Mara Hoffman & Vanessa Barboni Hallik

Meet the Women Bridging Ethics and Style

By Bonnie Langedijk

Human beings love things. And mostly the new. Our insatiable appetite for newness has led to a culture that celebrates consumerism, with only few willing to face the consequences while others try and shop their way to happiness. While the sales share of sustainable clothing has steadily risen over the past decade, with the market share set to reach over six percent by 2026, sustainability and the fashion industry remain two concepts that are often at odds with each other. The narratives around fashion and luxury products have always been led by inspiration, aspiration and beauty, while many of those championing sustainability underestimate the importance of creating a great product first. Add in the difficulty to define what sustainable fashion actually means and you end up with a fashion system that often greenwashes over truly making long-term investments into new business models and systems. 

Two remarkable women who have been able to seamlessly merge aesthetics and purpose are designer Mara Hoffman and Another Tomorrow CEO Vanessa Barboni Hallik. While their career paths into fashion couldn’t be more disparate – Hoffman launched her business straight out of Parsons while Hallik worked as a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley before founding hers – the two friends share the same goal. Transcending mere brand-building, Hoffman and Hallik continuously explore the intricacies of reshaping an entire ecosystem. Creating a new blueprint for an industry that so heavily clings to outdated structures – one where sustainability meets sophistication, and purpose meets style. But we’ll let Mara and Vanessa do the talking.

Mara: I've got to say, I'm so obsessed, Vanessa, with how we're showing up today. We are so in our caricatures. You're in this gorgeous black, hair pulled back. And I'm literally sitting in a jungle with frizzed out hair. 

Vanessa: Meanwhile, I would switch places with you in an absolute heartbeat. But it's true. You really got us in our natural habitat.

Mara: It's just perfection. I wish I could screenshot this. 

“I came from way outside the INDUSTRY and I was so taken aback by the problem and the enormity of this machine and what this machine does to people and planet and animals.”

Bonnie: How did you meet?

Vanessa: We were introduced years ago and it was one of those things where we couldn't quite make the timing work. We were reintroduced by a mutual dear friend, Isolde Brielmaier. And we just hit it off that night.

Mara: Vanessa and I are in constant contact and dialogue about where we're at right now as an industry and how to get to this next actual sustainable place. Where we connect the most is in how does the entirety of this movement survive? Beyond the material of it. And we both, I think, are in agreement that it's through collectivism. That's where the gem of our friendship is. We both understand this thing doesn't exist on a solo playing field. 

Vanessa: I can only echo that. This for me started as such an intellectual exercise, if I'm honest. I came from way outside the industry and I was so taken aback by the problem and the enormity of this machine and what this machine does to people and planet and animals. Where I'm coming from – and what Mara and I often speak about – is how do you come at it not from a place of replicating these linear structures, but to finding these truly collective solutions and to finding business models of resiliency? Because if you handle sustainability purely through sourcing in a linear business model, you do one thing, which is add cost to an already inherently fragile system. And so how do we really rethink how the whole thing works? What we're talking about is resiliency. So it's the opposite. How do you deliver that in ways that actually reduces business risk, that creates more opportunity for collaboration, that fundamentally allows us to stop making as many new things? I don't think either of us are on this call with the answers, but I think we're on it with a deep sense of intention and curiosity and urgency to find another way from a really open-hearted place because you can't muscle through this. 

The fashion industry continues to build upon the existing blueprints and structures whether that’s sustainability, wholesale, sizing, media. The whole industry needs an overhaul so it can be applied to life right now rather than life 20 years ago. You have found each other in understanding we need a collective mindset to bring change, but how do you push that conversation forward and change the ecosystem rather than just building a brand within it?

Vanessa: It has come from this place of how we can create resilient infrastructure. One of the first things that we did was thinking about production models. How can we move into this really demand responsive production model? And this isn’t novel, other industries figured this out 30 years ago. We’ve been looking at the overall structures that are required to accelerate this movement and just the absurdity of the duplication of effort that's happening everywhere. And so – thinking through this lens of collectivism – how can we actually start to think about shared services models, right? How do you think about that in terms of providing services for digitalization, circularity that independent brands have a really hard time doing on their own. A lot of this is the seeds that we're looking to sow together. In this world, in the economic realities of this business, change will not come fast enough in the absence of I think these approaches and regulations. Mara, did that come out the right way?

Mara: For sure. And then I can throw in the part of, if we're looking to get out of this thing alive we need to be adopting the feminine. We've all been building our systems, based on a masculine success framework, right? It's separatism and it's competitive and it's out for the self, where the feminine approach is about if one boat rises, all boats rise. And everything that Vanessa just spoke to is that. The question is, how fast can we activate towards that? And I don't know.

I couldn’t agree more with the importance of leaning into the feminine energy in business. What would you say are some of the things that you've learned from each other as it relates to leadership?

Vanessa: I would say vulnerability. It’s something that came really hard and late to me because I cut my teeth on trading floors, you know? But once you're there – and it's not appropriate in all situations – you find those people who are willing to meet you where you are, that to me is where it starts and where the real conversations, curiosity and solutions begin. I've been able to have conversations that I couldn't even have with myself. It's a completely different way of existence that I didn't know was possible. I credit you, Mara, in so many ways for that.

Mara: Thank you, Vanessa. We've just had very different kinds of experiences with our businesses. I'm 23 years into this. I started it out of college and I've gone through all of the falls. It's been one vulnerability after the next, almost to a point where I think, can I just have 10 minutes to breathe out of having to live my life through a brand? I didn't spend the time being able to watch someone else go through the shortcomings of something and learn it that way. There's been no real true privacy to my creativity. I look at you Vanessa and you experienced your life through other iterations to get to this point, to be able to apply your extraordinary intellect. And you’re able to now show up and have this trained masculinity of understanding the language of it, the way that money works – and not to give money over to the masculine –  but I think that you’re bilingual, right? It's so powerful right now because you’re going to be able to bridge an old world to a new world.

Vanessa: It's true.

How do you think the media and how female leaders are portrayed in the media plays into that? 

Vanessa: Unlike Mara, I lived a much more private existence when I was in finance. Mostly because you're taught to be terrified of something showing up on a front page of the newspaper, which is now the opposite of what we see. Moving into this space, one of the things that struck me pretty quickly is just how this cult of this individual entrepreneur is just such unbelievable BS. There's this story arc of the hero's journey, and you prevail and you prevail alone. As I've become more comfortable and more immersed in what the reality is, I've tried to be much more open about the collectivity of success, and the actual lived experience of this. Otherwise it sets our culture up to worship something that doesn't exist and it reinforces this idea that we're in it alone. I think about Seth Godin's book The Dip and I try to talk about those moments because that's where transformation really happens. But there is this concept of here's this box that I'm going to put you in over here. It takes effort to reshape that. But I think it's doable, you just have to force the issue a little bit.

And even expanding on that is, I imagine where there was that more of a privacy in the life before this one Vanessa, you then enter one that's really built on smoke and mirrors. Could you just imagine any industry or experience where we all - there's probably been a Jim Carrey movie about this - had to tell the truth every time. I have been extraordinarily groomed to emanate health and success. This is how we've survived, by projecting everything is great, everything is so beautiful and it's not true. I do still believe that there's room for us as designers, creators and manufacturers to transform the landscape. The experiences that we've had as this relatively small brand to be, and I'm sure for Vanessa too, in these types of interesting partnerships with innovators and tech companies that are building systems that could transform this planet once scaled. We can bring science into this language of beauty and femininity that people then can get behind, because humans still really rely on that. Once you pull beauty out of the equation, it’s light out. 

What are some of the things that excite you about the future as it relates to further building your companies and changing the wider fashion landscape?

Mara: We just launched a collaboration with Circ. They've developed a technology to split poly and cotton fibers, which has been such a roadblock for the industry. The majority of the clothes that are sitting in landfills are made from blended fibers, poly blended. With their silence, they can split these two, melt down the poly and separate the cotton and then put them both into new materials so the poly becomes poly again. And the cotton becomes this lyocell cellulose fiber that gets to be reapplied. We did this collaboration with them where we made a limited edition of 35 dresses. We don’t have the ability to scale these ideas, but we're the first match to light that thing and to put it into the world in a way that hopefully is going to inspire the organizations who have the ability to scale this tech. The reality is, we have such a sped up appetite for newness and we can't be satiated quick enough. Unless we're doing an ultimate consciousness uplift where we get people actually healed on the individual level, we've got to kind of go on that pace right now. With this kind of science and tech we're at least only activating what already exists.

Vanessa: Well, I can only say how powerful I think that is. And I have to say it's gorgeous also, Mara, and it's so important that it's gorgeous and that the product needs to exist. Otherwise, what's the point in all of this? It still takes a lot of time and energy.

Mara: For sure.

Vanessa: People need to see that the vision is possible without compromise with these solutions. Creativity is inherent. In so many ways fashion is one of our most personal, most human expressions, so it's not going anywhere. On our end, a lot of what we've done is around digitalization and being able to really provide provenance, authenticity and tracking to a garment's entire journey. But also to give it multiple lives and to use these digital IDs for this truly circular lifecycle. And in doing so to provide more inclusivity and the ability to access really impeccably made products, because we know access is also a challenge. And increasingly looking to see how some of the tools that we've developed could potentially be in service of others and of the broader industry. So there's a lot cooking.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.  

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