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JANUARY 2024 ISSUE

“Protecting The Environment Is An Act Of Self-Care”: Supermodel Amber Valletta On Turning 50 – And Turning Her Approach To Sustainability On Its Head

Amber Valletta stands for the planet. Here, the model and climate advocate reveals her path towards a more conscious future – and how fashion is following her. Photographs by Charlotte Wales. Styling by Poppy Kain.

BY AMBER VALLETTA

There were two phrases I heard more than anything else growing up: “Go play outside” and “Use your imagination”. My family lived in Tulsa – still does – and my grandparents had a farm 15 minutes from town, 40 acres of land dotted with old boxcars and wooden barns that dated back to at least the ’20s. My cousins and I would run wild there every weekend, riding horses underneath the willow oak trees and swimming in a natural creek so clear it must have been spring-fed. Even now, when I need a moment of peace, I picture Oklahoma.

I’ve been summoning its wide-open skies more and more often lately. I turn 50 this February, meaning I’ve worked in fashion for 35 years, and I’ve been a sustainability advocate for more than 20 of those, but in 2023 I hit a wall, mentally and physically. I wasn’t quite at the point where I couldn’t get out of bed, but I couldn’t tell you how I spent my days. The news just felt relentlessly bad – environmental and otherwise. I knew that, if I was ever going to get back on my feet, I needed to find a more sustainable approach to sustainability work.

When I left Tulsa for Europe at 15, I thought I had landed on another planet. One minute my mother had signed me up for paid modelling classes where I learnt to pose like a mannequin in Midwest department stores, and the next I’d been scouted to work in Milan. Before I was even out of my teens, I’d moved to Paris, where I impulsively cropped my hair into a pixie cut in the apartment I shared with Shalom Harlow. That led to my first American Vogue cover with Arthur Elgort in 1993, wearing a white blouse and pinstripes, which led to my opening Tom Ford’s a/w ’95 Gucci show, which then led to the Prada campaign in 1997 where I’m floating on the Tiber river in a rowboat at twilight, and on and on… Life became a merry-go-round of runway shows, photoshoots, and much time alone and away from my loved ones, spinning faster and faster until I had lost my bearings.

After a while, I realised how intensely disconnected I felt. I needed to take several steps back, retreat from the fashion world. At 25 I got sober, I became a mother, and I moved to California, where I began to work with the Natural Resources Defense Council. I educated myself about the climate crisis, quickly realising that, while it’s no one’s fault specifically, it’s everyone’s problem to solve. Emissions produced by garment factories in Bangladesh, making clothes for the West, will pollute the skies not just in the global south but above the Eiffel Tower. If I model a polyester dress in Milan, the cost will be felt, in a roundabout way, in Tulsa, by the sandstone cliffs and scrub oaks on my grandparents’ farm. Despite what I may have thought at 15, there’s no such thing as separate worlds; they are one and the same, and they are at risk.

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