November 09: the Gucci Group – owners of designer brands Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga – announces that all the paper used in the company, from copy paper to shopping bags, will not be sourced from endangered forests in countries like Indonesia.
For a company the size of Gucci to commit to such a cause is a big deal.
On Rainforest Action Network’s (RAN’s) blog, the headline announced: ‘Gucci Group Sets Indonesian Rainforest Protection as Fall Fashion Trend’.
Long before supporting causes was fashionable, there was already a name in the fashion world using her work to spread her eco concerns. Of RAN’s Don’t Bag Indonesia’s Rainforest Campaign, Summer Rayne Oakes says, ‘Basically we’ve identified close to a hundred fashion companies that have been unknowingly purchasing bags made out of endangered Indonesian rainforest pulp. Indonesia has become the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States, largely due to rainforest destruction for paper pulp and palm oil … This is a huge deal, especially leading up to COP15, the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen this December.’ Lafcadio Cortesi, Forest Director of RAN, says of Oakes, ‘She is a primary reason that we were able to connect with the green shows at Fashion Week, and has actively promoted us to friends and media outlets asking them to support our work and to sign up to our campaign. Through her, we’ve been able to talk to the Gucci Group and Levi’s, both of whom have since made commitments to protect Indonesia’s rainforests.’
Oakes’s involvement in socio-environmental issues is well known. Sustainability, climate change and waste management (forest conservation and restoration is the subject she is most passionate about) are just some of the topics that fire her up.
Since 2001, when she first began modelling, Oakes has become incredibly successful: her book Style, Naturally: The Savvy Shopping Guide to Sustainable Fashion and Beauty is used as a textbook by Kansas University’s fashion design programme. ‘Recently she spoke to nearly three hundred apparel and textile students at Kansas State University. The impact was so powerful that I even had a parent call to tell me that her daughter has never been so engaged in her studies, and that the impact of the eco-model has changed her life,’ says the department’s head and professor Dr Jana Hawley.
Oakes is unique. Using her modelling as a platform for her message, what she does bears closer resemblance to the work of an eco-activist. No staged protests on ships, or scaling to the top of buildings with a banner message here, though: instead, there are a lot of magazine covers and features in the pages of glossies such as Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan, always beating the drum of sustainbility and ethical issues. She has in the past turned down jobs if they did not fit in with her values. ‘It’s absolutely OK to say ‘no’ … It’s like Wayne from Models.com told me during our interview, “this is bigger than fashion”.’
Describing what happened with her book Style, Naturally, launched in 2008, she tells me what happened when the project took a different turn, which meant compromising her ethical beliefs. ‘Four days before the book was due they [her publisher] told me they couldn’t do recycled paper and soy-based inks. I was furious! We broke off the deal and pitched it around some more. Chronicle Books in San Francisco loved the idea, but they wanted to double the size of it and include both fashion and beauty, so I wrote two books over the course of a year and a half. Only one got published, however, and I’m glad to say it’s on recycled paper with soy-based inks and one per cent of the profit benefits the planet.’
Oakes will also be making the transition from print to television. In November she started filming for her own show with Discovery Network’s Plant Green channel. The network goes out to 50m households: that is a massive number of people who could be watching Oakes in their front room, a great achievement for ecological causes if it happens.
Far from being a one-season wonder, Oakes has been fighting for socio-environmental issues since way back before it was fashionable. To understand Oakes, you need to know her background. Growing up in a north-eastern Pennsylvania town, Oakes started taking art lessons at six. ‘All my art was influenced by nature and Native Americans – so that passion eventually outran the art,’ she says. When she started modelling in 2001, no one understood what she was about. Ecological topics were off the agenda, and certainly an eco-model was beyond comprehension. ‘How do you explain to someone something that doesn’t exist yet?’ recalls Oakes. ‘You have to talk it into existence. You have to will it into existence.’ Not one to be put off by a challenge, she pushed on. ‘It was an opportunity to create it the way that you envisioned it because no one else was doing it.’
It was during her days at Cornell University, where she was training to be an entomologist and environmental scientist, that she started modelling. ‘I have to be honest: studying sewage sludge, mine reclamation and bugs has an audience of one, so I had to come up with some way of bringing it to a wider audience,’ says Oakes. By her second semester, she was sure fashion was the answer. ‘I had no connections to the industry, so I thought I could go in covertly, as a model.’ She met a photographer, John Cooper, ‘who was doing these beautiful organic portraits’. His plan was to publish the images in a book and give the proceeds to rainforest relief. ‘I loved it! I asked him if I could be involved, and helped develop the project further.’ Organic Portraits then turned into an artistic project promoting ecological awareness and conservation through avant-garde photography and sustainable fashion.
Now there was no turning back. Oakes would work exclusively with sustainable designers, projects and programmes. ‘I began rearranging my college schedule to go to classes Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then I’d take a five-hour bus journey to New York City and spend Thursday night through Monday working on the project and networking with more people. By the time Tuesday rolled around, I was a student again and working on my research projects.’
In those early days of Oakes’s career it was an uphill struggle. Anyone with lesser steel and conviction would probably have given up sooner. ‘I didn’t identify with “traditional” modelling jobs, and my first agent didn’t understand that, so we parted ways,’ Oakes remembers. So she started her own company and listened to her gut. ‘If gigs didn’t gravitate in the sphere of my environmental work then it was just noise … it would classify as the stuff that took me away from what I’m passionate about, what I believe in – and it would dilute my mission and my message, so why bother?’ Unlike normal models, Oakes does not go to castings and does not have a comp card with her bust-waist-hip measurements. ‘My agent laughs because when she takes me to meetings, she just stays silent. She confessed the other day: “There’s nothing I can add! I am usually the one talking, not the model – and I don’t even know where to begin to interject in our meetings!”’
Presently, Oakes is working with Payless on their environmentally friendly shoe and accessory line, zoe&zac. LuAnn Via, CEO of Payless ShoeSource, describes zoe&zac as ‘democratising green by being the first-ever affordable green line of shoes and accessories with prices under $30 an item’. Oakes is working on the sourcing, design and communications, but she also recently spoke to the company’s sustainability team about waste, recycling and transportation efficiency. ‘We discussed campaigns they could do to inspire more employees internally, and the most pressing issues affecting the environment right now, and how they connect to the work they do on a daily basis.’ She enthuses, ‘It goes so much more beyond face value, and it’s worth every moment.’
Today, being green has become part of our lifestyle, and eco issues make the headlines just about every day. I asked Oakes if there was an environmental issue that was still under-represented in the press, and she very quickly cited the youth climate-change movement. ‘It’s the most diverse, exciting and inspiring movement to date – and I feel that so many people still don’t know about it – or care to report on it,’ she points out. ‘Just yesterday I was on the phone with the other founders of the Keystone Environmental Youth (KEY) Coalition. This is our newly formed statewide network that helped put on Power Shift PA during 23 to 25 October’s national days of action. On the phone one of the people asked, “What other audiences should we be engaging? Who is not being represented in these talks?” Those are all the questions that need to be asked when looking to build a diverse movement. The youth climate-change movement just seems to understand that.’
