United Nations at Coterie launches sustainability campaign

A new partnership between the U.N., UBM Fashion, ReMode, and SheTrades launched at Coterie with a prosecco toast and a special installation featuring brands which promote the initiative’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals' Conscious Fashion Campaign aims to harness the power of retailers, media and celebrities to embrace ethically driven fashion brands in order to create positive change and drive conscious consumerism. SheTrades, an organization which enables women entrepreneurs to improve the quality of their products, was instrumental in introducing female-led African brands including AAKS, Afrodesiac, COCOLILI, Maki Oh, Mar Y Sol, and Beauty@COTERIE brand, R&R Luxury to the floor for the first time this season.

Sustainable Development Goals

Featured brands with the SDGs at their core whose garments were displayed on mannequins while products and jewelry were inside glass displays included: AMUR, DefineMeEcru, Legami, Liverpool Jeans, Skazi, Washed Away, Wrangler, and B. Yellowtail.

The celebration kicked off with an indigenous traditional land acknowledgment to the Algonquian people as Elder Gerrod Smith of the Shinnecock tribe in his comments reminded us that the territory of Mannahatta upon which we stood inside the glass pavilion of the Javits Center belonged to the indigenous people going back 10,000 years.

“Sustainable can mean many things,” Smith said. “After all the things we have gone through, we are still here.”

Voices of the global conversation

Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel, Founder of ReMode, a global fashion event focused on sustainability, said, “Our motto at ReMode is to promote responsible growth in the fashion industry,” and true to his word, after Coterie, he will take the initiative to the United Nations General Assembly and onward to ReMode this November in Los Angeles where the event boasts a roster of featured speakers including Steven Kolb of the CFDA, designer Rebecca Minkoff, actor activist Rosario Dawson, model Amber Valletta, and Anna Gedda, head of sustainability at H&M.

“It’s an incredible moment to be aligned with something so innovative,” said Lucie Brigham, Chief of Office, United Nations Office for Partnerships, who describes the initiative as “a blueprint that all member states have agreed upon around a to-do list which covers education, pollution, fighting poverty, ending inequality and protecting the planet. And we have a deadline of 2030 to do it. The U.N. recognized that we have to work with the private sector, organizations, with everyone that has good intentions, as well as skills and resources. The Conscious Fashion Campaign in conjunction with UBM Fashion represents that unique collaboration that can move the needle and trigger change across the whole industry.”

Photos FashionUnited.