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Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Gabriela Hearst Fall 2025: The Luxury of Doing the Right Thing
Funding cuts for humanitarian projects; the threat to gender identity rights; on-again, off again tariffs; forced deportations; Elon Musk's slash-and-burn of the federal government…it's easy to tune it all out during fashion month, which has seemed like an alternate universe. Indeed, most designers have gone merrily along without addressing any of it, or if they do, saying obliquely that their punk or comforting clothing inspiration is a reaction against 'what's happening in the world.' More from WWD PinkPantheress Doubles Down on the Statement Belt in Plaid Mini Dress at Coperni's Fall 2025 Show During Paris Fashion Week Celebrities Front Row at Valentino Fall 2025: Jared Leto, Parker Posey Hang in Alessandro Michele's Public Bathroom Gigi Hadid Embraces Edgy Model Off-Duty Style in Charlotte Simone Bomber Jacket During Paris Fashion Week Not so Gabriela Hearst, who stepped out for her runway bow at Paris Fashion Week wearing an ACLU hat, and had ACLU representatives canvassing outside the Palais du Tokyo with information about how to interact with ICE agents. With sustainability and political activism seemingly falling out of fashion, Hearst is one of the few who continues to carry the torch, selling the luxury of doing the right thing with as many sustainable materials and practices as possible. Hearst is convinced that if women ruled the world, as they did for thousands of years, it would be a more just and peaceful place, where USAID programs like Save the Children, which she works with, would not be defunded. So for fall, she summoned goddess energy, ancient symbols of renewal and nature, including swirls, snakes and sprouting shoots, and wove them through her chicly ferocious collection, which had a new refinement this season. 'I wanted the collection to be as raw and as sophisticated as possible,' she said, explaining how long it took to explain to her Italian factories that she wanted to create plonge leather jackets and skirts with raw, jagged hems. (They did look cool.) 'We have snake four ways,' she joked. And she did, as a sleek Inversa python skin pencil skirt, sexy leather scale bustier dress, jacquard scale woven popover, and a screen print goddess on a stunner of a statement shearling coat. In a season full of shearling, hers were distinctive, including a white deerskin moto coat with a clever detachable shearling skirt, a lush fisherman sweater woven with shearling strips, and even shearling covered cowboy boots. The exotic was tempered with everyday recycled denim in deep sienna, cobalt and orange hues, cashmere multicolor pinstripe suiting, ribbed knitwear with swirl details at the bust, and perforated leather separates, all of which had a welcome lightness and ease. In line with her company growth mode, she amped up accessories, introducing handsome new versions of her Ohio slip-on sneaker in nubuck with rainbow speckle colored recycled soles, and a new tote bag called the Marija, after trailblazing female anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, whose research inspired Hearst. She also dipped her toe into upcycling, creating gorgeous herringbone mink coats pieced together from vintage ones, and reworking vintage exotic skin bags from Italy that were peppered into the runway collection, and will be sold to VICs. Hearst certainly has found her groove, making desirable clothing with an earthy but polished elegance, that doesn't take away from the women (and men) with something to say. Launch Gallery: Gabriela Hearst Fall 2025 Ready-To-Wear Collection Best of WWD Windowsen RTW Spring 2022 Louis Shengtao Chen RTW Spring 2022 Vegan Fashion Week Returns to L.A. With Nous Etudions, Vegan Tiger on the Runway
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Skin in the game: mink coat at ethical fashion show fuels sustainability debate
Gabriela Hearst is an ethical fashion designer, with sustainability at the heart of her brand. And she wants to sell you a mink coat. Hearst's Paris fashion week show included a coat, jacket and stole made from vintage real fur. 'We bought all these old mink coats in Italy, and pieced them together,' she said after her show. The collection also included fake fur made from silk schappe, which is spun from fibre left over from silk cocoon processing. Real python was used for clothes and accessories using skins from Inversa, an 'ethical exotics' company which sources skins from invasive species. The python skin comes from Florida where, according to Inversa, non-native pythons are causing a severe decline in animal populations in the Greater Everglades. Hearst's minks are part of a rapid rehabilitation of fur in the fashion industry. A moral battle which seemed definitively won has had its lines redrawn, between those who object to real fur on animal welfare grounds, and those who object to fake fur on environmental grounds. Mass-produced fake fur is often plastic-based, and its critics argue that even if made from recycled plastic, a fake fur coat is not sustainable – a plastic bottle can be recycled many times, whereas once converted into a coat, the plastic is destined for landfill. Then there is the vibe-shift. Quiet luxury is out, and 'boom boom' is in. Boom boom means gold and greed, visible hierarchy, the return of masculine and feminine as stay-in-your-lane aesthetics. A mink coat is as 'boom boom' as it gets. And while real furs have all but disappeared from most shopfloors in the past decade, they are easy to find in vintage stores – which have become aspirational shopping destinations for many younger style consumers. Another through line of Paris fashion week has been an about-turn from stadium-scale catwalk spectaculars to intimate shows in smaller rooms with fewer guests, to emphasise an up-close-and-personal reveal of the clothes. At Balenciaga, the catwalk was whittled to the width of a pavement flanked with simple black office chairs. There was no seating plan – a mind-bendingly radical twist at the shows, where hierarchy is observed with courtly precision. 'I wanted proximity to the clothes, because fashion should feel urgent,' the designer Demna said backstage after the show. This desire for intimacy echoed Friday's debut at Givenchy by the British designer Sarah Burton, where the designer limited the guest list to 300 and narrowed the catwalk to a width which she said was based on 'how close can we get without being caught on a handbag?' Similarly, at Schiaparelli, models were spritzed with fragrance before they stepped on to the runway, to emphasise how close they should be to the audience. At Balenciaga, the first three models were dressed in simple black business trouser suits with no discernible gimmicks. They wore glasses and carried briefcases, and their suits had tiny nicks in the fabric, or creases at the back from being sat on. A man in a cotton polo shirt wore a bike helmet, like a courier just stepped off a bike, a woman in a party dress had her phone in her hand. Some models had their hands balled in the pockets of their hoodies, or carried plastic shopping bags. 'It's easy to put a chair on a head and call it wearable art, or whatever, but I'd rather make a coat that someone tells me is the best coat they've been wearing for the past five years. Fashion is about right now, fashion is about what people wear,' Demna told a scrum of reporters after the show, before his democratic debrief was paused for an interruption by the iconic French actor Isabelle Huppert, the crowd parting for her to give him a post-show kiss. At Paris fashion week, iconoclasm knows its bounds. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion Intimacy took a different form at Valentino, where the designer Alessandro Michele designed a set based on nightclub toilets, complete with strip lighting and stainless steel soap dispensers, with each model making their entrance from behind a cubicle door. 'A lot of disclosure and intimacy happens in this place, in the toilets of a club, in front of those mirrors,' Michele said after the show. The look was Chappell Roan goes to Glyndebourne: grand-soiree glamour, but with thrift-store tastes and a wink to kink.
