SAVING FASHION, SAVING THE WORLD

Author, photographer, curator and activist Bonnie Young is well-known for her designer clothing, which has adorned stars and models such as Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid and Priyanka Chopra. Her designs are often splashed on the pages of Vogue, NYT and Harper’s Bazaar. But now, she’s made a commitment to using only fabrics and textiles in her collections that are destined for landfill, proving that upcycled fabrics can be just as fresh and inspiring as the original rolls — without taking a toll

- DONNA PARIS

Back in the ’90s, when Ralph Lauren offered Bonnie Young a job with a substantial salary for her work, she practically fell off her chair. As a student at Cornell University, she would get a lot of parking tickets because she was often in studios late and driving back to her apartment off campus and illegally parking her car, which ended up getting impounded. She didn’t want to tell her dad, but she needed money to pay the tickets and get her car back. Luckily, the father of one of her friends at school was best friends with Ralph Lauren, so he put her in touch.

So, it’s not as if she were on a fashion trajectory. “Literally, that’s just how I got into fashion,” she says. Even still, as a little girl, she would sometimes show up for dinner at home with lace tights and amazing shoes, which her sister really didn’t get. “I want to look nice,” Young would tell her. At her core, Young was always an artist and, for her, creativity is bred in the bone. Take her dad, for instance. He wanted to become a rock star, but became a doctor because, well, it’s just the stereotypical story, she says, and he really couldn’t choose that path as his career. “But, he’s extremely creative. He’s 83 and he still does open mics now,” she says.

Young didn’t sit back and relax in a comfy chair at Ralph Lauren, though. Instead, she moved to Australia. “I’ve had wanderlust my whole life,” she says. And, in another fortuitous moment, when she returned to New York and worked for Ralph Lauren full-time, her boss hated travelling. So, Young got to spread her wings and travel to places like New Mexico, London and Italy, doing fabric research and visiting vintage stores.