Amber Valetta, Heidi Klum, and Alessandra Ambrosio Celebrate The Green Carpet Fashion Awards’ Return to Los Angeles with an Intimate Dinner

With the Oscars fast approaching and Hollywood’s red carpet in full swing, there was no better time to announce the return of The Green Carpet Fashion Awards to Los Angeles than last night. A sustainably fashionable crowd including Karolina Kurkova, Elisa Sednaoui, Amber Valetta, Heidi Klum, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Italian rock band Måneskin joined environmental campaigner and GCFA founder Livia Firth to celebrate with intimate dinner at the San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood. 

The evening, co-hosted by Firth, who is also the founder of the global sustainability consultancy Eco-Age, and model and activist Bethann Hardison, served both to reiterate the call for sustainable transformation of the fashion and film industry and to honor four world-class changemakers. Vogue Sustainability Editor Tonne Goodman kicked off the evening welcoming the guests along with her British Vogue counterpart, contributing sustainability editor and model Amber Valetta. “The power of celebrity fashion is enormous, and Livia was one of the first people to harness that power for the planet,” said Goodman. “They have now worked with over 250 celebrities for the Green Carpet Challenge.”

Honorees of the night included Tom Ford, who received the GCFA Environmentally Restorative honor for the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize. Bethany Yellowtail was honored for her eponymous fashion label B. Yellowtail, which has developed a blueprint for working with Indigenous communities. Co-recipient of the Economically Inclusive honor was Aurora James, founder of Brother Vellies and The Fifteen Percent Pledge—the initiative that urges retail giants to commit 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. The GCFA Socially Just honoree was Rashad Robinson, Founder of Color Of Change, the online racial justice organization. Each of the honorees was given a baobab tree, a symbol of life, community, and positivity.

“My personal relationship with sustainable fashion started in Los Angeles,” Firth told the crowd over a family-style dinner of farro salad and vegan meatballs. “Colin worked with Tom on A Single Man, and that’s how I first found myself on the red carpet. The person I asked to explain to me how fashion on the red carpet worked was Richard Buckley, and that’s when I came up with the idea for The Green Carpet Awards, so this evening is very emotional for me.”

As the night drew to a close, the discussion turned inevitably to the upcoming Academy Awards, and who might wear what and why. “Since the Green Carpet Challenge started in 2010, there has been a huge shift. There is plenty of stylists and talent that want to do things differently,” said Firth. “When you talk about fashion, you are also talking about agriculture, deforestation, slave labor, ocean health, microplastics, and the oil industry. Fashion is a full spectrum industry running across the globe, touching billions of lives. We also know that sustainability solutions are intersectional solutions, that environmental justice is totally interlinked with social justice. The Green Carpet Fashion Awards are about all of this, about pulling together as an industry and using also the power of Hollywood.” Just how green fashion will play out on the red carpet this year? That will be revealed on Sunday.