The Green Carpet Fashion Awards (GCFA), led by Eco-Age founder Livia Firth, are uniting fashion and film with a new wave of sustainability in Hollywood.
Last month, Firth hosted an intimate dinner and cocktail party to celebrate the award show’s anticipated move to Los Angeles for the 2023 event. Held at the San Vicente Bungalows, the evening honored Tom Ford, Aurora James, Bethany Yellowtail and Rashad Robinson for Color of Change. Firth hosted, alongside model and activist Bethann Hardison and the honorees.
The Italy-based sustainability and communications agency chose to make the move to Hollywood to mark the beginning of a new direction for the GCFAs, which the organization will continue to drive forward during 2023. Most recently, the 2020 GCFAs took place at the Teatro alla Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy, awarding five honorees, including Zendaya and designer Sindiso Khumalo.
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The Green Carpet Fashion Awards 2020 awarded five statuettes on Oct. 10 with winners including Zendaya, for her work increasing inclusivity in the style world, and designer Sindiso Khumalo. The awards were held digitally, streamed on YouTube’s Fashion Channel, and incorporated a mix of film, visual FX, holograms and augmented reality.
The four honorees were all selected for representing different pillars of the GCFAs: Environmentally Restorative (Ford), Socially Just (Yellowtail and James) and Economically Inclusive (Robinson). Ford is behind the The Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize, a pioneering and transformative competition focused on ending plastic pollution by innovating an alternative to plastic film which is both ubiquitous and problematic in the fashion industry and beyond.
Additionally, Yellowtail was honored for eponymous brand and fashion label B. Yellowtail, whose core values center on championing indigenous craft, upholding social justice, and preserving heritage culture and community, while James is recognized for her passion for artisanal design and social justice with Brother Vellies, her brand dedicated to keeping traditional African design practices and techniques alive, while creating and sustaining artisanal jobs. Robinson accepted on behalf of Color of Change, the racial justice organization dedicated to bringing economic inclusivity to the market and secure financial equality for Black people in America.
The Green Carpet Fashion Awards are held in honor of the Green Carpet Challenge, which came to fruition during the 2010 awards season. Since, several stars have supported the challenge by wearing sustainable brands on red carpets, including Penelope Cruz, Olivia Colman, Thandiwe Newton, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
“This is not a celebration of an industry with the power to distract. Rather it’s the recognition of an industry that needs to leverage its power for people and planet,” said Firth. “Fashion can and should be a lifeline. We need to come together and forge strong paths with human and ecological justice centre stage. All those awarded here today look crisis and conflict in the eye. By doing that and actively creating our future we embrace active hope. The GCFAs champion active hope and deep, truthful work for transformation.”
Livia continued, “Today’s fashion landscape has changed dramatically and, after two years of pandemic and now war and conflict, diaspora and trauma, we are all feeling overwhelmed. Fashion is a full spectrum industry running across the globe, touching billions of lives and reliant on a healthy biosphere. We must use that reach and power to bring purposeful change. We also know that sustainability solutions are intersectional solutions, that environmental justice is totally interlinked with social justice. The Green Carpet Fashion Awards are about all of this, showcasing the level of commitment and focus that we all need to mirror; they are about pulling together as an industry that needs to step up. This is why this new concept for the GCFA marks for us a crucial point for the fashion industry, using also the power of Hollywood as movies and fashion have always been interlinked, flirting with each other in a symbiotic relationship.”
Additional attendees of the night included Nikki Reed, Amber Valetta, Heidi Klum and Alessandra Ambrosio.
