Spanish model Blanca Padilla is styled by Bárbara Garralda & Sylvia Montoliu in a sea and earth-honoring fashion story lensed by Rafa Gallar [IG] for ELLE Espana’s June 2022 issue.

The focus for June is environmental awareness and damage to our oceans and seas.

Once again, we find ourselves in this mentally-twisted fashion reality of having an environmental activist model creating an informative environmental narrative about the urgency of climate action and fashion’s significant role in creating the increasingly significant damage to the planet.

Blanca Padilla does an excellent job as both model and activist. In the interview she obliquely references fashion’s professed inherent contradictions around sustainability. Google translates:

Blanca defends the survival of the eternal duality between ethics and aesthetics. “Making fashion is a creative process that also carries an important responsibility. Both for those who create it and for those who wear it. It is an artistic expression, that is clear to me and I have been able to corroborate it thanks to all the designers with whom I have worked over the years and whom I greatly admire", she explains, reflecting on the compatibility of the beauty of a design with a sustainable commitment and which [s]he considers absolutely feasible. “Nothing has to affect that a garment is sustainable with respect to its design, what's more, every day new alternative fabrics are being discovered to the traditional ones that give a lot of play. also upcycling, It is a very good alternative, remaking garments from others that already existed”.

The clothes featured are largely unsustainable with no eco-credentials. Stella McCartney is represented, and I believe this is the extent of the sustainable fashion. Chloe is included and also could be sustainable.

Where Is the Sustainable Fashion for an Environmental Issue?

If money is required, surely the exciting Ecoalf brand — Padilla’s collaborator — would find the money. Or a fabulous Global Citizen type of fashion story could have brought together funding to pay the costs required to be featured in ELLE Spain. At the very least, Blanca Padilla could have launched fundraiser online — we certainly would have helped her raise money for the feature.

It’s one thing to make the effort and fail. In that case, we would side with ELLE Espana. Because trying is everything. But I don’t get the feeling that ELLE Espana even notices these very obvious contradictions in their editorial strategy.

Blanca Padilla herself speaks at length about her ongoing collaboration with Ecoalf. She mentions being guided by American model Cameron Russell. Giada Lubomirski, founder of the international Ecoshaker platform is news to AOC.

I went through this same restrained diatribe over Fashion Canada putting Tasha Tilberg in the identical position a couple months ago.

There is no excuse in my mind for not having sustainable clothes in this fashion story. Or at least a 50/50 mix. Elle Espana could promote their effort ‘Getting It Half Right is Better Than Being Dead Wrong.’

We say thanks to Blanca Padilla for both her modeling efforts and excellent interview about the critical environmental peril in which we live. ~ Anne