For Dr. Joyce Brown, President of FIT, and climate activist Saad Amer, mentoring the next generation means encouraging others to have tough conversations around sustainability and fashion. During the "Mentorship Mindset" panel, the two sat down in conversation with Marie Claire's Style Director Sara Holzman for the second Fashion Our Future event, an initiative between Marie Claire and Kering that brings together experts, activists, and public figures to discuss how to create a more eco-friendly fashion industry and encourage actionable change.
Through his work as a sustainability activist, Amer has stepped into the role of a mentor for the younger generations. For him, reframing our conversations around fashion as a whole is crucial to making positive changes in the industry. "I think we've gotten to a world where we don't think fully about what fashion is and what fashion means," he explained. "If fashion is about expression, what does it mean when our clothes are polluting rivers, deforesting forests, ruining the atmosphere, emitting carbon, and being made by women of color enslaved abroad?" When we reframe conversations around fashion to understand its system as a whole, Amer said, that's when we can feel empowered to make changes.
