In the third and final virtual conversation of the CFDA and ELLE magazine’s series in honor of National Hispanic Heritage month, designers, entrepreneurs, and change-makers gathered to discuss creation, making, and change in sustainable systems.

Moderator Lucia Cuba Oroza sat down with Gabriela Hearst, Carmen Gama, Arturo Castañeda, Lisa Morales-Hellebo, and Carmen Busquets to hear more about their backgrounds and experiences as industry-disruptors.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

On the idea of “place” or “territory” and where their work comes from…

Lisa Morales-Hellebo: Everything in my life and in my career ties to roots in my childhood. I am a Puerto Rican-American, Nuyorican by birth, and didn’t really have a deep connection to my heritage until I was much older and returned to my island and fell in love with it – the people and the culture and the music and the food and the dance. I’ve lived a duality like everyone I’m sure on this panel, being an American and Latino.

Carmen Gama: For me, it means home – my family, Mexico, all of the values that my parents gave me as a kid and as a teenager – because I was born and raised in Mexico, and came here when I graduated from high school. I was raised in a family that instilled in us the value of waste, you know how to be very conscious about waste, both from an environmental perspective to a financial perspective.

Gabriela Hearst: I grew up on a ranch. It’s the same place where my family’s lived for 117 years in Uruguay. I learned to save everything and learned about quality and sustainability from a utilitarian perspective. When you live somewhere where the closest city is two and a half hours away, you learn a lot of survival instincts. I think Latin culture has a huge appreciation of beauty. And I think that that beauty is what has drawn us all here to the fashion industry because it’s a way we communicate. I learned everything that I apply in my professional life back home.

Arturo Castañeda: I was raised by a single mom with six kids – my mom herself was a seamstress. She raised us in both countries and everything I do today ties back to my past, my upbringing, and my mom. I’m a fifth generation in the industry: my mom was a seamstress, her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and so it kind of fell on me.

My mom worked at a sweatshop and it was very difficult for her, through tough times in Mexico, and when she worked in a factory in the U.S., there is no difference in the conditions. So I always say today, I get to do this on my own, I will do things different. I look to how I wanted my mother to be treated and the respect she deserved as a creator and a talent.

Carmen Busquets: I grew up in Venezuela, and for me in my background, like all of you, it was very important sustainability-wise. I think also one thing that we have, all Latin Americans, is resilience and we welcome other cultures. Venezuela was one of the fastest growing countries in Latin America during the 50s and the 60s. I was lucky to grow up in a country that was very rich and was receiving a lot of immigrants. I think that helped me to appreciate and also motivate my parents to make us more rooted, to not get spoiled or be entitled, and so we traveled to a lot of places where we supported local craftsmanship. For my mother, who was a sociologist and anthropologist coming from Cuba, it was very important to always support local art in Venezuela. There was no question about importing goods until our economy was strong. That was a huge thing for me.

On how their career path was guided by their heritage…

L.M.H.: In Puerto Rico, my family comes from pig farmers and seamstresses – sewing is in our genes, in our blood. It absolutely is something that I was obsessed with since childhood and my career has led me back to the space because it is also the space that impacts probably more brown women around the globe than any other.

I realized that true power comes not only in creativity, but in deploying capital and getting to decide what gets to exist on this planet, so I’ve been building things to disrupt the status quo around the supply chain for apparel.

C.G.: When I came to the U.S., I was studying and working in the industry and finding out about the amount of waste that these industries produce. That’s very quickly when I was like I need to start using my design skills right to start creating and really pushing for new systems that will address the waste issue that these industry faces.

Right now, I’m working for Eileen Fisher Renew, but I’ve also co-founded a company, MAKE ANEEW, that will help companies address the post-consumer waste that you can’t resell, and that’s how my heritage is really embedded on me.

A.C.:  If you come to my facility, you will see that it’s different: it’s more of a hybrid design center where we don’t hire seamstress retailers, we hire creators and makers. We value the individual, and for us, my team comes first and then the client. We do make beautiful garments and that is just a byproduct, that’s not who we are, we are much greater than the product that we produce.

And as far as my brand, we’ve done special pieces for red carpets and such, but I’m getting ready to launch my own completely. It’s been a while and I’m ready for that, so you will see my heritage in there as well.

C.B.: I felt always that there was not much difference between people, and how, although our world was a huge place, we still need to be always thinking about local first. If we don’t take care of ourselves in a micro economy way, we cannot succeed in a global, in a sustainable world, so I grew up by aligned with people having the same kind of principles that I had.

And while sometimes you get lucky, and you meet the right people and sometimes do not, but for me that’s I always say I will not grow to be like the non-believer. I will not be the richest man or the richest woman in the cemetery, but I will have the most experience. I think America brings us a lot of experiences and the more united we all become as one we will be stronger.

Gabriela Hearst on what fashion practitioners need do in order to transmit the importance of sustainability…

 I get asked about why sustainability is important to me, and I always answer, “is survival important to you?” We have limited natural resources. This is globally taking us to a place of tribalism.

We know what climate injustice looks like. We spent the summer with what we saw in the developed countries, meaning Europe and the U.S. but these types of climate catastrophes have been happening in the developing world. When they happen in, let’s say Europe, the U.S. – the floods, the fires – there’s trauma, there’s loss of life, there is economic impact. But when they happen in the developing world, it sets back progress for years. Kids don’t have access to school, no access to nutrition, no access to healthcare, and so this is where we are right now: we’re really facing the darkest hour. We used to be able to talk in a matter of years and now we’re talking a matter of months.

This is my industry, and so I have to use everything that I have, my platform, my voice, my making power, to convey the message that we are all catalysts of this movement and of unity. Unity will take us out of this. We’re in a pivotal moment of our humanity, and I am still hopeful.

Carmen Gama on the alternative approach we should seek for alternative fashion systems…

For me there’s two things that I would love to see that we collectively as an industry really push forward. One is for companies, brands and designers to really start pushing for circular design. The other would be for us to start creating a post-consumer supply chain that fully addresses all the waste that we’re seeing right now in our world.

When talking about circular design, we ask how the garments are made, what are the materials they’re made with, what are the trims, how are they constructed, who’s making these?

The more you’re planning for these with second, third, or fourth life, the less waste that we’re going to start generating and the less resources we’re going to start grabbing from the environment.

The second one that I’m talking about is the post-consumer supply chain – right now we’re seeing a bloom in companies embracing resale, and that’s something that has been changing over time.

Now brands are really wanting to do this on their own, or partner with companies that are doing that. But we’re not talking about on a bigger scale is what about the 50-60 percent of garments that cannot be resold? That is what people are calling waste, I’m calling them resources.

Lisa Morales-Hellebo on true disruption in the industry, and the way forward…

I have been called the disrupter throughout my career and I finally learned to embrace it and love it, because disruption is a catalyst for change, and that is truly what we need.

I’m a builder and I like innovating and building things from the ground up. After founding the New York fashion tech lab, talking to the C-suite of all the major brands and retailers behind closed doors for a year, I realized the industry is not currently incentivized to change. Their inertia is so great and their C-suite executives are incentivized to get their bonus, and they jump jobs every two to three years, don’t really care if the company they happen to be working for at the moment goes under in five.

We have addicted humankind to fast fashion. Given, even with the 2030 deadline, we have 10 years. That’s still not enough time to change human behavior, so how do we make the addiction to fast fashion, not kill our planet.

The only solution I believe we should all be putting our time, energy, and resources behind is the localization of an automated sort of distributed collaborative network of on-demand micro manufacturing facilities here in the U.S. and then spreading around the world.

Arturo Castañeda on the role of branding within fashion systems …

In the fashion system, we always talk about art, commerce, and consumption, and I think production is always kind of left out. If we look back at vintage garments, the tags always had a factory attached to it, and that was a sign of luxury. The brands wanted to associate and there are some sort of pride there.

Today, designers are hesitant to even say where the clothes are made and industry is pushing that.

As far as identity and awareness, now that there’s designers who have really opened doors for a lot of us, I see a lot of young designers that say I work with such facility or I go here and there’s a little bit of more inclusion on that production side. when I think, the more we show that, because if I look at art commerce and consumption, yes, we see that we see marketing and trends have changed, including more people of color in there, but we never hear of production. When you think of production, you automatically think of you know, places in Latin America and places in Asia, or even Europe, but you don’t you don’t get that exposure of who’s making the clothes or who’s not. I think with this new wave of designers, you’re beginning to see that there is a collaborative with others.

Carmen Busquets on the main drivers of change for fashion systems across the world today…

The obvious ones that we are talking about are sustainability, diversity, gender equality. But I also should add that when we talk about sustainability, we should always be building companies in ways that are more efficient.

It’s ironic that it’s all woman entrepreneurs that have been successful in building the most revolutionary companies in technology and ecommerce through the 21st century, and none of us have gone to the stock market with them.

Gender equality is also very, very important in our agenda. It’s about trying to create more of a place for genders all across, and that’s about the need of creative ideas and disruptive ideas.