As the daughter of a Uruguayan cattle rancher, Gabriela Hearst is no stranger to the production cycle of leather. The designer, who has made sustainability her core message since launching her eponymous brand in 2015, often speaks out about her childhood working on her family’s 17,000-acre ranch – Santa Isabel in Paysandu – and the lessons it taught her about making things to be used, and last.
“It informed my desire for quality,” she told Time Sensitive podcast back in 2020. “I have really thought about why I am so attracted to things of quality. It is because things have to be made well to last and to endure – I grew up with things that were made to last and to endure, not necessarily from an ostentatious point of view but from a quality, utilitarian aspect. And I’m always trying to recreate that in what I do.”
Since leaving her role as creative director at Chloé back in 2023, Hearst has focused solely on her own label, implementing a number of sustainability measures that go against the grain of the other mainstream fashion houses she stands among.
Hearst has been outspoken in criticising the use of petroleum-based vegan leathers and stated that she has sourced some natural materials, including wool, from her own family ranch in Uruguay, which she now owns and operates following her father’s passing in 2011.
When it comes to leather, Hearst has been working on her traceability standards since 2020 – when she teamed up with digital identity platform EON in order to give customers total transparency across each material in each garment. By clicking a small icon under every piece, shoppers are able to see which Leather Working Group tannery the leather came from, as well as where the animal was farmed.
“One thing is for sure – [fashion] needs transparency,” Hearst said at the time. “Even for myself, who is passionate about the subject, it was hard to gather this information.”
In more recent times, the house has celebrated a buzzy footwear launch – the Ohio, released on the Spring/Summer 2025 runway, has been namechecked as the brand’s ‘first sustainably-crafted sneaker’. Using Leather Working Group-certified leathers, suedes and nubucks, water-based glues and partially recycled rubber and polyester in the soles and stitching, the line is certainly an impressive feat compared with other runway competitors.
“We love to make beautiful things. That’s our North Star,” the designer recently told Elle magazine. “And we may not be a massive, multibillion-dollar business, but we’re building something that I know to be solid and strong. It will pass the test of time. Because at the end of the day… beauty has always been a part of who we are.”
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