Gabriela Hearst knows what’s on the mind of luxury brands that charge $5,000 for a dress made from polyester, a fabric that costs “maybe a couple of euros” per yard.
“Margins, margins,” she said at the Columbia Fashion, Energy and Climate Summit at Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall during New York Climate Week on Monday. “A lot of money gets spent on marketing. My industry is in for a real reckoning partly because of that.”
But nothing else irritates the Uruguay-born, New York-based men’s and women’s wear designer more than seeing cheap fabrics marked up and passed off as high fashion, she told Sheena Butler-Young, senior correspondent for The Business of Fashion, in a fireside chat. Polyester, Hearst said, is a “dead material from another geological time.” If there’s one thing that needs to change on a burning planet, it’s the fashion industry’s—and, indeed, the world’s—addiction to fossil fuels.
Hearst credits growing up on a 17,000-acre ranch—where there were “maybe 15 other humans” and the nearest city was two and a half hours away, meaning “there was no place to shop”—with shaping her relationship to consumption and waste. When she founded her eponymous brand in 2015 after a disillusioning stint at a contemporary brand that sold through department stores that kept asking her for lower prices and therefore lower quality, Hearst set out to create something that was “better made than anything that is out there.”
At the same time, Hearst is clear-eyed about the fact that nothing she makes is a need. A desire, maybe, but if you’re going to be extracting resources from the natural environment, you “have to be very conscious about it,” she said.
But back to polyester, which Hearst considers little more than plastic masquerading as fabric. Plastic, she said, is an obsession of hers. Even looking out at the audience, she couldn’t help thinking about how everyone’s clothing was riddled with plastic, had arrived in plastic packaging and hung from plastic hangers. Her label was among the first to use 100 percent recycled cardboard hangers in 2019 as part of a mission to eliminate plastic from both front- and back-of-house operations. It also started using polybags made from a biodegradable polymer—not ideal, Hearst said, but the best that was available at the time.
Not everyone was a fan. One retail distributor wanted to issue chargebacks because the hangers didn’t meet the specifications in its manual. Hearst stood her ground. If the chargebacks went through, she said, she would speak out publicly about them.
“This is kind of like every small thing matters, even if you don’t think it matters at the time,” she said.
When Hearst joined Chloé as creative director in 2020 while continuing to run her eponymous label, she began making changes there, too. She had her work cut out for her: The French fashion house had no one in charge of sustainability, let alone a sustainability department. By the time Hearst left at the end of 2023, Chloé had more than a dozen people working in sustainability. It also became the first luxury fashion house to earn B Corp certification—an achievement that was by no means an easy lift.
“It was really about collective care,” she said. “People really wanted to change. So we moved really really fast, and we were pre-European legislation. There were a lot of things we did that were before legislation became active in Europe.”
Hearst uses polyester—recycled, of course—in only two products: lace tights made in Italy “because I felt sexy” and the stitching in the soles of her sneakers.
But one of the things Hearst is proudest of is producing more than 80 percent of her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, which was inspired by the Major Arcana tarot deck,, from leftover materials from previous seasons—an unexpectedly large volume that surprised even her.
“I told my team: ‘We’re not buying any new materials. We’re going to use all the woven materials that we have,’ and they accepted the challenge,” she said. “This is our job—to be creative, to find solutions. You don’t do my job if you don’t like problems.”
For Hearst, that exercise illustrated a broader problem: Fashion’s material debate too often seeks silver-bullet solutions rather than confronting the system as a whole. Wool, despite being “one of the most sustainable materials we can use,” she said, accounts for just 2 percent of global fiber use because it’s been displaced by acrylic and polyester. Virgin cotton may be biodegradable, Hearst added, but its environmental costs—including monocropping and, in certain cases, heavy pesticide and water use—are why she uses it sparingly. Instead, she opts for small-batch Sea Island cotton grown in Barbados with rainwater.
The fashion designer made a similar case for leather, which she views as a byproduct of the meat industry, even as she condemned industrial farming.
“When I’m in South America and the global South, people ask me what’s going on with leather. There’s no price for it anymore,” she said. “So we’re burning a material that has clothed civilization for centuries. That doesn’t mean tanneries don’t have to be safe. That doesn’t mean things don’t have to be done ethically.”But if there were one material that she could get everyone to stop using today, it would be—no surprises there—polyester.
“What I’m asking CEOs and creative directors is to at least acknowledge this—to keep top of mind how much polyester is in their products,” she said. “At the bare minimum, if you change nothing else, at least know the number. Know how much synthetic fiber is in the materials you sell. Because once you have that number in front of you, you’re less likely to increase it, and you’ll probably consciously start using less.”
