December 1 is World AIDS Day. CFDA.com asked Kenneth Cole, a pioneer in the fight against the disease and Chairman of amfAR, to pen a piece on this day. Here, he reflects on the importance of World AIDS Day, the ongoing mission to find a cure for HIV/AIDS and his hopes and goals in the future:

In 1985, I was confounded by a most unsettling reality. All around me, people were contracting a strange still unnamed virus that was infecting and killing young men at an alarming rate. What made it even worse was that few then dared to speak about the crisis because of the stigma associated with doing so.

So, with the help of Annie Leibowitz, many of the most esteemed models in our industry, and various children, we ran an ad that spoke about the fact that no one was speaking about AIDS because of stigma, which was then, and is still is today, arguably more devastating than the virus itself.

A little later, in 1987, I joined the board of amfAR where I assumed leadership in their branding and communications efforts, which is when so much of mine, the brands worlds’ changed.  We were all feeling a much greater sense of purpose that what we were doing not only felt important but it was important.

Since amfAR’s founding almost 30 years ago by two extraordinary women, Dr. Mathilde Krim and Elizabeth Taylor, we have been blessed and enabled by the support of so many generous, talented and dedicated individuals in the fashion industry and so many others; people who so generously have given of their time, their money, their art, their celebrity and of course, in this case their fashion. Every year amfAR kicks off NY Fashion Week with an annual Gala as our way of thanking so many who have been supportive of us for so long.

This World AIDS Day I will be thinking of the over 37 million people around the world who are still living with HIV, while remembering those who we have lost.

Today, because of all the progress made through research, everyone with the resources should be able to protect themselves from contracting HIV. One of the biggest advances has been the increasing number of people living with HIV worldwide who are receiving treatment. Close to 16 million people are now on treatment – almost double where we were five years ago. And 10 years ago, the number was just 2 million. That said, unfortunately too many people are still not receiving treatment.

We are at a point now where we can finally focus on finding a cure, so we’ve recently launched what we refer to as “The Countdown to a Cure” which is an all-out effort to find a cure for AIDS. This includes the most radical expansion of grant-making in amfAR’s history and includes an incremental hundred million dollar allocation over the next five years, to specifically support teams of scientists working collaboratively on various cure initiatives, across institutions and across national boundaries, accelerating the way research is done.

This World AIDS Day, amfAR is announcing the establishment of the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research. It will be based at the University of California, San Francisco, and will involve innovative collaborations with other major research centers.

The Institute is the cornerstone of amfAR’s Countdown to a Cure, which we launched at the beginning of this year. The goal is to develop the scientific basis of a cure by 2020 and we’re very excited about it, and its potential for accelerating progress towards a cure.

To coincide with the announcement, we’ll be convening an HIV Cure Summit at UCSF on World AIDS Day with some of the leading HIV researchers who will update us on their work and where we are in the search for a cure. It’s a community event and open to the public.

My biggest hope is that we will finally find a cure for the millions of people living with the disease and all of those who are vulnerable to it.