly not the political sphere. What I can control is myself: my responses, my energy, and the vibe in my household and community. I want to cultivate calm and positivity where I can.

3. Highlight people who inspire me. The world thrives on fear and clickbait, but there are extraordinary people doing courageous, creative work to make the world better. Every person we’ve featured on No Kill Mag is an inspiration to me. Their actions—big or small—give me hope and remind me to do better.

4. Find the joy. In Every. Single. Day. I’m a goal-oriented person with a lot I want to achieve. Some say I work too much. I’d disagree, but I’m learning that I don’t always pause to appreciate what I have now. I tend to focus too much on the future. But tomorrow isn’t promised.

I want to cultivate joy—today, right now. Even in the face of everything wrong in the world, I believe I can choose joy. To me, this is resistance.

Highlights from No Kill Mag –Our TOP 10 Articles from 2024.

Yes this should have been published earlier but alas…server issues. ICYMI, in no specific order they are:

Profile of KATE SEKULES -an iconic visible mender/educator shares her vintage collection, why she loves clothing swaps and why mending should be a field of study.

A Studio Visit with SAM FINGER Stepping into the studio of fashion designer Sam Finger is like walking into a vivid collage of urban influences, graphic narratives, and deep personal expression.

INTERVIEW with MARY BEMIS - founder of Reprise, nontoxic activewear that is good for you and the planet.

LET’S MOVE THE NEEDLE An Activist Handbook for Artists, Crafters, Creatives and Makers- now more than ever, this book by Shannon Downey aka Bad Ass Cross Stitch needs to be part of your permanent collection.

EMMA HAKANSSON of Collective Fashion Justice captivated us in her editorial highlighting cruelty free fashion alongside some of her favorite friends from Tamerlaine Sanctuary.

A conversation with CAMERON RUSSELL - Supermodel, super changemaker, super woman. No Kill writer Anne Whiting chatted with the fashion industry critic and activist after reviewing her powerful memoir, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone.

NFW’s Plastic Free Revolution. NFW is a new materials company. It has a portfolio of plant based, plastic free material –including “vegan leather” MIRUM. Greg Stillman shared how they do it and what’s next.

Interview with HOLLY EDWARDS the founder of Lost Woods, a handbag company that uses MIRUM to creater gorgeous plant based “leather” bags that you'll want to own.

Profile of MOZHDEH MATIN - from Peru to a studio in Brooklyn, this is an ethical fashion designer to know.

Interview with ADAM TAUBENFLIGEL, co-founder of Triarchy Denim. He shared how their jeans are made with stretch but ALSO plastic-free –biodegradable in under 2 years and NO microplastics.

There’s alot more to add but I don’t want to overwhelm – so until next time –thanks for reading –Katya

*like Mar-a-Lago but worse. Also a celebrity couple nickname.