Muse at the Designer’s Remix installation – a comment on fashion’s wastefulness – during Copenhagen fashion week this season
Clare Press meets the multi-tasking model mum and former face of Prada Arizona Muse, and finds out why she’s on a mission to spread the word about sustainability.
What’s left that is truly exciting in fashion? When you’ve been the face of Prada. Found your image splashed across 14 consecutive pages of American Vogue, gazed down from billboards advertising luxury brands and worked with all the best photographers. When you’ve walked in Chanel shows and been invited to the Met Gala so many times they all blur into one. What then? “Sustainability!” says British-based, Californian model Arizona Muse on this week’s Wardrobe Crisis podcast.
Muse has been mugging up on the deep stuff behind the movement to make the global fashion industry less harmful to the planet. “I’m so in love with the subject,” she says. “It has really taken my life to a new level of experience and interest and brought so much into what I do and think about…It’s kind of like my self-education.”.
Listen to the full interview here
Muse has been reading everything she can get her hands on, watching TED Talks and listening to podcasts. Her favourite subjects: biodynamic farming and sustainable materials. She is an ambassador for The Sustainable Angle, the organisation behind the Future Fabrics Expos that take place in London each January.
“Modelling opens so many doors for me that I really want to walk through,” says Muse. “What’s really important [to me] is that I know my stuff when I get through those doors and that I can follow through. So I’m being really careful to make sure that I can prove myself. This is a life-long passion. I would not have made this so public if it wasn’t going to last.”
Given her fashion credentials, she thought of starting a sustainable label herself. In fact, she got almost to the point of releasing one to market, before deciding she could make a bigger impact by collaborating with existing brands. “I don’t want to test myself as a designer, I want to test sustainable materials,” she says. “The time for awareness-building is over. We know what the problems are. I think it’s time for action now.”
Listen to more Wardrobe Crisis podcast episodes here.