Lily Cole's New Sustainable Jewellery Project

Lily Cole wearing Lylie's jewellery

Lily Cole, the British model who has starred in campaigns for fashion labels including Chanel and Hèrmes, walked the catwalk for Louis Vuitton and Versace (to name a few) , is also an author and environmental campaigner. She recently spoke about her views on sustainainable fashion, conscious shopping and her new project transforming electrical waste into jewellery. as well as being an author, environmental campaigner and mum. 

Lily is the face of a new campaign with sustainable jewellery brand Lylie’s and Recycle Your Electricals. Together, they have created the ‘Five Gold Rings’ collection made entirely from precious metals recycled from electrical ‘waste’, showing the amazing jewellery that can be made if we recycle. 

Lily Cole even has her own book and podcast Who Cares Wins to talk about the issue of sustainability, particularly within the fashion industry. Having focused on ethical issues for over 15 years, Lily supports brands who are making a difference and reusing waste – wearing a silver Vivienne Westwood dress to the 2017 Oscars created from plastic bottles is one of Lily’s most memorable fashion moments. 

Below, Lily talks about why recycling electricals and transforming the metals into jewels is a massive help to the planet, shares insight from Stella McCartney herself and explains how everyone should strive to be more sustainable, and happy. 

Lily wearing the 'Five Gold Rings' collection by Material Focus.

Lily:

I believe it is only by exploring solutions that we will get to a better future.

Lily: I had several memorable experiences of sustainability early on in my modelling career – my attention was first drawn to problems with fashion supply chains including diamond mining and cotton farming. 

After becoming more aware of the potential negative impacts in supply chains, I started to seek out positive counter examples I could champion; I believe it is only by exploring solutions that we will get to a better future. That journey took me to different countries exploring possibilities such as fair trade natural cosmetics, organic farming, carbon neutral factories, indigenous hand craft, wild rubber, to most recently bio-plastics and 3D printing (low waste) through my company Wires Glasses.

I’m also interested in the narratives pushing against disposable fast fashion – whether that’s supporting second hand clothes, emphasising timeless style over trends, or reducing and repurposing waste into new products. Fashion has a huge impact on the world both in terms of its actual literal and the cultural impact of what we consider “fashionable.”

So sustainable fashion invites two questions: can we produce the things we wear without hurting the earth in the process? Culturally, is sustainability becoming fashionable?

I’m actually more interested in sustainable style, pushing against the relentlessly wasteful trend mentality of fashion as we know it. As Yves Saint Laurent once quipped, “fashion fades, style is eternal.”

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