Joshua Katcher is Doing Fashion Better
Species Unite
elizabeth novogratz
5.0 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When it comes to fashion and good design, Joshua Katcher, the man behind the sustainable luxury fashion label, Brave GentleMan, cares a lot about beauty; but not in the way that most people think about it. He defines beauty not only as the end result - the dapper suit or the stylish boots; instead, he only deems something beautiful when the entire process that has created that something is beautiful, meaning ethical, sustainable, and made with materials and processes that never hurt anyone - human or animal. (And, of course it needs to look good too.)
Joshua knows a lot about fashion. He founded the popular men's vegan lifestyle website, The Discerning Brute in 2008. His brand, Brave GentleMan has appeared in Vogue and on the cover of GQ. He's taught at Parsons the New School and L I M College, and has lectured internationally and lobbied in the United States for sustainable and ethical fashion.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're very good at invalidating every form of dissent that animals express and we're very good at |
| 0:07.4 | resisting looking at the truth about how things are actually made. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novigrats. This is Species Unite. Today is the first episode of our fourth season, so welcome back and thank you for coming back. |
| 0:31.0 | My conversation today is with Joshua Catcher. |
| 0:34.9 | Joshua is a fashion entrepreneur, an author, an educator, and an activist. |
| 0:40.0 | And he happens to do all of those things, not only only incredibly well but with a whole lot of style. |
| 0:45.4 | He founded the popular website The Discerning Brute in 2008 and the Brave Gentleman label in 2010, |
| 0:52.0 | a vegan luxury fashion brand that's appeared in |
| 0:54.4 | vogue and on the cover of GQ. He's also taught at Parsons the New School and L.I. |
| 0:59.1 | College and he wrote the book Fashion Animals, the first book dedicated to understanding how and why animals are |
| 1:06.0 | exploited in the fashion industry. Joshua and I met in February in Brooklyn just a few weeks |
| 1:12.2 | before social distancing became the status quo. |
| 1:15.0 | And clearly the world has changed quite a bit since that day. |
| 1:19.0 | We went from semi-normal to global pandemic very quickly. |
| 1:24.6 | And I think a lot of us are still spinning, |
| 1:27.2 | not only wondering how did this all just happen, |
| 1:30.4 | but hopefully wondering, |
| 1:31.9 | how do we prevent this from happening again and like all zoonotic diseases |
| 1:36.2 | COVID-19 started because of what we've done to animals our relationship with animals |
| 1:42.1 | Yet I think that's one conversation that's just not happening nearly enough in the media. |
| 1:47.0 | We need massive change, and it's not only our food system that needs to change dramatically, |
| 1:52.0 | it's every system in which we exploit animals, |
| 1:55.6 | including the fashion industry. We have to be better and we have to do better and |
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