Michelle Gabriel
Meet Michelle Gabriel @shellygabes @gcnyc, a researcher, educator, and advocate focused on building a more viable, supportive, and sustainable world through fashion. “Fashion is a global lingua franca, a massive socio-cultural and geopolitical force, and one of the oldest and largest industries in the world. While the fashion industry currently causes enormous harm including significantly contributing to climate change and environmental destruction and being the leading industry of exploited and child labor, I believe if we better understand fashion, we can leverage its impact for positive change across our world.”
IRK: Tell us your “Why”?
Like many advocating for a less harmful, more sustainable, more positively impactful fashion system, I came to my ‘why’ working in the fashion industry. Before coming to higher education after getting my master’s degree, I had spent 15 years in fashion design and production. In the last few years of that career, I was fortunate to be leading design and product development at a brand that was earnestly seeking to be socially and environmentally better. And while I saw and learned so much in the role, I ultimately was still responsible for producing more, at lower and lower costs, with fewer and fewer resources which were causing me some serious existential dread. My career had allowed me to travel globally within the supply chains where we produced all of our products, and I had seen some very scary, very painful, and ultimately very common things on those trips done in the name of producing fashion. My work left me with deep questions, and the answers I found in conversations with colleagues or in the available information were lacking or unsatisfactory. I was able to complete my master’s degree while working, and when I was looking for my next step, I knew I could not longer do what I was doing: I could no longer be a designer and I could no longer be responsible for producing clothing. However, what I could do was far less clear to me. While I was attempting to figure it out, I was asked to teach at GCNYC because of my professional experience managing sustainability considerations within a fashion brand, and I found so much joy in the experience. At the time, I had never met anyone doing what I do now or really had any interactions with academics in a professional sense, so I really wasn’t sure how to get more of that joy I was experiencing. Long story short, I have had wonderful people who have advocated, supported, and championed me and that has allowed me the opportunity to do the work I do now and build the novel graduate program I now lead. In the mix of all of this was my want to continue my education and get my Ph.D. which I was able to begin in February 2021. My focus in that work and research is largely on the political economy of fashion and policy interventions for the fashion system. My research has really allowed me to understand our most meaningful leverage points for environmental and social change for the fashion industry, and given where we are today, the policy is the number one opportunity that is currently the least leveraged. This work led to my involvement in the New York State Fashion Act, in which I co-lead the supporting coalition along with the brilliant Maxine Bédat, the mastermind behind the bill.
IRK: What are you most passionate about with respect to taking care of people and the planet?
I deeply and earnestly believe in the ‘common good’ and our responsibility to one another. I think that those of us in positions of relative power – power over knowledge, attention, money, resources, and decisions that affect others – bear a proportionate responsibility to use that power to effect the most good possible for the greatest amount of people. One of the most painful and significant shifts in our culture over the last few generations is our walking away from the social contract that said that those with relative privilege should be pressured to use that privileged position towards the common good. There are, of course, always good actors and bad actors present in any situation at any point in time in history; however, we have lost what once drove FDR, JFK, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as examples, to use their position of privilege towards common good ends through civil service and advocacy. Part of this erosion is part of a bigger cultural shift in the West, part of it is because of the different and impersonal ways we now interact, and part of it is because of how effectively we have all adopted the notion of scarcity and accordingly feel we can only manage to take care of ourselves, leaving ideas of common good unattended to. I feel so passionately that if we can reframe who we feel responsible for, and accordingly broaden who we think of as our community, we will gain not just the warm fuzzy feeling that can come with altruism, but we can all gain the benefit of a better world – a more sustainable world which is viable for all of our collective needs, a world with less destruction, a more inclusive world, and a world with fewer ‘have-nots’. We have innumerable truisms which speak to this; “A rising tide raises all boats” or “No man is an island”, as examples. I believe if we better acknowledged that we are part of a collective experience, using collective resources and that what happens somewhere happens everywhere, we can reframe how we think about environmental and social stewardship, think differently about our own ability to effect change, and our responsibility to that common experience.
IRK: What are some conscious actions you implement in your daily life?
I feel strongly that one of the most significant ways we can drive change for the planet and people is to shed our disempowered identity as ‘consumers’ and instead adopt the powerful identity of ‘citizens’. For me, that means spending the majority of my attention and energy on leveraging my role as a citizen to participate in environmental and social policy development, championing good government oversight including regulation for the activities in the world I hope to change, engaging directly with lawmakers, and educating others on how to become involved in your community as a citizen. Instead of focusing on how to consume best given the environmental and social challenges we face in our world and in fashion, I focus and suggest others focus on consuming less and becoming much more aware of why they consume.
IRK: What’s your hope for the future of the planet?
I hope we can acknowledge our shared responsibility for the current urgent challenges at risk of destroying the planet and, in turn, feel empowered by our responsibility to drive change toward a viable future for all of us. The risks are so high right now; it is not alarmist to say we are earnestly on the edge of catastrophe and climate collapse, the implications of which are unimaginable. I hope we will be able to change course so we can have a viable planet, capable of supporting us for millions of years to come. I am hopeful because I know we truly hold the power to change course and I’m not willing to give up on that hope.
What Sustainable Development Goal do you align with the most? (https://sdgs.un.org/goals)
Fashion and its impact affect every SDG. This is why focusing on the fashion system is a worthy endeavor; the positive impact you can get in shifting behaviors in fashion comes back multi-fold to the greater world. My work specifically is most focused on SDG4: Quality Education; SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production; SDG16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions; and SDG17: Partnership for the Goals.
