Marie-Claire Daveu with Elodie Brunstein of ecological engineers Solicaz in French Guiana. Image by Magneto.

The Kering group, owner of Gucci and Bottega Veneta, led the luxury industry by pioneering a sustainability strategy years ago. Marie-Claire Daveu, who spearheaded this move, explains how environmental accounting and the blue economy are good for business, consumers and the planet

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Marie-Claire Daveu. © Benoît Peverelli

The fashion industry is dependent upon nature’s resources to manufacture. It is also a vast industry and, unfortunately, one of the most polluting. This means we have a specific responsibility to act now and transform our business model to mitigate the diminution of resources, loss of biodiversity and climate change that we already see affecting our industry and our planet. Sustainability is not an option; it is a necessity. And it demands definitive action from the fashion industry and beyond.

The blue economy in particular has to be a huge focus for everyone. The oceans are the lungs of the Earth, producing more than half the world’s oxygen and helping regulate our weather. But in the past few hundred years they have absorbed vast amounts of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, raising their temperature and changing their chemistry and ecosystems. Marine animals and humans rely on the oceans to live, and the only way to mitigate the harm being done is to change the way we operate here on land – from reducing plastic and chemical waste to choosing renewable energy sources where possible.

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Kering has already implemented a series of measures specifically in recognition of the rapidly degrading ocean environment. We have been working for years to preserve ocean biodiversity via programmes and partnerships with recognised associations – most recently, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). And in 2017, our chairman and CEO, François-Henri Pinault, presented the Fashion Pact to the G7, incorporating ocean protection as one of its main environmental goals. It proposes a set of concrete actions, such as the adoption of pollution controls to safeguard the rivers and oceans from chemicals released through the fashion production processes; and compels companies to develop innovations that will eliminate microfibre pollution from the washing of synthetic materials.

Such innovation is vital to growing a sustainable blue economy. In 2017, we committed to reducing our environmental footprint by 40 per cent by 2025, and half of that reduction will come from innovation, which is crucial if we want to bring new solutions into our business model.

Today, we are looking for and investing in innovations that can address blue economy challenges, including closed-loop recycling, alternative materials and sustainable sourcing. But there is still a long way to go. One of the main challenges the blue economy is facing is plastic, used to pack, transport and store garments. The fashion industry needs to urgently tackle polybag-packaging waste. One possible innovation has been developed by the Plastics Packaging Project – a Fashion for Good initiative supported by a coalition of companies, including Kering. The project aims to reduce the impact and use of plastic packaging, and recently launched a pilot for the collection and recycling of garment polybags. They will be transformed into new plastic film products, closing the loop and dramatically reducing the amount of plastic waste that often ends up in our waterways.

Kering’s Materials Innovation Lab. Image by Jean-Luc Perreard

Transparency will be vital to the longevity of such initiatives. Studies show that millennials and Generation Z are very sensitive to sustainability – with a keen focus on traceability. They also have very high expectations. Generation Z entering the workforce, together with increasing sustainability questions from consumers, will drive further efforts in the fashion industry and increased transparency around a product’s origins.

Read more: These photographer-activists are capturing underwater beauty

Corporate sustainability agendas must take into account a product’s entire impact, from the raw materials to products reaching clients. At Kering, this has become an essential part of our products’ excellence, and we have made that process transparent through the creation of our Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) system, which measures, monetises and monitors the full environmental impact of a company’s operations across the entire supply chain, including greenhouse gas emissions, water use, water and air pollution, waste production and land use change. When you think about what is behind luxury, sustainability is often already built in: we use the highest quality raw materials; our products are made by skilled craftspeople; and some of them are passed down from generation to generation. They have to be perfect; even their sustainability must be perfect.

Building a sustainability strategy is about taking your whole supply chain and its impacts into account, and activating programmes to mitigate these impacts. The blue economy can be fully part of an environmental policy, and sustainability as a whole should be very much integrated in a company’s strategy. As an example, we know that the high-quality raw materials in luxury goods are ‘pre-designed’ for circularity, because of their value and versatility. But brands can extend product life cycles even further by employing recycled and upcycled materials. One blue-economy example within our supply chain is our collaboration with Econyl, makers of regenerated nylon yarn made of recycled fishnets, textile and industrial nylon waste. It has the same high quality as less sustainable alternatives, but can be endlessly regenerated.

Innovative collaborations such as these are the answer to accelerating sustainability. Our collaboration with IPBES is helping to strengthen the evidence base for better informed decisions about nature. And our EP&L hackathon in October 2019 brought developers and sustainability experts together to create digital tools that provide greater transparency around fashion’s footprint.

The message is clear: we want to play a pivotal role in leading the shift towards a sustainable future, but we can’t do it alone. Our action must be science-based and results-oriented. The private sector, governments and international organisations need to collaborate to protect nature and build a globally sustainable economy.

I am a very optimistic person, and I can see that a real shift has happened recently. Sustainability is at the heart of every conversation, both from companies and media, and this is a very good sign. Now it’s time for implementation, with unwavering determination. Fashion’s influence holds the key to accelerating those sustainable practices, both within our industry and beyond.

Marie-Claire Daveu is Kering’s chief sustainability officer.

Find out more: kering.com/en/sustainability

This article originally appeared in the LUX x Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Blue Economy Special in the Summer 2020 Issue.

Construction view of Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) (2018) by Oscar Tuazon

Artists have long explored themes of environmental sustainability in Southern California, but a recent series of devastating wildfires has brought even greater resonance to their work. Evan Moffitt explores how four LA artists are changing the way we think about climate change

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When the Getty Fire tore up the dry hills of Mandeville Canyon in October 2019, many in Los Angeles feared the worst: the Getty Center’s Titian and Thomas Gainsborough paintings curling from their frames, masterworks of European art reduced to cinders. This wasn’t the first time locals had imagined such a catastrophe – Ed Ruscha had painted his iconoclastic portrait of the county museum, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, in 1968 – but this time, it was different. The severity and frequency of wildfires had increased as climate change accelerated, threatening not just art in Southern California but the very way of life there.

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Scientists, furthermore, have warned that the city could eventually run dry, and nothing has shaped LA more than its lack of water. The Department of Water and Power was long seen as the most powerful bureau of city government, dating back to when William Mulholland drained the Owens Valley in 1913 to soak the dry fields of San Fernando. The violent conflict that ensued was famously fictionalized in the 1974 film Chinatown, and many artists have explored the city’s relationship with water, from Judy Baca’s epic mural along the Tujunga Wash, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1974–84), to more recent projects by artists such as Carolina Caycedo and Oscar Tuazon.

This work can be difficult, but it has struck an important nerve. “Most of our patrons are museums or their supporters who want to engage in dialogue with challenging contemporary art,” says Kibum Kim of Commonwealth and Council, the gallery that represents Caycedo. “They don’t want something that is easy.” For Caycedo, this has led to being included in shows at major institutions such as the Hammer Museum in LA, as well as having works in a number of private collections. Artists such as her are a reminder that Southern California has always been a place where artists, writers, filmmakers and others have mobilized around difficult issues, mining the past to build a better future.

Wagon Station encampment at A-Z West (2004) by Andrea Zittel

No one embodies the utopian spirit of LA more than Andrea Zittel. In 2000, the artist left a burgeoning career in New York for a ramshackle bungalow on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. She began slowly expanding her compound in the desert, informed, in part, by the Bauhaus, Japanese architecture, minimalist sculpture and architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. A-Z West, as the 60-acre campus is known, encompasses Zittel’s home and studio, guest cabins, outdoor sculptural installations, informal classrooms and a series of Wagon Stations, tiny chrome sleeping pods nestled between boulders like UFOs.

Read more: Picasso Through the Lens of David Douglas Duncan at Hauser & Wirth in Gstaad

Zittel refers to A-Z West as “an evolving testing ground for living – a place in which space, objects, and acts of living all intertwine in a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today.” In part, this means creative, sustainable approaches to the privations of living in the desert. Zittel pulps her paper waste and sets it to dry in metal trays called the Regenerating Field; she uses the results to make sculptures. Vegetables grow from barrels shrouded by mosquito netting in a courtyard formed by shipping containers. Shade is provided by trees watered using dry irrigation techniques.

Installation view of ‘Rafa Esparza: Staring at the Sun’ at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019

What ecological problems might be solved by building better? Like A-Z West, Oscar Tuazon poses this question with his Water School (2016). Its central component, Zome Alloy (2016), borrows its bubble-like plywood structure from the waste-free dome homes designed in the 1960s by Steve Baer, the inventor of passive solar technology. Tuazon’s project also refers to another LA visionary, the architect Buckminster Fuller, best known for his transparent geodesic greenhouses and light-filled homes. When Zome Alloy was recently on view in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, visitors could browse a small library of books about water rights and convene for bimonthly discussions.

Read more: Gaggenau’s head of design Sven Baacke on the meaning of luxury

For several years, Caycedo has explored the effects of colonialism and industrialization on water resources throughout Latin America with her ongoing project ‘BE DAMMED’. At the 2016 São Paulo Biennial, four enormous satellite images of controversial Brazilian dams revealed the structures’ disastrous effects on the surrounding landscape. Caycedo hung brightly colored sculptures woven from fishing nets, which she calls Cosmotarrayas, mesmerizing mobiles linking the precariousness of marine resources to the over-fishing that threatens the life within them. “There’s been great demand for Carolina’s Cosmotarrayas, which have immediate visual power,” says Kim. “They’re colorful, and they play into generally accepted ideas about sculptural composition and form. But they also carry a powerful message.” Caycedo says she doesn’t believe in sustainability, per se: “Extraction will never be sustainable. A coal mine is not sustainable. The way we use our water is not sustainable. I prefer to think about ‘sustenance’ in terms of my work and a healthier relationship to nature: to give strength to something you care about or someone you love.”

Installation view of ‘Wanaawna, Rio Hondo, and Other Spirits’ (2019) by Carolina Caycedo at Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA

In 2014, artist Rafa Esparza began making adobe bricks from mud he harvested on the banks of the Los Angeles River, on a parcel of land known as the Bowtie – one of the only sections of the river left unpaved by the Army Corps of Engineers when they buried the channel in concrete in 1936. In 2014 the artist Michael Parker had carved a 42m obelisk into the earth that Esparza covered with approximately 1,400 of his bricks. During the installation’s closing performance, he donned a traditional Aztec loincloth, pheasant headdress and ankle rattles and performed a dance atop the structure that referred both to his ancestral people and the indigenous Tongva displaced from the river’s edge by colonialism. Adobe and thatch are among the most sustainable building practices on earth, but the indigenous people who used them were killed or forced from their land, which was then torn up to build LA. Esparza has since repurposed his bricks for shows, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in what he refers to as “browning the white cube”.

This has had its challenges, according to Kim, who represents Esparza: “Adobe is very structurally strong, but it’s not archival; it will deteriorate over time, which can be hard for some collectors and institutions to accept. But that’s an important element of Rafa’s work: we need to re-conceive our notion of art as a static thing that will forever remain the same.” By imagining cities like LA and their museums made of mud and river water, Esparza places the environmental costs of colonialism into stark relief, proposing, if not a return to a precolonial past, at least a few important lessons we might learn from.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 Issue.