In the midst of a global pandemic and widespread protests against racial injustice, the fashion industry can seem pretty frivolous.

Fashion-industry leader Kikka Hanazawa (MBA 2002), CEO of VPL, a women’s underwear and athleisure company, knows this. “There’s nothing positive about fashion in the news these days. The last innovation we had was 200 years ago, through the Industrial Revolution,” says Hanazawa. “Fashion is not doing anything for our health. It’s not making the environment any cleaner. I feel strongly that we can do something better than what we’re known for.”

This is not the first time Hanazawa has wrestled with the ways she could urge her industry to focus on social impact. In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami leveled towns and cities in her home country of Japan, and she struggled with how to help. She weighed her options: She could donate clothes but learned that clothing ended up in landfills, as organizations scrambled to meet food, shelter, and medical needs first. She could offer a percentage of her sales at VPL, but in the face of a tsunami-sized tragedy, her contributions would be reduced to metaphorical pennies. “The magnitude of the disaster was so big. What could one company or brand do?” she wondered.

Hanazawa also understood the fashion-industry network is powerful and has the potential for wider impact. In 2011, she tapped fellow industry leaders Julie Gilhart, Miki Higasa, and Tomoko Ogura, to launch Fashion Girls for Humanity (FGFH), the mission of which was to provide humanitarian services and funding to communities in need across the world. Hanazawa mobilized the global fashion industry by soliciting excess merchandise from luxury brands and designers, and by recruiting hundreds of volunteers to raise money by selling merchandise in New York, London, and Tokyo. “It was a win-win for consumers who were able to buy beautiful clothes and bags at discount and still feel like they were doing something good for others,” she observes.

Over the last decade, FGFH has teamed up with designers like Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Proenza Schouler, and Ralph Lauren, to provide more than $1 million in direct relief for victims of the earthquake in Nepal, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and Hurricane Sandy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a different kind of disaster, affecting the entire world at once. The women at FGFH recognized an opportunity for impact when they began to hear stories of the massive shortages of personal protective equipment for front-line medical workers and to see images of medical personnel wearing trash bags, rather than medical gowns, to treat patients first in Europe and then in New York.

It started with Hanazawa, who began to research the breakdown in the medical-gown supply chain. The gowns were produced by a tight circle of manufacturers that had begun to shut down due to supply-chain issues related to the pandemic. So in March 2020, Hanazawa headed to her drafting table in her Los Angeles studio to study a medical gown given to her by a friend in the medical profession. She broke it down, rebuilt it, and put all the information—from material to construction—in a YouTube video, in hopes she could rally the fashion network again. Maybe 100 people might see this, she thought, and that would be a pretty good start. Instead, the video attracted some 170,000 views, from 170 countries.

As the video took off, FGFH welcomed input on the processes and patterns, crowd-sourced through social media. It partnered with Humans from Home, a nonprofit established to mobilize the American workforce quarantined at home, and began offering their MadeByUS kits that include everything—from assembly instructions to precut gown panels—for anyone with a sewing machine and knowledge of fabric patterns who was willing to help communities in need. FGFH also began raising funds for the Gowns for Good Made in America initiative, which supports small businesses within the fashion and garment industries in the United States that have pivoted their manufacturing to create personal protective equipment. FGFH further partnered with The RealReal, an e-commerce site for pre-owned luxury items, to use their platform to sell face masks made by designers, and more recently launched a partnership with Athleta, a division of The Gap, to raise much needed funds to make and deliver more gowns and masks in the United States this fall.

FGFH hopes that big-name fashion icons and brands will continue to make an impact by doing what they do best: setting trends. By creating beautiful masks, says Hanazawa, the fashion industry can meet the world where it is. VPL launched a mask line using kimono fabric Hanazawa had inherited from her family business in Japan. Louis Vuitton created a line, and Christian Siriano has done the same.

“I'm hoping that fashion has a role in inspiring people. Great designs can do that,” says Hanazawa. She offers the example of her son, who was initially reticent to wear a mask. “So I thought, ‘Well, I have to make a cool mask.’”

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