Nawal El Saadawi is a woman of many firsts. The 88-year-old was the first woman in Egypt to become a physician and the first feminist writer from the Arab world, and she remains a pioneering activist in the global movement for gender rights and feminist politics. As both a psychiatrist and a social commentator she has authored 20 books in Arabic that have since been translated into more than 30 languages, making her a rare living, global Arab icon. Once incarcerated and censored, she now writes a regular column for the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram. "That is a government paper, but I write in it. So there is progress," she says.
She finds hope, too, in the #MeToo movement, and takes some quiet satisfaction in having spent decades dismissing the notion that Arab societies were uniquely repressed in contrast to a supposedly enlightened West. "They thought that it is only women in Arab societies or in Muslim societies that are harassed, and that women in the U.S. and Europe are free. I was saying, 'No, we are all in the same boat.' I was saying that in the mid-1950s. They laughed at me." No more.
That same spirit of putting conviction into practice now animates a wave of brands. Breitling has updated its 61-year-old Superocean dive watch in collaboration with Outerknown, the sustainable clothing label co-founded by eleven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater. Its colourful NATO straps are woven from Econyl, a yarn spun from nylon waste, including the lost and abandoned fishing nets that pollute the oceans long after their fishing days are over. The Swedish brand TRIWA, meanwhile, takes its name seriously — Transforming the Industry of Watches — and its Humanium Metal 2.0 timepiece is made from melted-down illegal firearms. The modest watch has won the acclaim of the Dalai Lama, helped remove 4,500 guns from the streets, raised funds for local violence-prevention projects and earned a place in the UN's permanent disarmament exhibition.
Material innovation is rewriting fashion's compromises. Reishi by MycoWorks, a fungi-based biomaterial that took over a decade to develop, looks, feels and even smells like leather, yet is biodegradable and requires so little energy to produce that it conjures a future free of factory farms and animal skins. Denham the Jeanmaker, founded in Amsterdam by Englishman Jason Denham, has partnered with the Milan denim mill Candiani to launch the first sustainable stretch denim, a Bio-Stretch Selvedge built from organic cotton wrapped around a natural rubber core, free of plastics and microplastics. "We are not doing this because there is a demand," says Alberto Candiani, the mill's fourth-generation leader, "but because it's the right thing to do." H&M has gone further still, becoming the first brand to retail a garment made from Re:newcell's Circulose, a material engineered on a molecular basis from discarded clothes.
Conscience is also reshaping the boardroom and the runway. Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon raised eyebrows in Davos by announcing the bank would no longer take a company public in the US or Europe without at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women. "We realise this is a small step, but it's a step in the right direction," he said. On the runway, Rihanna's Savage x Fenty has helped expose the limits of the now-cancelled Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, celebrating women of all shapes and sizes and streaming its extravaganza to more than 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers across 200 countries.
Cities and smaller makers complete the picture. Copenhagen, already the cleanest major city in the world, aims to be carbon-neutral by 2025, powered by feats such as Copenhill — a waste-to-energy plant topped by a year-round artificial ski slope — alongside an almost entirely electric bus fleet and 32 square metres of green space per resident. The London brand Elvis & Kresse has spent 15 years rescuing the city's decommissioned fire-hoses from landfill, turning them into durable bags and accessories while donating half its profits to The Fire Fighters Charity. In Beirut, Sarah's Bag, founded by Sarah Beydoun after her sociology research inside women's prisons, gives former inmates not just an income but a sense of purpose and a path back into society. "The only way the women can come out of any misery," Beydoun says, "is through work." Across watchmaking, fashion, finance and the street, the message is the same: doing the right thing has finally become good business.
Words: Nicolas Shammas & Karim Mounib
