Vegan Fashion Week Postponed, but Mission Prevails
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The third edition of Los Angeles’ Vegan Fashion Week, originally scheduled for April 4, has been canceled.
Emmanuelle Rienda, founder of the promising platform for ethical fashion brands, hopes to stage the event in October, if she can recoup some of her financial losses and secure a venue. About half of the 20 designers and brands originally scheduled to participate would not commit to a future date, citing their own financial difficulties, she said.
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Last season’s event, held at downtown L.A.’s United Artists Theatre, now owned by the Ace Hotel, featured animal-loving designers mixed with animal-loving celebs Mena Suvari, Emily Deschanel, Moby, Kate Nash and more to highlight brands using plant-based alternatives.
“I want to grow and establish L.A. as the ethical fashion destination of the world,” Rienda said at the time. The Paris transplant and founder of creative agency Le Frenchlab, was feeling hopeful in the wake of California’s historic fur ban, passed on Oct. 12, 2019, and ready to broaden her activism. “We want to show that the labor industry is just as cruel as the leather industry.”
While she tries to rally the brands that are sticking with her for next season (among them Sylth Virago and ENDA from New York, Noize from Canada, Sarah Regensburger and Fashion Without a Face from the U.K., New Rock from Spain and Julien Esteves Berthier from Romania), she’s launching an “Ethical Fashion Talks” online series next month to keep the discussion alive.
“Everything is interconnected. The message I have been trying to express about animal exploitation and ecological disaster is what drove us to this health and economic crisis we are now in,” she said. “I hope people can take this opportunity to think about the cause of the virus, see beyond social distancing to create new awareness and change behavior. My core work in the fashion industry is to show we don’t need animal products; there is amazing innovation and designers, it’s just a matter of consuming more of their products. Right now the planet is giving us a signal, we are going too far, we need to rethink the way we consume, what we consume, and how we can care about sustainability and also ethics. This can happen again and we are doing nothing to stop it.”
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