The Green Carpet Fashion Awards: A Reflection
BY CAMERON RUSSELL
The Green Carpet Fashion Awards, hosted at the 1 Hotel West Hollywood
The Green Carpet Fashion Awards were founded to celebrate sustainability in a fashion industry spiraling out of control: paying unlivable wages, generating a massive amount of waste, polluting waterways.
Part of that work is wearing sustainable looks, but the other part is taking fashion seriously; as expression, as belonging, as resistance, as joy; and challenging the idea we are fed that it is a superficial, disposable, consumer good. And last week that aspiration was on display. Annie Lennox, Livia Firth, Amber Valletta, and Rupi Kaur stood at the podium wearing #artists4ceasefire red pins which burned like candles when the power goes out. Helena Gualinga and Leo Cerda carried a sign on the green carpet that read: Stop Mining the Amazon! The powerful statement about who belongs in front of the cameras, at the helm of culture, when our feeds filled with Zendaya posing with climate activists Wawa Gatheru and Vanessa Nakate. Yet for all its glamour the evening was also part of something even more extraordinary and global: the movement underway to change the terrifying trajectory of extinction by fossil fuels, to assert people before profits, to challenge racism and patriarchy and the imperialism that denies our humanity.
The Green Carpet Fashion Awards, hosted at the 1 Hotel West Hollywood
When honoree Mary Robinson stood to accept her award she wore a dandelion movement pin, a symbol of the global feminist majority who believe climate justice is the only way forward. She instructed us to reach out to whomever we knew to build together, which is what Livia Firth and the Eco-Age team have been doing for the last fifteen years.
Like any organizing challenge, it must have surely been at turns frustrating and challenging. How to get so many people with so many different priorities to come together? It is a humbling summons we are all called to fulfill, to extend our hands, to overcome the need to be in perfect agreement, to overcome the need for all our most profound concerns and challenges to be resolved in one evening or through one action. It will not be at the polls alone — just ask honorees Bobi Wine and Barbie Kyagulanyi, the president and First Lady of Uganda who won the democratic election but were not allowed to take office — or at a protest — just ask honoree Kalpona Akter whose colleague was shot and killed this fall as they marched for livable wages for garment workers in Bangladesh that still haven’t arrived— or in the passage of a new law — just ask Shaka Senghor and honoree John Legend who celebrated a 13% reduction in mass incarceration and in the same breath reminded us of the 2 million still held captive in United States prisons, and the 19 million whose felony charges still bar them from good jobs and fair housing— because a whole new world will not arrive overnight.
We will find joy and pleasure as we are called to build a better world and care for it each day anew. And we will be sad and fearful and anxious and angry. And despite all this we must continue to come together and listen, not just to the words spoken at a podium, but to the pins, the banners, and most of all the bodies present, still standing, still dressed and adorned, still saying it matters that we are alive and together we reach for something better.
Honoree Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq told us about the big ice melting in his Greenland home. He told us “you can’t plant ice. When it is gone, it is gone.”
We have much to grieve, and even more to live for. I hope the GCFA inspires more action, more bravery, more people, no matter where they find themselves, from the big screen to the frontlines, to stand together to protect all that is sacred.