Eye: London Launches Commonwealth Fashion Exchange For Sustainability | Kering Offers Online Course On Sustainable Design

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SOPHIE, COUNTESS OF WESSEX, AND CATHERINE, DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE

Eye: London Launches Commonwealth Fashion Exchange For Sustainability | Kering Offers Online Course On Sustainable Design

"We're not talking anymore; we're doing," said Livia Firth in describing the Buckingham Palace celebration of the Commonwealth Fashion Exchange. Firth has long championed the human potential of fashion to make positive impacts on the lives of people -- especially women -- while reforming the damage wreaked on the environment by fashion. Baroness Patricia Scotland, the Commonwealth secretary-general, joined Firth in launching what Vogue calls "perhaps the biggest set of collaborations in history."

“At Eco-Age, we have so many conversations about how to get people to understand the negative effects of fast fashion. We thought this was a real opportunity to demonstrate the handprint, not the footprint, of fashion," said Firth about the Queen's State Rooms,  "lined with more than 30 sustainably produced, handcrafted ball gowns, representing the cultures, identities, and creative skills of 52 countries, from the large—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Britain—to the tiniest of islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean."

The overarching point, said Baroness Scotland, “Is about engaging young people and using fashion as a thread that connects everyone.” She quoted staggering statistics: A third of the Commonwealth’s 2.4 billion citizens are under the age of 30—a vast generation primed to be interested in fashion and involved in it as workers. “It is the second-largest employer of women in developing countries.”

Sustainability Gaining Major Credibility In Fashion Industry

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Lupita Nyong'o, Margot Robbie and Emma Watson wore Calvin Klein gowns to the Met Gala, all designed as part of Livia Firth's Green Carpet Challenge.

Read in-depth: Sustainability Gaining Major Credibility in Fashion Industry

They were joined by supermodel Amber Valletta, who co-hosted the recent sustainable innovation summit in Copenhagen, wore H&M conscious couture to the Met.

Amber Valletta Co-hosts Copenhagen Fashion Industry Summit

Livia Firth's Green Carpet Influence Is Spreading

Livia Firth stepped out in Cannes this weekend, refusing to splurge on a new gown and wearing her mother's 1968 vintage coral dress once modelled by her mother in the Italian resort of Viareggio.  Last year, Firth launched her documentary 'The True Cost' Fashion Industry Documentary, featured on AOC one year ago today. 

In Cannes Livia dazzled in ethically-sourced emerald jewelry, a collaboration by Chopard and Gemfields, the world's leading producer of colored gemstones. Firth was not alone, joined by Julianne Moore, featured last week wearing Chopard for a David Roemer feature in Grazia Italia.

Moore's emerald earrings are part of the same Chopard and Gemfields collaboration with Llivia Firth.

Eye | US Poverty & Child Development | Stella McCartney's Green Carpet Collection

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RedTracker

Nancy Pelosi the money juggernaut Politico

25 Famous Women on Childlessness NY Magazine

Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp’s relationship was far from ‘normal’ The Guardian

The Afghan Girls Who Live As Boys The Atlantic

India’s Caste Culture is a Rape Culture The Daily Beast

Baduan has woken up the world to this reality. India’s culture of caste is a culture of rape. Both for oppression and opportunism, caste-based sexual violence is meant to silence our communities. Each attempt to achieve equality— going to school, getting a job, or voting—brings greater risk of reprisal.  Because at its heart, caste-based sexual violence is about creating a climate of terror so that Dalits will fear challenging this system. This reprisal violence though has now reached record numbers with a recent study by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights reporting that over 67% of Dalit women have faced some form of sexual violence.

This culture of rape is also a culture of impunity where upper-caste Hindu perpetrators of these crimes are protected within India’s rape culture at all levels of the justice system. UN Special Rapporteur Ms. Rashida Manjoo relays in her recent report on the status of women in India that there is a “deeply entrenched patriarchal attitude of police officers, prosecutors, judicial officers.” This coupled with the unsavory reality that members of the police, judiciary, and public officials often collude with perpetrators to keep Dalit women from filing claims and receiving justice.   

HopeTracker

The Way to Beat Poverty NY Times

One reason the United States has not made more progress against poverty is that our interventions come too late. If there’s one overarching lesson from the past few decades of research about how to break the cycles of poverty in the United States, it’s the power of parenting — and of intervening early, ideally in the first year or two of life or even before a child is born.

The article points out further:

— 60% of children born with fetal alcohol symdrome or effects become expelled from school. Nearly half have displayed inappropriate sexual behavior — public masturbation, for example.

— 20% of babies have mothers who smoked during pregnancy. An Emory University study found that when a mther smoked a pack of cigarettes a day during pregnancy, her children (especially boys) were more than twicee a likely to be violent criminals as adults.

Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, founder of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, argues that the constant bath of cortisol (stress hormones) in a high-stress infancy predicts that a child will embrace a high-risk environment. The cortisol affects brain structures so that those individuals live a fight-or-flight existence as adults.

Dr. Shonkoff calls this “toxic stress” and describes it as one way that poverty regenerates itself in an ongoing cycle. Moms in poverty are more likely to live in high stress environments. Juggling enormous challenges, they are also more likely to be teenage mothers. “A baby in such an environment is more likely to grow up with a brain bathed in cortisol.” Read on at NT Times

Saint Laurent, Brurberry And Dior Deny Animal Cruelty Vogue.com

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