This article first appeared on Vogue Runway.
Mara Hoffman is closing her eponymous label after 24 years. In an exclusive interview with Vogue, the designer revealed that her spring 2024 collection will be her last. The news comes just six months after she received the 2023 CFDA Environmental Sustainability Award for her decade of work in the space.
Hoffman has never shied away from making difficult decisions, but shuttering her brand, she says, “is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life”. While it took several years of consideration for her to feel like she was ready to let go, it was in January that she made the choice. “I didn’t want other people’s ideas of solutions and how they thought it could be fixed or where I could have done things differently,” she says. “Once that had been decided, it was between me and my team.”
The designer, who was raised in Buffalo, New York, started the brand in 1999 after graduating from Parsons in New York City. She quickly gained popularity after Patricia Field took an interest in her work and began selling the pieces at her iconic store in the East Village. Over the next decade, Hoffman’s brightly patterned swim and resortwear became a staple for young, popular celebrities of the time. She was further embedded into the cultural zeitgeist through appearances on reality shows like MTV’s The City and her relationship with publicist Kelly Cutrone.
In 2014, she made a massive pivot to prioritise ethics and sustainability. At that time, she halted everything she had been doing and completely restructured her supply chain to focus on due diligence, moving away from polyester and investing in workers and communities around the world to ensure her garments would earn Fair Trade certifications. A few years into the shift, she wasn’t just practising sustainable design, but championing it, putting her name on some of the first pieces of legislation aimed at regulation, including the New York Fashion Act and the FABRIC Act. She’s worked on dozens of collaborations with brands like Circ, with whom she brought a groundbreaking, fully recyclable dress to the market.
As the path less chosen often goes, none of it was easy. Creating a brand that paid workers fair wages and used higher-cost materials that didn’t rely on fossil fuels came with financial burdens and business woes. As part of her shift to sustainability and in order to avoid overproduction, she transformed the business from a wholesale to a direct-to-consumer operation, but the lack of upfront orders posed problems. “There are not many companies that have successfully done this for as long of a period as we have. And the reality is that the demands that are on a small company financially make it almost impossible to be privately held and run after a certain point,” Hoffman explains.
For a brand making claims of responsible design, cracking the overproduction issue is quite possibly the most important piece of the puzzle. Right now, anywhere from 15 to 45 billion pieces of clothing that are produced go unsold every year. Those pieces end up in landfill or in secondhand markets and on beaches in the Global South. Reducing that number should be a core tenet for any sustainable brand. Adding to her challenges, Hoffman wanted to retain her name, and taking on outside investment could have threatened her brand’s integrity. “It was the right time while I still own my name,” she says. “I’ve been using this saying that it’s almost impossible to be dying and trying to give birth at the same time. You have to make time for both. I’m not saying that the business itself was dying, but that this industry is calling for a great change. And as a thought leader, it’s really hard to give myself that space to think of new ways to do that.”
Sitting in an office in Chinatown just two weeks before the brand’s closure, Hoffman seems as effortless and calm as ever, with her signature long braid tossed over her left shoulder. “This is all I’ve known,” she admits. “I’ve grown up in my brand. I’ve been a brand my entire adult life. It’s been my identity. It’s been my purpose, my way of existing in the world, my way of being recognised and seen, my outlet, my channel for art, for speaking. I’ve lived through this thing. So, it wasn’t just this idea of shutting down a business. It was this extraordinary reckoning of my identity and how I would exist or be placed in the world without it.”
What made the decision even more difficult? She was finally getting recognition for her work from fashion at large. “[There was a] complexity of being honoured by an industry for this work we had done, yet feeling the devastation of how it simply cannot work in this current iteration of the fashion industry,” she says. Indeed, we are at a crossroads. While awareness about the climate issues that clothing production contributes to is at an all-time high, fashion’s carbon emissions are set to increase by an estimated 40 per cent by 2030, according to a new report.
The inevitable question, then, is whether or not Mara Hoffman’s closure indicates something more insidious about the clothing industry. Can sustainable fashion actually exist and thrive in this environment? Hoffman still thinks so but hopes her decision is a wake-up call. “I know that there are going to be a lot of people that hold deep disappointment in this and their own connectedness to the pieces, to the brand, to what it stood for,” she says. “But we need to hold the recognition of the fact that there is so much more to do, and if we’re going to have brands like Mara Hoffman that are using everything they can to make some sort of transformation, there have to be different support systems built for it.”
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Hoffman points to the fact that for her business to grow, she would have had to make bigger orders and hold larger amounts of inventory, which is something that is fundamentally at odds with her ethos. “I could just keep going and build collection after collection and try to figure out what a department store wants, sit on piles of inventory because this is how the system is.” There is also a lesson here about learning when enough is enough. When too much clothing is just too much. “Everyone knows how to begin things. People are not versed or trained in our culture to end things because we don’t want to end things. And here we are buried in clothes, we’re buried in stuff because we can’t let things die,” she says. “We can’t end.”
The designer will share the news of the brand’s closing via a letter to her customers, collaborators and team today. In it, she makes clear that the path she chose was still the right one, even if it had to come to an end. “It has been an honour to step into a position of responsibility, to become an example of change in this industry, and show the potential for new systems that are more loving, Earth-centred, and kinder,” she wrote.
In our interview, she elaborates that closing the brand doesn’t mean she’s giving up on sustainability in fashion; rather, she’s saying goodbye to a system. When people inevitably ask her what’s next, she’s OK with not having an answer. “It will forever be the most beautiful fucking love story that I could ever imagine writing,” she says. “I lived in a state of my own expressiveness and creation and got to work with and help and bring forth so much elevation and beauty to many people. I got to work directly with thousands of women and bring them into a version of themselves. I am here to celebrate that and champion and say, please, people, let’s do this work.”
Mara Hoffman steps closer to synthetic-free swimwear
