Can fashion ever have a conscience? Indré Rockefeller thinks so.

A few minutes later, she dashed to her car and changed into a white dress borrowed from Old Stone Trade — former editor Melissa Ventosa Martin’s start-up that spotlights rare and handcrafted clothes — to read the corresponding set of lines she’d previously muttered, hair down and without glasses in a Superman-esque pseudo-disguise. “I don’t even let my husband near all this,” she said bashfully.

The resulting two-minute video explained how circular fashion — designing and making clothes in a way that “focuses on keeping things in existence, and reusing things that are [already] in existence,” Rockefeller said over Zoom — differs from the more wide-ranging label “sustainable.” Between researching and writing her scripts, then editing the two parts together, Rockefeller would ultimately spend upward of eight hours on it. “I’m embarrassed to admit that some have taken even longer,” she said.

This quirky, stylish but strangely wholesome content has made Rockefeller, 43, for decades a fixture of Vogue, fashion weeks and this century’s international jet set, into a cult figure in sustainable fashion and science. Since December 2022, Rockefeller has been posting these videos on Instagram, covering veggie burgers versus beef, the effect of atmospheric rivers on California’s weather and why reusable water bottles are superior to single-use plastic ones.

“The videos are so funny,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said. “They’re a great example of how you can make a difference with whatever interests you have.” She was struck by their scientific accuracy: “I really love the fact that I was watching her videos without my radar going off.”

“This is exactly what a rich, old-school fashion person should be doing right now,” a fashion influencer told me over dinner this summer.

“It’s not meant to be an expert teaching,” Rockefeller said between filming. “It’s more about a friendly conversation with a bit of banter, a little playfulness, as if it’s two friends.” They began as an independent study on how social media is used to talk about climate change while she was attending Columbia University’s recently established Climate School, from which she graduated last year. “It’s a passion project, and I love it. And it’s some sort of creative outlet,” she said. “So those eight hours are worth it.”

In fashion, as in any industry, it can be hard for individuals to feel as if anything they do in the face of climate change is enough — Rockefeller included. Earlier this year, she launched the Circularity Project, a nonprofit funded by corporate partners that she hopes will encourage designers to think more critically about the end-stages of a product’s life as they’re creating it, so that every piece can become another product once a consumer finishes with it.

She started with a lunch in April at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar in New York, co-hosted by Ralph Lauren and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), where designers such as Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Emily Adams Bode Aujla and Coach’s Stuart Vevers spoke about using deadstock or recycled fabrics and repurposing heirlooms. Later this year, she will host a half-dozen events to educate designers and corporations. “It’s really meant to be inclusive so everyone can share and exchange ideas,” Rockefeller said.

Fashion people love to sit around and pat one another on the back. But attendees said they felt Rockefeller and her luncheon were far from out to lunch. “There’s not that many people doing small things to bring designers together,” said Taymour, whose brand is considered a standard-bearer in environmentally conscious design. “It was actually really beautiful.” She said about 10 designers reached out to her afterward to share how she sources her silk made out of rose petals instead of silkworms. “It’s not about me making a better product. It’s about all of us making better products.”

Steven Kolb, the head of the CFDA, recalls that a decade ago, “sustainability” mostly meant niche merchandising efforts to highlight a small rack of clothes made from organic fibers. “It’s been quietly there for some time, but I think brands are way more conscious of it. The trick for them is figuring it all out,” he said, which makes an educational effort like Rockefeller’s ideal.

Other fashion capitals have centered sustainability more aggressively; Copenhagen Fashion Week, for example, now has “sustainability requirements.” “New York is a gorilla,” Kolb said. “To exclude someone who is a small designer who doesn’t have the resources to get to that bar” is not in the organization’s interest, he said, nor is fair to larger ones. “We would never mandate it, but we do believe it has a bigger role to play.”

At the beginning of every fashion month — the Spring 2025 shows begin officially on Friday — is a sense of dread. So much stuff. By the time editors, influencers, stylists and reporters wrap up in early October, they’ll have seen, by my own loose math, more than 270 fashion shows and more than 10,000 runway outfits, with some traveling to four cities.

In an interview for System Magazine’s 21st issue, released last summer, fashion critic Tim Blanks, in conversation with New York Magazine’s Cathy Horyn, said that he felt future generations would see fashion as inherent to civilization’s decline. “I think fashion will be written about as just one more business that contributed to the destruction of the world: the giantism of multi-­multi-billion-dollar companies, the insane levels of waste.”

Is it so silly — so naive, such a pipe dream — to ask whether fashion will ever have a conscience? Rockefeller doesn’t think so.

From all appearances, Rockefeller has led a charmed life. She was born in Washington, D.C., to parents who immigrated from Lithuania, joining the Washington Ballet when she was 17. She danced professionally while attending Princeton University, until an injury ended her career. She married Justin Rockefeller, a social entrepreneur and impact investor, in 2006. (Justin is the great-great grandson of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, and has senators on both sides of his family, with his father serving as a longtime senator from West Virginia and his maternal grandfather serving as a senator from Illinois.)

Après-ballet, Rockefeller worked as Anna Wintour’s assistant — a job that, for all its infamous difficulties, is basically a magical sprinkling of guaranteed fashion world success — before she earned her masters of business administration at Stanford, became a fashion director at fellow well-heeled blond Lauren Santo Domingo’s e-commerce start-up Moda Operandi, and served as the U.S. president of the Spanish demi-couture label Delpozo. A little over a year later, in 2015, she founded Paravel, a sustainable luggage business, with Andy Krantz, a former Goldman Sachs banker whom she’d hired to oversee finances at Delpozo.

She has an Edith-Wharton-does-Instagram existence. Her vacations are covered in Vogue; she wears great gowns to Manhattan galas. When we first spoke, across two days in mid-August, she was in Wyoming “learning about dinosaur bones,” she said. “This is just for fun and to be able to learn a bit,” she continued, adding that “you see these layers of sediment and rock. I always find those moments very humbling.”

Rockefeller is not outdoorsy, but she describes herself as a longtime environmentalist who wanted to reconcile her experiences in fashion with the knowledge her studies have given her. “Coming out of climate school, I found myself grappling with the question of, how can I contribute to this space? It’s such an overwhelming, big topic. What is my role here? I’m not a PhD climate scientist. I am an imperfect evangelist: I still travel, and I do love fashion,” she said.

“And it took me a while to realize that what I had been doing in fashion was primarily storytelling,” she continued. “And what is a brand but a collection of stories that connect you to product? And if I could use that skill set to really make people feel more connected to their ability to make change or to their communities, or more connected to the ultimate outcome of our collective actions, then maybe that would be a path to find my voice, like my primary role in this very, very, very big issue with a lot of amazing people working on it. And it was almost a sense of relief to realize that I didn’t have to stand up and say, ‘Here’s how you do it. Here’s the answer. I have the solution.’ That was never going to be me. I didn’t have the right to say that. But what I could do is say, ‘I will ask questions.’”

People tend to rhapsodize about Rockefeller. “One of my favorite subjects,” said one friend, Carolina Herrera designer Wes Gordon, who added he’s thought more critically about the fabrics he uses as a result of her work. Her publicist called her “a badass.” She is careful, even reticent, in conversation; she has an old-school interest in privacy, perhaps, or the mindset of someone who’s spent a lot of time around scientists.

When asked about the responsibility she feels as a result of her last name, she thought for a moment. “Well, it’s not the name I grew up with, so I tend not to think about it a lot. I think my identity was fully formed by the time I was married.”

It is difficult to find anyone who has a bad thing to say about her or the Circularity Project, except the occasional Instagram hater, who chimes in that her videos are too focused on the United States, or not urgent or angry enough. Her approach is a stark contrast to activists who throw paint at priceless works of art or sustainability influencers who publicize their decision to give up fast fashion or buy nothing.

“We all have to wear clothes,” Hayhoe said, “or else we’d be running around naked. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of clothes, just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of food — it’s how we do it.”

But what is “enough”? “It is interesting how there is so little ethical leadership coming from the people who are allegedly in charge of our lives,” Blanks said in System. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if it was fashion that could offer some kind of leadership? It seems like a bizarre enough idea that it could actually work.”

The enthusiasm around Rockefeller’s project suggests an optimism around grassroots activism, even if those grasses are quite well-manicured.

“Where we’re beginning is really on that education, connectivity, community-building aspect,” Rockefeller said, “because I really believe that’s the first step to understand this.”

“I am absolutely convinced, from what I study and what I’ve seen, that to care about climate change, you don’t have to be a scientist,” Hayhoe said. “You don’t have to be an environmentalist. You just have to be a human being.”