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72TO THE FULLESTGisele calls her first book, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life,due in October, a “process of digging inward.” Bottega Venetadress. Special thanks to Hotel Esencia. In this story: hair,Christiaan; makeup, Dick Page. Details, see In This Issue.``````Fashion ranks among the most polluting industries inthe world, and toxic wastewater from textile plants poses aconsistent threat to the global water supply. According toTheanne Schiros, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the FashionInstitute of Technology and a research scientist at ColumbiaUniversity, whose lab is developing sustainable, kelp-basedtextiles for sneakers and knitwear, each day women andgirls devote 200 million work hours to collecting water fortheir families—the equivalent of erecting 28 Empire StateBuildings every day. “This isn’t just an environmental issue,”says Schiros. “It’s a social-justice issue. Gisele is a force in thefight to preserve fresh water supplies, and in her work in therain forests she is protecting both the visible and the invisible,including plants and animals we have yet to discover thathave the potential to heal people and ecosystems.”Nowadays Gisele is especially keen to work for fashionbrands that have shown a commitment to sustainability.Defined broadly, this means any brand willing to considerits impact on the environment, from minimizing carbonfootprints to using easi-ly replenished materialsand natural dyes. Sincesomewhere betweeneight and thirteen mil-lion tons of clothing,by various estimates,end up in landfills everyyear, anything beautiful-ly made and built to lastqualifies as sustainable.“It’s a matter of thinkingabout the consequencesof making something,”she says. “At what priceare we creating all thisbeauty? People think you dump something in the riverand it’s just going to disappear. Nothing disappears, as weknow. Whatever gets made here stays here.”Gisele is interested in designers who are turning toward ma-terials such as algae, hemp, and bamboo. She is a champion ofStella McCartney, who has made protecting the environmentand promoting human welfare cornerstones of her business.At this year’s Costume Institute gala in May, Gisele—whoappears in Versace’s spring campaign—connected DonatellaVersace to her friend Livia Firth, a sustainable-fashionevangelist, who helped the house create a gown made fromresponsibly dyed organic silk.“I first met Gisele when she was presenting at a RainforestAlliance gala,” Firth recalls. “She was like a bomb of passion,so much charisma. Sustainability can be a gloomy subject,but Gisele refuses to be anything but positive. She’s alwaysasking, ‘But what can we actually do?’ And she does theless glamorous part of the work—she gets her hands dirtywhere a lot of people don’t. We pushed an iconic house—Versace—to do something out of“If I had to promotemyself in the waygirls modeling nowhave to do, forget it.I wouldn’t do it”CONTINUED ON PAGE 122