Joseph Altuzarra On Why Sustainability Is The Future Of Fashion

Four years ago, Joseph Altuzarra packed up and left New York City for Paris, determined to remove himself from what he calls the “hamster wheel of Fashion Week.”

“I really hadn’t taken a break for 13 years with my own brand,” Altuzarra, 38, tells Bustle. “It was odd to take time to stop and look at where we’ve been and think about where we wanted to go.”

During that time, he says he lost sight of his purpose while “chasing the next show.”

“[You] forget why you’re doing it or how it ties to your personal life and lived experience,” Altuzarra says. “And so a lot of the collections over the last year and a half were really thinking about how to put myself back in the collection — how to put my personal life, what I loved, what was important to me, and what was happening in my life back into the clothes.”

The designer, whose work is beloved by celebrities from Meghan Markle to Nicole Kidman, calls the Spring 2022 collection his most personal yet. It’s intended to be a “distillation of a year and a half of thinking and experimenting” that he didn’t have time to do before, he says.

That experimentation resulted in some of the most striking elements in his latest collection, namely the vibrant tie-dye fabrics in shades ranging from deep teal and kelly green to blush and cream.

“The whole premise behind the collection was based on research we did on pagan rituals and these celebrations that would happen in rural communities — and it’s still happening in a lot of rural communities — of welcoming spring and bidding farewell to winter, which feels like a very relevant narrative for the time we’re living in right now,” he says.

“I loved the idea in the collection of telling this story of openness and blossoming — this freedom and celebration of spring, of summer, of being present, which was inspired by these pagan celebrations.”

Altuzarra has been especially focused on his responsibility as a designer and the materials and processes he uses to make clothing. Ahead of his NYFW show, he was joined by Tiffany Reid, vice president of fashion at Bustle Media Group, on a panel presented by BMW to discuss the future of fashion and luxury.

He says BMW, the official automotive partner for New York Fashion Week, was a "natural" fit to work with his fashion house. "We are always trying to partner with brands [who] are really leaders in their space."

Embracing sustainable processes is also a critical part of the Altuzarra brand ethos. “We’ve been working with a lot of natural dyes,” he says. “We’ve been working with a lot of natural techniques, using recycled yarns or recycled materials.”

For the past year and a half, he’s also been rediscovering just how important the actual craft of fashion is to him. “When I mean craft, I really mean artisanal, handmade things,” he says. “One of the joys of being a designer is working with artisans who work on very specific, age-old techniques, and collaborating with them on trying to modernize it and find new ways of doing it.”

Among those he’s worked with lately is a Pennsylvania-based artist who specializes in flower bundle dyeing, using flowers that she presses into fabric to create unique patterns.

Another recent collaborator is a traditional Japanese shibori dyer. “[We’re] working on creating new types of artworks that we’re using very traditional Japanese techniques for, but trying to make them feel new and speak to the modern world,” he says. “Those are examples of ways in which we’ve been trying to push the collection and think more purposefully about my role as a designer.”