S1E8:
Fashion Eco-Warrior
with Katharine Hamnett
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas, and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane. And it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change makers from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
British designer Katharine Hamnett is fashion's original eco-warrior and pioneer of sustainable fashion. Back in the 1980s, when women's clothing was about power suits and ladies who lunch, Hamnett was printing statement T-Shirts that declared important political and social commentary. Like "Choose Life," which was inspired by the central tenet of Buddhism: to live a good, meaningful life and change the world for the better. Wham!’s George Michael, a 1980s icon, even wore one of Hamnett's Choose Life T-Shirts in the video for the duo’s pop hit Wake Me Up Before You Go Go!
Another of Hamnett's famous statement T-Shirts read: “58% Do Not Want Pershing,” a reference to the United States' placement of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe. Hamnett wore the T-Shirt to a London Fashion Week reception with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in 1984. She'll tell us all about that encounter later in the show. Though Thatcher did not become a Hamnett acolyte, months later, Hamnett was the first designer to win the British Fashion Council's "Designer of the Year" award.
Hamnett had a well-to-do and rather exotic upbringing: when her father, a military attaché, was stationed in Bucharest, she traveled to her English boarding school on the Orient Express. When the family moved to Paris during her teen years, she started sewing clothes. In the late 1970s, she attended Saint Martins, the art school in Soho, London where the punk rock band The Sex Pistols famously gave their first concert.
Soon after graduating, she launched her namesake brand. Hamnett made the decision to shift to more ethical and pro-environmental practices, such as using organic cotton and natural dyes. It was an "unbelievably difficult" process, she later said, because her own employees opposed her decision, and sometimes secretly replacing her sustainable materials for unsustainable ones. Nevertheless, she persisted, and eventually, she met her pro-planet and humanitarian goals: her clothes are made as ethically and environmentally responsible as possible. Design decisions consider the environmental impact. Raw materials are sustainable. Production is within the European Union, and meets EU labor and safety standards. Hamnett proved that sustainable fashion was not only possible; it could be profitable. She became known as fashion's “Bad Girl with Integrity.”
Thirty years on, Hamnett is frustrated by the fashion industry's slow adoption of sustainable and ethical practices. She was also so disheartened by Brexit, she moved fulltime to her farm in Mallorca, Spain. It's from there that she is speaking with us, so you might hear her rooster cockadoodle-dooing in the background.
Also with us today is Hannah Elliott, the luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits, and a regular contributor to The Green Dream. Hannah will tell us all about Harley-Davidson's new electric motorcycle, the LiveWire One, which she calls "powerful and stylish."
But first, Katharine Hamnett, welcome to The Green Dream. Now, what are you doing in Mallorca?
Katharine Hamnett: Well, we've always had a little farm holiday home here, and with Brexit, I was brought up in Europe, I'm sort of second or third generation European family and I just couldn't stand it. so the whole family has left and we've moved to Spain.
Dana Thoma So where does this leave your company? Are you managing it from there?
Katharine Hamnett: I've always approached my work as an artist and if I'd known what I know now about the clothing industry, I'd never have gone into it.
Dana Thomas: Really? Why is that?
Katharine Hamnett: Well, it's just the most horrendous polluter. It doesn't give a damn. There's a really interesting article actually, which I was going to quote to you, in Harvard Business Review, "The Myth of Sustainable Fashion.” Have you read it?
Dana Thomas: I did. I did
Katharine Hamnett: From Kenneth Pucker. He's the ex-CEO of Timberland. they were really an early adopter of organic cotton, they were really having a go, and he just got pretty fed up. Well, that kind of says it all, doesn't it the word sustainability should be retired.
Dana Thomas: But you're not fed up yet. Are you?
Katharine Hamnett: Oh, I'm disgusted. I mean, does that count?
Dana Thomas: But you've been disgusted for a long time, haven't you?
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah. I'm bored at being disgusted. I'm appalled. I'm appalled at the lack of progress, I'm appalled at the indifference. I'm appalled at the greenwash, the hypocrisy,
Dana Thomas: The greenwashing is just extraordinary, isn't it?
Katharine Hamnett: It's so vile. Nobody says buy organic cotton because it doesn't use bee-killing pesticides. I'm kind of almost speechless. Yeah. Fast fashion, cheaper and cheaper, worse and worse materials, worse and worse human rights abuses for the workers.
Dana Thomas: Appalling, yes.
Katharine Hamnett: And nothing's changed. As Ken said, in 25 years, you just thought we've got it right. We've just got it more wrong.
Dana Thomas: And why do you think that is?
Katharine Hamnett: Company's being driven by their shareholders. There's indifference in there's kind of just, I don't know how you say it? It's just like habitual behavior patterns. They regard anything as green or environmental that's being marginalized as risky for profits. That's one of the things that shocked me when I was first blowing the whistle is that I thought I would just say, "Oh my God, this is absolutely terrifying. Look, what's going on." People would say, "Oh, we've got to fix it at once." And in actual fact, an industry doesn't give it damn. I was blocked out of textile companies where I bought hundreds of thousands of meters previously, because I was asking for organic cotton, and they'd say, "Why should we produce it? You're the only one asking for it." One guy from a very large Italian manufacturer, top end, who was manufacturing a collection said to me, when I was very carefully putting a sustainable collection together in organic cottons and sustainable materials, "If you carry on this ethical environmental shit, you can take your collection and fuck off." So I did, but, you know, it comes at a price.
Dana Thomas: You've been fighting this battle since forever. When did you first become an ecologist? you graduated from St. Martin's in 1969, which is really the thick of the youthquake. Is it rooted back into that era of peace and love?
Katharine Hamnett: Much earlier than that. My grandmother was the first woman in England to get a science degree, in 1908, and she's a biologist. And so I guess it's been in the family for a long time. I mean, it's the way that I was brought up, with huge respect and awe for nature and an enormous love of it and the environment. It's kind of in my blood.
Dana Thomas: But you went to study at St. Martin's, studying fashion.
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah, I didn't really know what to do when I was leaving school but I got a friend who was going to St. Martins and she said, "Why don't you come with me and study fashion?" So I said kind of okay and went along.
Dana Thomas: And this was the height of Swinging Sixties London when fashion was really fabulous and fun.
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah, it was an incredible time. I mean, I was there at the absolute epicenter of excitement. St. Martins was actually in the middle of Soho, and so you were surrounded by strip clubs, advertising agencies, fantastic art galleries, the whole Pop Art thing, so it was the most wonderful time that you could ever possibly have had. And we had incredible teachers and the course at St. Martins was phenomenally good, and half your marks were history of art. So you got an incredible all around education at the same time studying fashion.
Dana Thomas: But then you started your own company. And did you have, I mean, we call it sustainability now, but sort of eco-ethics at the core of the company from the beginning?
Katharine Hamnett: Well, I think, you know, we thought that you can get rich and famous by being a really horrible person. But the challenge is to do it by being a decent human being. And so I think that was the start of it. But at that point in time, we thought everything was fabulous and didn't know that anything was doing any damage at all.
Dana Thomas: So when did you pivot towards more cleaner, ethical sourcing and manufacturing?
Katharine Hamnett: I think in '89, I'd been very interested in Buddhism, which talks about to be happy, you've got to be a good person, how you're a good person. It's like the eightfold path. And one of the paths that you have to take is right livelihood, which is earning your living without harming any living thing. And in actual fact, probably for the good of all life or earth. And I thought well we can't be doing anything wrong, really just making silly dresses. It's not like we're making weapons, tanks, or bombs. So, I initiated some research within the company, set the team up to go and have a look, examine the social environmental impact to the clothing and textile industry, just to be on the safe side, thinking we'd be fine. Of course, he came back and said, well, how's it all fine? He said, actually, no really. Sorry. No. And it was just this tsunami of terrifying data, you know, in those days of saying about 10,000 accidental deaths from pesticide poisoning in cotton agriculture, every single material was having a negative impact on the environment.
Dana Thomas: But you were already politically engaged. You had a moment in 1984, that was one of the, perhaps the greatest guerilla action movements in the history of the fashion industry. You were invited to see Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at a reception at Downing Street during London Fashion Week because you had just won an award.
Katharine Hamnett: I wasn't actually gonna go. As Jasper Conran said, why should we go and have a glass of warm white wine with that murderess? But then I thought my father was in the armed forces and he was actually a defense attaché, and worked in the cabinet office. Actually. He was even working in the Pentagon during the bay of pigs. He was representing British military. So I got politics from a pretty early age. But I thought my family was also quite snobbish, and they loved to have pictures of themselves with kings and queens and presidents. At St. Martins, I went from kind of very posh rightwing Republican-type chick to this super socialist, so I thought, "Well, actually, yes, they can have their vile pictures, I'll get one that they can put in a silver frame on the piano." So it was a sort of a practical joke really on Thatcher. I had no idea that it was gonna go, so, it's almost like a millstone around my neck because I can't escape it. But it was a practical joke to some extent. And it was quite funny.
Dana Thomas: And so what you did is you wore one of your statement T-shirts.
Katharine Hamnett: No, I made one specially. I thought, and it was actually that afternoon. I just thought, "Oh God, I should go there, wear something strong, about the undemocratic proliferation of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe." And I'd found a quote from, I think a Dutch European review. It shows that 58 percent of the European population didn't want cruise and Pershing missiles in their countries, because obviously they send them off and they get the retribution. It's not a very nice thing to have in your backyard. So that was the "58% Don't Want Pershings"--that's where that came from.
Dana Thomas: And you walked into 10 Downing Street with your coat on, you kept your coat.
Katharine Hamnett: Well, yeah, cause I was on a diplomatic list when I was 16, so it was an experienced cocktail party invitee. And I realized that there's certain things that wouldn't go down too well if you go into the prime minister's house. And so I kept the T-shirt covered up till the last moment. Because I knew I'd been bundled off and I practiced the angle and just whipped it open as I was shaking my hand, because I realized I'd got one chance of doing it–sort of art-directed it from within.
Dana Thomas: I love that. And what did she say? I don't remember her reaction except she
Katharine Hamnett: She squawked. She started off–she didn't read the T-shirt and she was quite pleased that all the cameras were suddenly flashing like crazy–and she said, oh, you seem to be wearing rather strong message on your T-shirt and she bent over and looked, she went "ACK," like a chicken. It was amazing.
Dana Thomas: So by the time you decided to pivot to sustainability, you had a bit of a reputation for poking at the establishment.
Katharine Hamnett: Well, we were on an incredible roll. We were doing incredibly well as a fashion company, doing fashion shows all over the world.
Dana Thomas: Absolutely.
Katharine Hamnett: Selling in 40 countries.
Dana Thomas: I remember very well. I was working at The Washington Post for Nina Hyde at the time. I remember very well.
Katharine Hamnett: Oh wow. Nina. Wow. Amazing. We had a great time.
Dana Thomas: But you'd been poking at the establishment for a while.
Katharine Hamnett: Since the early eighties really–probably about '83, because we were getting so much publicity. I mean, I literally had 27 TV interviews, one after the other, at the end of the fashion show, far more publicity than we really needed to sell the clothes, because they seemed to be selling themselves fine. So I just thought, "Well, I've got to do something constructive with it." And we of course were getting enormously copied and people literally walk in buy the whole collection and copy it. I thought what would be funny if it was copied? And I thought, well, something huge, really important messages about issues that need to be addressed in huge writing that you could read from 200 yards.
So hence the T-shirts. But American Vogue came into my showroom, I think in '83, '84. And it was all like, "Oh Hi, Katharine." Very friendly until they saw the T-shirts and then they spun on their heels, and walked out of the show and without even saying goodbye, which I thought was a bit rude. It's unbelievable to think that a t-shirt saying “Save the World” or “No War” would be considered so shocking!
Dana Thomas: I was given one when I was at COP26 this fall, from Christiana Figueres who is a long-time activist in sustainability and environmentalism. And it says in big black letters in a Katharine Hamnett style: Stubborn Climate Optimist. And I wore that all over…
Katharine Hamnett: Brave you. Who said man's hope is more tragic than his final despair?
Dana Thomas: Well, you embraced the whole environmental movement in fashion. You pushed it long before anybody even thought about it and really was a flag bearer in this area.
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah, like San Sebastian shot through with arrows. Yeah, we haven't really made very much progress, which is heartbreaking, because so many people are employed in the industry–35 million people working in it, most of them working in appalling conditions of extreme poverty, and maybe being forced to buy the pesticides to kill them before they can even get a contract to sell their cotton. Farmers earning a dollar a week. It is vile. It is really vile.
Dana Thomas: I went to Bangladesh to interview the survivors of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, and I met other workers while I was there, And at the time they were earning $68 a month, which was half a living wage in Bangladesh.
Katharine Hamnett: Oh, it's criminal.
Dana Thomas: And the owner of Zara at the time was worth $68 billion.
Katharine Hamnett: Just, you see what I mean? They don't care. He could have given a billion dollars away and not even felt it.
Dana Thomas: Or just started paying people a full living wage in Bangladesh. Pay them $120 a month, instead of $68.
Katharine Hamnett: I think the only thing that is gonna fix it is EU legislation. All of these economies, Bangladesh or Cambodia, they're all export economies. Including China. They've got a bigger home market now but basically they are manufacturing to export and exporting into the EU because it's the biggest richest trading block in the world with the population of 550 million. As opposed to the U.S., which is a bit poorer population of 350 million,. They've got to get it into Europe. So European legislation that says that any goods that are made outside are only allowed into the EU if they're made to the same standards outside as are compulsory inside. So they'd have to be made in compliance with REACH, with the European health and safety, with the European employment law. Their workers would have to be paid a realistic living wage, not some farcical joke. Something that they could really live on. And that would put the price of outsourced clothing up and therefore make domestically produced clothing more competitive, give it a chance because we've outsourced our manufacturing, our clothing manufacturing to these countries and outsourced our pollution and outsourced our CO2 emissions. But we need those jobs back.
Katharine Hamnett: We need to be making locally. We need to be making for local consumption. And we can't lose those skills. So if we had this legislation, it would make the most enormous difference. Unless we have that, I think it's just gonna carry on going from bad to worse.
Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
I’m Dana Thomas and you’re listening to The Green Dream. Let’s return to our interview with pioneering sustainable fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, who is speaking to us from her regenerative farm in Mallorca, Spain. Hamnett pivoted from conventional to green practices more than three decades ago–long before it was trendy or necessary—and proved that sustainable fashion can be beautiful as well as profitable.
Let's talk about cotton for a moment, because that's one of the things that you use a lot, especially for your statement T-shirts, and you've been sourcing organic cotton for a while, which I think makes up 1 percent of all cotton produced today. Do you go to the cotton farms and visit with them?
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah, I was in west Africa with Oxfam. I was in Mali, I’ve been there and I've been in tears talking to farmers' wives who lost two children at the breast because they were starving. They couldn't make enough milk to feed their babies. Because they're on a dollar a week. They're not allowed to grow food. I've been in some beautiful biodynamic farm in Egypt, the second project which made me want to cry for different reasons, because through biodynamic farming principles, they'd actually turned it into a thriving farming community. Maybe 12,000 farmers farming cotton, rotating it with medicinal herbs, with food, with tea, 700,000 baby clothes being made in a factory. They send their cotton out to be spun and bring it back. And then they were knitting and garmenting baby clothes. That was just amazing. You see rows of eucalyptus trees, sheep grazing under the trees, insects, dragonflies, hovering over the sheep, keeping them free of parasites. And this all used to be desert. I wanted to cry and I had to accept that whatever these people were doing, they were doing something really right.
And I've been in the farms in India, around indoor, seeing the organic farmers working with Pratibha Syntex, one of the best mills in the world. And looking at their extraordinary, fascinating techniques that they use, using cattle, cattle manure, cattle urine, how they regenerate the land, how they make natural pesticides, seeing the results of the communities. It's been an amazing experience, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes truly uplifting when you see the success of sustainable projects, backed by people that really care and are doing it properly. It's a wonderful thing.
Dana Thomas: It's Eden. It sounds like paradise.
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah, it is. Butterflies and bees and happy kids and clean drinking water being provided by the reverse osmosis processing plant that processes all the dye water, and turns it into municipal quality drinking water, and providing the local community with safe water to drink, schools to go to. It's amazing.
Dana Thomas: Where do you get your cotton?
Katharine Hamnett: You can get organic cotton. But you have to demand it and it's mostly grown–there's some grown in Turkey, some grown in India. I'm not sure about China. There's some grown in Egypt. But you've obviously got sort of wars of the pesticide companies who are making it harder and harder for farmers, particularly in India, to get a hold of organic cotton seeds, or non GM seeds, GM is kind of taking over.
Dana Thomas: It’s very difficult, very difficult, yes.
Katharine Hamnett: Yes. It needs all the support it can get. People need to realize, organic cotton doesn't use bee killing pesticides.
Dana Thomas: And it actually does not take a lot of water either.
Katharine Hamnett: It's mostly rainfed — organic is mostly grown by smallholders and it is hugely beneficial for the farmers because they have to rotate it with other crops, including food. And so it gives them food security. It enables them to shelter, clothe, feed, educate their families and afford healthcare because they get a better price rate, which isn't the case with conventional. So, and it's a plus for the climate because they have to use organic fertilizers, which would be sort of compost or chop-and-drop. You're not using chemical fertilizers, which run off into the river, the sea and the aquifers, super toxic. So it's better for them, better for you, better for the planet, better for the biosphere, better for microorganisms, better for life on Earth.
Dana Thomas: And soil is so important. If our soil is not healthy, nothing is healthy.
Katharine Hamnett: Yeah. And pesticides kill everything and they go on killing. And then these herbicides as well.
Dana Thomas: And you just see a farm with healthy soil looks so lush and beautiful as opposed to sickly.
Katharine Hamnett: Oh yeah. It's the key to everything. I mean, in Mallorca here, we are practicing sustainable regenerative, organic agriculture. And the color of our soil, we've had no chemicals on it since we've had the farm, which is like 40 years and it's black. It's beautiful. Beautiful. So lush have enormous worms, which still terrify me.
Dana Thomas: <laugh>
Katharine Hamnett: Really enormous. I mean, literally two foot six long because you know, they must be really old. I tend to scream. I can't help it. But for sure they're a sign of fabulously healthy soil.
Dana Thomas: Explain the difference between regenerative farming and simply organic farming. It's about mixing your planting.
Katharine Hamnett: it's about not plowing, it's about chop and drop. It's companion plants, starting plants together that either feed each other, protect each other from disease, insect attacks. It's not monoculture. You have to mix everything up as you plant it, so it's much harder for industrial farmers. There are gigantic cotton farms in America and it's hundreds of acres and they're being run by two people. Iit's much, much more labor intensive.
Dana Thomas: Yes. I practice a little bit of this companion planting just in my vegetable garden. I put the marigolds in between the tomato plants and I put the green beans with the zucchini and the pumpkins, because they help with pollination. I put onions between the carrots so that they keep away the bugs from the carrots. Just little things like that, even.
Katharine Hamnett: Great. It's wonderful. Garlic is amazing.
Dana Thomas: You have how much land there?
Katharine Hamnett: Oh, it's not big. It's about five acres. Basically olives, almonds, citrus.
Dana Thomas: Beautiful, beautiful. Different from London.
Katharine Hamnett: Oh my God. I do kiss the ground practically–it was probably once a day. But now it's about once a week. I'm just getting used to being here.
I mean, when we've got things like a refugee crisis. If we all went regenerative, for instance, in Europe or in America, you've got the late extra labor force that you need to do this clambering at your doors. Let them in for Christ's sake.
Dana Thomas: What would you consider a fashion victim?
Katharine Hamnett: Well, somebody that's being persuaded, swallows all the advertising without questioning it, thinks that their identity depends on their clothing. Who thinks that brands are all important. Somebody who spends ridiculous amounts of money on rubbish. People who don't care about anything apart from just, buy buy buy, really. Brainwashed.
Dana Thomas: And do you think that we can get ecology and environment into more consumers' list of reasons to go shopping?
Katharine Hamnett: Or maybe not shopping. I think people have to be aware that we're killing the planet. We are making it difficult for future generations to be able to survive in this world so that we have to be more responsible. I don't really think there's much hope for the older generations, but I think kids, the younger generation are super concerned and much more conscious and much more informed. They're going to be making better choices, but fashion is like a primate attractivity, it's how we attract a mate, establish our status. It's tough for them. I'm involved in this Samsung UNDP Sustainable Development Goals app, which I'm super excited about. It's about telling younger people, or youth and the young, how they can help deliver the United Nations sustainable development goals. Tremendously exciting.
Dana Thomas: And how can we find it?
Katharine Hamnett: Go to globalgoals.org. And I'm totally excited about the whole thing because it's an app that's opened 6 million times a day.
Dana Thomas: Wow.
Katharine Hamnett: It's on 200 million phones. Samsung UNDP Global Goals app helping young kids, giving them hints on what they can do to help deliver their sustainable development goals. And I'm finding that really great. What is it the Chinese say–that teaching is the highest human activity. And the chance of having access to that kind of audience, it's one of the most exciting things I think I've been involved in my whole life.
Dana Thomas: The New York Times had a front page story about how often textile companies market organic cotton. When you test it, it actually isn't. They're basically lying.
Katharine Hamnett: I suppose you could probably find out from the test whether it was genetically modified or not. But in the eighties we did tests on non-organic cotton to see if there were any pesticide residues. And it tends to get washed, the residues tend to get washed out during the dyeing process, So it's hard to tell, I'd like to know how they told them and it doesn't surprise me. There have been cases with certifiers being bribed by factory owners, that kind of thing. Lot of that going on. Yeah, it’s vile. How dare they.
Dana Thomas: I also read the same day about a lab that is trying to develop a test a bit like these COVID tests we've been doing, but doing it for cotton instead, like a cotton swab that will tell you if it's organic or not, which I think would be really clever if they can do it.
Katharine Hamnett: Well, I'd love to know. I'd love to know how they do that.
Dana Thomas: In the fashion industry, like all industries that's driven by greed and growth and money, money, money…
Katharine Hamnett: And desire. And lust.
Dana Thomas: There's a lot of people who are trying to pull the wool over our eyes, right?
Katharine Hamnett: Oh yeah. Things like bamboo that was flagged as a sustainable viscose as absolute nonsense. You know, it's absolute rubbish — as toxic as any other viscose, apart from the Lenzing process.
Dana Thomas: Are there any synthetic fabrics that you do use in your fashion line?
Katharine Hamnett: Recycled polyester. The problem with recycled polyester is that from a sort of recycling point of view, you've now got the bottling companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi want their bottles back to be able to make more bottles. And so the supply chain of raw material for recycled polyester is f being eaten up by the bottle companies, because it's very hard to recycle polyester if it's got other components in it–if you're kind of recycling from old clothes or that kind of thing.
Dana Thomas: There is a wonderful company here in London called Worn Again, that's taking blended polyester, like cotton polyester shirts and dresses. And they figured out how to separate them and just take the polyester and regenerate it and then regenerate the cotton as well. There is some science that's working on it, but in the end, we should just get rid of polyester. Shouldn't we?
Katharine Hamnett: I think so, because it's gonna end up as microplastics.
Dana Thomas: Exactly. Which are the little filaments that are in our water, in our air.
Katharine Hamnett: I know it's just everywhere.
Dana Thomas: It's everywhere. It's everywhere. And because it's micro, we don't think about it.
Dana Thomas: So do you have any hope for the fashion industry?
Katharine Hamnett: I have a hope for young discriminating consumers really pushing it, pushing the boundaries, because the brands will find that they can't sell products unless they up their game. And I also think there's a chance that this legislation that I mentioned that only allows goods into our economic blocks that are made to the same standard outside as are compulsory inside. I talked about this in a conference in Amsterdam, there were quite a lot of trade unions there and they were really excited — there was cheering from the audience. So I think there's a chance, something like this could happen.
Dana Thomas: And what about the young generation of designers that are coming up and are really trying to be more eco-conscious?
Katharine Hamnett: That's fantastic. They're so much better than we were. We just thought, "This stuff's fabulous. Let's party." They're far more responsible than we were and it's tougher for them. We had a really easy ride and we didn't know there was anything wrong with it, but they're trying to do something about it, which is really admirable.
Dana Thomas: Do any of them come knocking on your door and want to work with you?
Katharine Hamnett: Sometimes, and we've had students and people coming in doing placements who are very keen to understand what we've learned on the sustainability side.
Dana Thomas: So the Katharine Hamnett message is being disseminated throughout the industry sort of covertly.
Katharine Hamnett: Well, people know a lot more than they did.
Dana Thomas: What was your favorite moment in your fashion career that you really feel like you've achieved something important or left a mark?
Katharine Hamnett: For me, it's kind of work in progress. It's nice when people come up to you and say, "I had the best time in your clothes, your clothes are the only clothes I don't throw away. They’ve made me so happy. I met my boyfriend wearing your dress and we’ve been together ever since." These sorts of things are really lovely.
Dana Thomas: Thank you so much, Katharine Hamnett for being on The Green Dream. It's been wonderful to speak with you today.
Katharine Hamnett: Well, my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Dana Thomas: When we talk about electric vehicles, or EV’s for short, we often think of automobiles. But the EV revolution is also happening in the realm of two-wheeled transportation. I see here in Paris more and more electric Vespas and similar EV scooters, replacing, mercifully, the high-polluting and terribly loud two-stroke engine version. And now the king of motorcycles, Harley-Davidson, is moving into the EV world with the LiveWire One, an electric motorcycle. Hannah Elliott, the luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits, returns to The Green Dream with a review of the LiveWire One, which she describes as "powerful and stylish."
Hannah Elliott: The LiveWire One electric motorcycle has a slightly confusing heritage: It’s the first offering from the new LiveWire brand within Harley-Davidson Inc., a division that will soon be spun off and publicly traded via a special purchase acquisition company.
But Harley had an EV before, also called LiveWire, which it made from 2019 to 2020. (Recalls and high pricing rather damped its reception.) LiveWire the brand arrived last year with the debut of the $22,000 LiveWire One. A nearly $1.8 billion deal to merge with a company called AEA-Bridges Impact Corp. has been planned since at least 2020. A spokesperson said it will happen “in the first half of 2022.” (We’re still waiting.) When it does, Harley-Davidson will own 74 percent of the new company, according to the proposed ownership structure.
Marketplace intricacies didn’t concern me, though, as I sat at a stoplight recently near the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. I was more curious about the gentle pulse I could feel—I'm sorry, there’s no delicate way to put this—between my legs.
This wasn’t the loud, rattling vibration you’d expect from Harley’s piston-pumping V-Twins beloved by the Hells Angels. It felt more like sitting on a slightly winded horse. Or wearing pants so tight you can feel your heartbeat in your hamstrings.
It could be my own adrenaline, I thought. I had just darted up a hill, then dropped underground in a street area called Lower Grand. Or was it the brakes? Maybe some kind of regenerative technology had them throbbing to gain energy.
I checked with a LiveWire spokesperson later. It turns out I’d felt the “haptic heartbeat,” a function the company developed to make its bike feel less like an appliance. Electric motorcycles, it seems, are derided by some for approximating scooters or toys rather than “real” motorcycles. (The critique in my experience has come exclusively from men, but that’s a discussion for another column, or your therapist. You can turn off the function if you don’t like it.)
I can see why LiveWire added the pulse. There is a lot riding on this bike—a whole new company, in fact. It needs to feel distinctive and young, different from the fat Hogs that Harley-Davidson sells to retirees and white-collar weekend warriors. The average age of a Harley owner is 45, roughly comparable to the average industrywide. In April the company reported that sales fell 5 percent in the first quarter in the US, its core market.
But a week riding around downtown LA, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood proved it a powerful and stylish step forward. Producers of electric motorcycles have a big opportunity to make riding more accessible, efficient, and fun—but they’ve got to make products as appealing as this one.
With a futuristic black frame and a big black battery stacked right under the handlebars—and with components such as hand grips, headlights, and mirrors taken straight from the Harley-Davidson spare parts bin—it’s hard to distinguish the LiveWire One from the old LiveWire that Harley sold for $30,000 in 2019. And I’ve ridden both. The LiveWire One has the same 100 horsepower and 84 pound-feet of torque and even the same weight as its predecessor. At 562 pounds, it’s much heavier than combustion-engine bikes with superior performance, such as Ducati’s 443-pound Streetfighter.
This makes it challenging to reverse in loose dirt or gravel. Because it doesn’t have a neutral gear like conventional bikes, which lessens the resistance as you push it back, it took quite a bit of strength and balance to maneuver the bike backward on my gravel driveway.
The added pounds didn’t affect how much I liked riding it down Olympic Boulevard during rush hour. It felt nimble, with an instant response that had me disappearing in traffic like a character in a Bourne film. I loved how smooth the power delivery felt as I wound the throttle; that one guy — there’s always that guy — in a busted Camaro who tried to tail me through Koreatown didn’t stand a chance.
The bike does need range improvement, though. The 146 miles promised of city riding will fall short for riders who love cruising hundreds of miles per tank on their engined bikes. (By comparison, Zero Motorcycles offers 223 miles of city-riding range on its electric Zero SR.) If you use a DC Fast Charger, the LiveWire One will charge full in an hour. Or you can plug it into a 110-volt household outlet and wait 11 hours.
If you’re commuting or just taking the bike out for an hour or two on the weekends, you should be fine. Built with an easygoing upright riding stance and a seat height of 30 inches, the One is comfy enough for you to sit in the saddle for that long or more. My knees and arms fit easily across its body; I felt like my 6-foot frame was probably the perfect size for this bike. If you want something that will comfort you like a La-Z-Boy for hours on end, look elsewhere.
Despite such premium technology as Bluetooth capability and cool two-tone color option chart, the one I rode did have a build-quality issue. The day after I got it, a battery cover panel fell off in my driveway.
I also hated the right switchgear setup, which houses the right blinker button, the toggle to change the display layout, and the ride mode switch all in the same space on the handlebar. (Many motorbikes wrap both left- and right-turn indicator switches into a single button positioned at the left thumb.) But with the throttle and front-brake lever also located on the right, reaching my thumb to signal a right turn felt very inconvenient. At one point — my attention focused on toggling from Sport to Road mode, plus indicating a right-hand turn — I looked up to see the car in front of me had stopped abruptly, causing me to squeeze the brakes harder than I would’ve liked. My pulse’s quickening was hardly just haptic.
But these design issues and behind-the-pack range don’t make me anxious for the future of the LiveWire brand. It has a lot in the pipeline: Coming models such as the LiveWire S2 Del Mar Launch Edition promise a svelte body weight of 440 pounds while keeping much of its range capability. That one, limited to 100 units priced at $17,000 each, has already sold out. Deliveries start in the spring of 2023.
I saw the new Del Mar on display at a warehouse party last month in LA’s Arts District. Judging from the bike’s racing-inspired, psychedelic checkerboard graphics and the uber-cool under-40 crowd gathered excitedly around it, LiveWire is showing it can be more than just the new subdivision of an aged, sleepy company. It’s primed to take us on a stirring ride—even if you turn off the haptic pulse.
Dana Thomas: New episodes of The Green Dream come out the first and third Tuesday of the month, so we’ll be back in two weeks with Nancy Birtwhistle, a British author and homebaker who won The Great British Bake Off in 2014. Birtwhistle has written several books about sustainable home practices, including Green Living Made Easy, 101 Eco Tips, Hacks, and Recipes to Save Time and Money, published by Pan Macmillan. She calls it a massive lifestyle manual.
Nancy Birtwhistle: Everybody's busy. We're under enormous pressure with the planet and with the increasing cost of living pressures, and I accept that people with busy lives haven't necessarily got the time to be mindful of making green changes, or doing things from scratch, because there's a perception that doing that takes much, much longer. And I think we've been brainwashed into thinking that going green and using natural products is in fact inferior to chemical, heavy alternatives, which just isn't the truth.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
This episode of The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, senior producer Katie Flood, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find us online at wondercast.studio. I’m Dana Thomas, the European Sustainability Editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column in the magazine or online at Vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and on Twitter where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. Thank you for listening.