Sustainable Fashion Campaigns & Conservation

Our cheetah campaign caused controversy. For a sustainable brand, that was not surprising. Fashion has an old habit of taking from wildlie, animals become shorthand for danger, sensuality or luxury; the landscape a stage where conservation a reassuring caption beneath the photograph of 'no animals were harmed'. The story behind the image rarely gets an acknowledgement, let alone a share of any profit it generates.

The cheetahs in our campaign were rehabilitated cubs, reared from infancy at the conservancy where the shoot took place. They are calm around people without being sedated, or coaxed into performance. The zebras were fed that is very obvious in the imagery. A direct payment was made to the conservancy. Those facts were not incidental. They were the conditions on which we agreed to the photoshoot and also chose it for.

The ethics of wildlife imagery sit across three distinct questions. The first is about the animal: its history, its welfare, its degree of habituation to people, and the expertise of those caring for it. The second is about the institution around it - whether a conservancy is being used as an aesthetic asset, or whether the commercial value produced by the work returns in some material form to habitat protection, rehabilitation and care. The third is about the image itself: the fantasy it creates once it begins to circulate, stripped of its production context.

Gucci's Year of the Tiger campaign made that third question difficult to avoid. Tigers were photographed separately from models under welfare supervision, then composited into the final work. But the criticism was never purely about the technical conditions of the shoot. It was about the finished image. Tigers placed within a world of private luxury, presented almost as companions, as though their captivity were not itself worth questioning. That is where welfare and representation separate. A shoot can be carefully managed and still make proximity to wildlife appear aspirational. It can avoid immediate harm and still reinforce a culture in which rare animals function as status objects, entertainment, extensions of wealth.

The Gucci example remains useful because it asks a harder question than whether an animal was treated properly on the day: what is the image asking its audience to desire? Fashion is in the business of manufacturing desire. It does not record a setting or the etical research behind it. In our case, we conciously knew a cheetah beside a model will carry associations of rarity, freedom, danger and sensuality. Those associations belong to the visual history of fashion, but also of safari, colonial travel and luxury tourism. A welfare statement does not neutralise them. They have to be consciously held within the work.

The financial question is equally urgent. Conservation is routinely treated as backdrop, an atmosphere that makes commercial imagery possible, without any corresponding obligation. The Lion's Share initiative was a direct challenge to that assumption: advertisers using animals in campaigns should contribute a percentage of their media spend to conservation and animal welfare. The figure was modest. The principle was not. If an animal creates commercial value, that value should not be extracted without return.

This is where sustainable fashion needs to become more rigorous. The industry has grown fluent in the language of fibres, traceability and circularity. Biodiversity remains largely decorative — referenced through a campaign's mood, palette or location, rather than understood as a system of living relationships with real costs, real labour and real governance.

Elsewhere in Universe, our interview with Alec Wildenstein at Ol Jogi Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya sits within this same argument. Wildenstein has spent decades running one of Africa's most serious private conservation operations that provides veterinary care, anti-poaching, rehabilitation, land stewardship across thousands of acres. The photographs of him with his elephants were taken in the award winning iniative in Kenya. What that image carries is not atmosphere. It is the weight of sustained, unglamorous work. The kind that makes any encounter with wildlife possible in the first place, and that fashion almost never stops to acknowledge.

Fashion translates the natural world into atmosphere with extraordinary skill. It is far less accustomed to acknowledging the structures of care that sustain the life behind it. These conservationists are not a backdrop. They are the point. There is no uncomplicated way to photograph wildlife for fashion. There should not be. We cannot claim that a conservation context makes every image acceptable. It is to insist that the conversation cannot be excluded from sustanable fashion mainly, but the industry as a whole.

Photos Courtesy of Gucci, Wieteke Konings & Ol Jogi Conservancy