Rolex Awards for Enterprise Honor SukkhaCitta Fashion Brand Founder Denica Riadini-Flesch
PARIS — Rolex has revealed the latest round of honors for its biennial Awards for Enterprise, selecting five leaders of environmental and cultural projects from around the globe.
Projects protecting flora and fauna were among this year’s winners, and one fashion brand founder was honored.
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Former World Bank economist Denica Riadini-Flesch was selected for her social enterprise SukkhaCitta, part educational endeavor and part ethical fashion line.
“Unfortunately, the story of how clothes are currently made is really not beautiful,” said Riadini-Flesch. “It’s really women who have been kept invisible because they don’t have any access.”
Sixty percent of the clothing made in Indonesia is actually outsourced to women in villages as piece work, and only about 2 percent earn a living wage. That includes manufacturing by big-name brands.
Riadini-Flesch set out to change that with SukkhaCitta. The garments are produced using artisanal techniques, traditional growing practices such as regenerative cotton and plant-based natural dyes. Profits from the line fund the school, which teaches women not only craft but business skills and financial literacy so that they can accurately calculate their earnings, for example. The enterprise is set up to empower women and create long-lasting, structural change.
Once Riadini-Flesch started working with the artisans, she also became aware of the environmental and health impacts of the chemical dyes they were working with, which were often deployed in someone’s kitchen, used without protective gear and then dumped into local waterways.
“We are ensuring that the economic opportunities that we were bringing to the villages don’t come at the cost of the environment,” she said. All of these issues are intertwined, and there are no easy one-off solutions.
“The deeper I got into it, the more I realized that climate action work is such intersectional work. You can’t protect nature if you don’t provide better livelihoods for women, because Indigenous women in particular, they’re the guardian of 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity,” she said. “But you can’t empower them and sustain living wages if you don’t educate consumers.”
While boosting wages is a first and fundamental step, it is just a Band-Aid if materials and dyes cause deforestation and pollution in the production process. Supply chain transparency and traceability must be taken into account as well, she added.
“Fashion is such an interesting thing, because it’s always ‘What are you wearing?’ and there’s power in that,” she said. “But at the same time, consumers need to understand that there’s all these stories behind what they’re wearing and it’s fundamentally interconnected with different issues. And by changing that from the ground up, we can actually make sure that fashion allows you to express your values.
“If I can transform people’s mindsets, in terms of thinking about the invisible impact behind something such as clothes, and empowering people to really think of the big picture — what if they can be part of the solution?”
SukkhaCitta has grown to five schools across Indonesia and has trained more than 450 women. With the Rolex grant, Riadini-Flesch plans to both enlarge the physical schools as well as digitize the curriculum and make it available via an app. The goal is to impact 10,000 students by 2030.
The tech benefits will be twofold. The younger generation has been reluctant to enter the profession as it is synonymous with poverty wages, and while that is changing and the digitized curriculum can reach a younger demographic, the hope is that the app can also improve the image of what it means to be an artisan.
Riadini-Flesch said that idea came in part from the European tradition of artisans, craft and culture.
“Ultimately, that’s how we get the young generation to regenerate our culture, when we change their status, that there is pride in becoming an artisan and continuing this culture, and sustaining their Indigenous heritage,” she said.
The awards are in their 48th year, and now fall under the umbrella of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, launched in 2019. The awards consider work in the realm of environmental protection, science and health, technology, cultural heritage and exploration, which receive a grant to support their projects.
The other recipients include biologist Constantino Aucca Chutas for his work protecting and reforesting the high Andes in Peru; Kenyan social entrepreneur Beth Koigi for her work to provide solar-powered atmospheric water generators to provide clean water to local communities; Ivory Coast primatologist Inza Koné for his work creating a community-managed natural reserve to protect animals and biodiversity, as well as provide local jobs, and Chinese scientist Liu Shaochuang, who is adapting his expertise working on the Mars Rover to track the movements of and create habitat preserves for the Gobi Desert’s last wild camels.
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