Butterflies, blossoms, and birds are all over fashion. The business making them is still among the planet’s heaviest polluters.
Lupita Nyong’o has visited the orphaned elephants. As WildAid’s global elephant ambassador, she has gone to the David Sheldrick sanctuary outside Nairobi, where keepers raise calves whose mothers were killed for their tusks, and for the better part of a decade she has put her face to the campaign against the ivory trade, onto posters that read “Poaching Steals From Us All.” Last week, she was in a stranger sort of animal kingdom: the front row at the Grand Palais, watching Chanel walk its creatures past her in resin and thread. A hummingbird had been sculpted onto the back of a heel, a beetle sat where a button belonged, and one shoe carried a chicken with an egg balanced on its mate.
This was Matthieu Blazy’s second couture collection for the house, a fairy tale staged inside a Grand Palais turned into an overgrown garden — beanstalks, giant flowers, a tufted raffia scarecrow of a jacket, suits strung with a magpie’s nest of gold chains, and, to close, a black off-the-shoulder gown Blazy called a “revenge dress.” Nyong’o, in sequins and slingbacks, is one of Chanel’s longtime faces, and also someone who has seen up close what the loss of a real animal looks like. “I have come to realize that when you know more, you do more,” she said when she took the WildAid role.
Blazy is hardly the only one chasing the garden. Sarah Burton opened her Givenchy debut last year with gowns stitched in wildflowers and swallows, Marni and Burberry and Undercover sent out photoreal butterflies and hand-painted tulips, and Iris van Herpen grew a dress from bioluminescent algae, the one time all last season the nature onstage was actually alive. The impulse is old — crewelwork roses in the 1600s, cranes on 18th-century Japanese kimonos — and it swells whenever the world feels harsh. Dior’s 1947 flowers softened the years after the war; this season’s arrive after a pandemic and a long stretch of political and environmental dread.
There is a name for the tug. The biologist Edward O. Wilson called it biophilia, our built-in lean toward living things. “Our collective yearning for nature and the solace that it brings, especially during the pandemic, has led to a fixation on all things earthy,” Veronique Hyland, Elle’s fashion features director, told the Associated Press in 2022. And nature, she pointed out, has itself turned into a luxury, one fewer people have the time or the green space to reach, so they buy it back on their clothes. Bruno Pavlovsky, who runs fashion at Chanel, said much the same in the house’s own accent, telling WWD that nature is “the ultimate luxury.”
What fashion’s nature habit costs the planet
The industry that frequently borrows those creatures is hard on the real ones. It produces 92 million tonnes of textile waste a year, and in 2023 only 8 percent of its fibers were recycled; over the fifteen years to 2015 the world doubled what it made and kept each piece 36 percent less time before discarding it, the UN Environment Programme reports, and clothing and textiles have grown into 11 percent of the planet’s plastic waste. “Unsustainable fashion is aggravating the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature, land and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste,” Inger Andersen, the agency’s executive director, said. The shows spend the atmosphere before the clothes ship; the four major fashion weeks put out around 241,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, most of it from everyone flying in to watch.
A handful of designers have spent years insisting that luxury should hold more weight. Stella McCartney has never used leather or fur, keeps PVC out of the studio, and works in materials like Mirum, a plastic-free leather, and sequins grown in a lab, though she can manage only about five petroleum-free sequins to a competitor’s thousands, and her faux leather runs dearer than the real hide, which she calls morally wrong. “In the luxury space, I’m a really weird rogue pirate ship on the edge of the conversation,” she told Atmos. “And I feel it’s my responsibility to inform people, but I’m the only one working in this way still.” For her the word luxury points the other way. “It is a luxury to buy something that is not killing the planet,” she said. “It is a luxury to respect animals, to feel the love and the goodness in a product.” A true one, she says, “should by all rights last your entire lifetime.”
Couture, to be fair, is the least wasteful room in fashion, cut to order in small numbers for people who keep the clothes for decades. The damage starts when the rest of the market copies it, and a hand-carved butterfly comes back as a print on a million throwaway tops. Cate Blanchett has been making the same case with less noise, wearing one black Giorgio Armani lace to the Golden Globes in 2014, to Cannes in 2018, and again after that, rather than retiring a gown after a sigle night. “There’s a chance here to redefine the notion of luxury,” she told Business of Fashion, calling herself and others “tired of the churn.”
Nyong’o will wear Blazy’s collection beautifully, the way she wears everything. A house that can sculpt a hummingbird onto a heel can make almost anything it decides is worth making, and McCartney has spent her career proving the sustainable version is buildable too. What the industry has not committed to is deciding that a living hummingbird is worth at least as much as the one on the shoe.
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